E-Mail This Article to a Friend Real drunk Heather King sobers up BY ROBIN VAUGHAN
	Parched Heather King | Chamberlain Bros./Penguin Group | 288 pages | $19.95

Eighteen years ago, National Public Radio commentator Heather King was an alcoholic’s alcoholic, if you can imagine that as a compliment: a genuine drunk. At least, she thought she was genuine. The drunk part was too real.

As she tells it in Parched, it was love at first beer, a compulsion that took hold of her "instantaneously and completely." Halfway through the bottle that launched a 20-year drinking career, "I was transformed. . . . it was a laugh-fest and a love-in." That honeymoon was brief. "Later still, I insulted everyone, got sick, and blacked out." But all she wanted to know the next day was when she could do it again.

By her early 30s, King, who’d grown up in New Hampshire, was living like a Bowery bum: sharing a cruddy Causeway Street rooming house with staggering old men, showing up faithfully at the dive around the corner every morning for first call, sleeping around. In the middle of all this, she went to Suffolk Law School, graduated with honors, and passed the Massachusetts bar exam. And then she went on drinking for a couple of years.

King creates a laugh fest and a love-in without crashing the good vibe by insulting the reader. Parched is loaded with jokes and wicked anecdotes that claim few victims other than herself. Her sense of what it was to be "special" was not her salvation but her curse. It was something to be the only derelict at the bar in the morning who was a licensed attorney, but the shame and guilt of squandering her advantages was murder. She’d gotten straight A’s with little effort and was a National Honor Society scholar and a technicality’s hair’s breadth from a Phi Beta Kappa key in spite of partying her way through seven years of college. Her notion of herself as unique made her life an always-extreme act. Not everyone could pull off drunkenness like this: if she was going to be fucked up, she was going all the way. As vivid and detailed as it is, Parched is a big-picture kind of memoir, literary and complete.

King cherished a few great, long-term friendships (and she makes them wonderful supporting characters in her memoir), but she didn’t want to be part of any club. Even the punk-rock scene — which included her brother Joe and his band, the now-famous Queers — involved "too much of an organized attitude and lifestyle for me," she explains over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. "I just wanted to get bombed. I just wanted to throw down shots of Wild Turkey. I suppose this was, somewhat, the ‘nostalgie de la boue,’ as the French say, this glamorization of the mud, but really, it was what I knew. My father was a construction worker. His construction-worker friends drove up to our house and drank beer in the breezeway. I just loved that: the chatting, telling jokes, making fun of each other, but in an affectionate way, and that’s still my highest ideal in life — sitting around with people and laughing."

Parched is neither lecture nor confession, but King does include the material details. Her mother meted out food to her eight children by the thimbleful; it was always cold in the house. "This chronic deprivation," she writes, "gave rise to a scarcity mentality where there was only one of everything — choice, chance, group of friends; to belief in a universe that was anything but welcoming, anything but abundant, anything but accommodating."

The book is dedicated to her parents, "who gave me life twice." In the powerful scene that would lead to her getting sober, King wobbles home in a heatwave to her slummy apartment building on Merrimac Street. Her parents are standing outside, waiting for her, like a mirage. When she can’t dissuade them from coming upstairs, they take in the wreckage of her living space, the fetid communal bathroom, and politely ask why there’s no food in the fridge. Then they take her to lunch, say goodbye, and head home to New Hampshire to plan her rescue.

Heather King reads June 29 at 6 pm | Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center | 617.247.6959.