Barely living in shadow of a famous father

"Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption"
by William Cope Moyers, with Katherine Ketcham
Viking, 306 pp., $25.95

From the perspective of William Cope Moyers, the only thing worse than growing up with a famous dad is growing up with one whose public reputation as a thoughtful, decent guy matches his private persona.

The guy is a saint, Moyers tells readers in "Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption," offering his bigger-than-life role model as a sort-of rationale for why someone with his skills and advantages turned to booze and drugs.

If he couldn't match the accomplishments of his dad, television journalist Bill Moyers, he figured that he could escape this fact by getting high.

By the time he was 30, the younger Moyers was a spectacle of uncontrollable nosebleeds and hacking coughs, sporting a beer gut and the erratic behavior of someone who cares less about the impression he's making than where he can get his next buzz.

"Broken" tells the story of this descent, his inexplicable and seemingly inexorable fall from a young man who "liked flirting around the edge of authority," to a full-fledged, free-basing cocaine addict who would spend weeks subsisting in someone's ratty basement apartment doing crack.

The book also describes his slow road to recovery, one peppered with relapses and, unlike most addicts, repeated second chances. Having a well-connected dad does have its benefits, after all.

Moyers' goal in writing the book seems sincere enough: Now in his mid-40s and a decade into recovery, he works for the Hazelden Foundation, the addiction treatment center in Minnesota that James Frey wrote about in his dubious best-seller "A Million Little Pieces." It's one of several places Moyers visited on his own path to sobriety.

Personally and professionally, he is invested in the view that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing, and that public policy and insurance benefits should treat it accordingly.

Fortunately, he only gets on his soapbox at the very end. The bulk of the book is devoted to telling his own story, in compelling but believable detail. He's aided by the fact that, as trained journalists, both father and son made a habit of recording events and keeping letters as the addiction progressed.

As Moyers' problem mounts, he depicts his parents' compassion as limitless. When he's 30, he 'fesses up, saying that "it felt good to admit the truth and even, I had to admit to myself, to wear all those experiences as a perverse badge of honor."

At this point, his father looks bewildered, and his mother jumps to his rescue, saying, "You are a good man, a fine human being." Maybe it's just coincidence. But five years later, when his father gives up after yet another relapse — "I'm finished," he says coldly after picking up his son at a crack house — it's the dose of reality that his son needs.

Moyers uses parallel language to describe the moment he finally surrendered to a power beyond his own. "I'm done, God," he said to himself. "Have me."

These days Moyers lives on a tree-lined street in St. Paul, Minn., where he and his second wife — a recovered addict herself — are raising their three young children. Yet this happy-ever-after ending came at a harrowing cost, both emotionally and financially. (The letter from his first wife, detailing the damage caused by his behavior, feels like the most honest expression in his book.)

Moyers recognizes that his family and treatment saved him, but most addicts are on their own.

As the book advances, Moyers tries to isolate the cause for his addiction but repeatedly dances around his relationship with his father. "My disease is less about the drugs I took than the reason I took them — to blot out the pain," he writes. Unfortunately, in exploring that pain, the true cause of it remains elusive.

Ellen Emry Heltzel is a writer and critic based in Portland. Her Internet column can be found at www.goodhousekeeping/bookbabes.