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Summary
Summary
Christopher Kennedy Lawford's New York Times bestselling memoir, Symptoms of Withdrawal, offered readers a startling, first-hand look at his own addictions to drugs and alcohol, prompting People magazine to write, "Few have written so well about the joy of drugs, and few are as unsparing about their drug-driven selfishness." In his bestselling follow-up, Moments of Clarity, Lawford presents "Voices from the Front Lines of Addiction and Recovery." With contributions from Tom Arnold, Alec Baldwin, Meredith Baxter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Dreyfuss, Anthony Hopkins and many others, Moments of Clarity is an important addition to the literature of recovery.
Author Notes
Christopher Kennedy Lawford was born in Santa Monica, California on March 29, 1955. He received a bachelor's degree from Tufts University, a law degree from Boston College Law School, and a master's certification in clinical psychology from Harvard Medical School.
He struggled with drug addiction from a young age and wrote several books about his recovery including Symptoms of Withdrawal, Moments of Clarity, and Recover to Live. He became a public health advocate. He was a member of California's Public Health Advisory Committee since 2009 and was named a Goodwill Ambassador on Drug Dependence Treatment and Care by the United Nations in 2011. He also worked as a public advocacy consultant to Caron Treatment Centers, which runs rehabilitation programs.
He acted in the late 1980s and had parts in television shows including Frasier and The O.C. and in films including Terminator 3. He died from a heart attack on September 4, 2018 at the age of 63.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The epiphanies in these engrossing oral histories, gathered by Lawford (Symptoms of Withdrawal), of addiction and recovery run the gamut, from bouts of raving trauma and degradation to subtle promptings from a still, small voice. Drummer Dallas Taylor's moment of clarity came when he stabbed himself in the stomach after freebasing with a homeless guy. For memoirist Susan Cheever, it was watching her daughter drink milk. For actor Richard Dreyfuss, it was realizing that the little girl who appeared to him in a vision at a cocaine-fueled orgy was his unborn daughter. Lawford (who is Peter Lawford's son and a Kennedy cousin) weights the selection of these confessionals toward entertainment-industry acquaintances who speak with a thick Hollywood accent (one of Jamie Lee Curtis's moments came when her Brazilian shaman called her on her pill-popping). For them, the 12-step recovery movement is more religion than therapy. The addicts' journeys uniformly proceed through a "surrender" of the will, prayer on bended knee and entry into the loving congregation of the meeting; their struggle is really a spiritual one to purge themselves of selfishness and egotism and connect with God, or "whatever." Well, religions spread for a reason: these laceratingly honest stories of depravity and redemption show how the 12-step creed addresses human failings. (Jan. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Transformative experiences that led to sobriety, chronicled by 44 people in the public eye and compiled by one of their own. Lawford knows a thing or two about alcoholism, heavy drug use and denial, which he disarmingly chronicled in Symptoms of Withdrawal (2005). His "moment of clarity" is not an unfamiliar one: He tanked and was a step from pulling the trigger when he surrendered to honesty and got help. Such revelatory epiphanies are as mysterious as they are sublime, and here they make for good storytelling. (They also serve as good examples, readers will hope; Lawford points out that more than 22 million people in the United States have problems with alcohol or drugs, and fewer than ten percent seek treatment.) Personal testimonies by celebrities ranging from Alec Baldwin to Buzz Aldrin bespeak the many faces that substance abuse can take and the equal variety of the illuminations that point people toward change. Some have a religious tone, some are dramatic, others subdued but deeply felt. A few will leave you wondering, such as Richard Dreyfuss's recurring vision of a little girl dressed in pink, an image he couldn't shake even while he was busy with drugs, booze and orgies. More than a few will leave you cringing, like Martin Sheen's ugly encounter with his son Charlie and his painful realization that Charlie's subsequent drug problems were partly his responsibility. "I taught him everything he knew," the recovering alcoholic admits. An angel in the form of a no-bullshit therapist came to folksinger Judy Collins's rescue; a mirror in his solitary-confinement cell did the same for musician/federal prisoner Dejuan Verrett. Each story holds the individual fascination of its particular circumstances; all of them get their oomph from punchy compression and plainspoken honesty. Hard evidence that "no matter how long it's gone on, no matter how bad it is," an addict's life can move to higher ground. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Moments of Clarity Voices from the Front Lines of Addiction and Recovery Chapter One Jim Vance Jim described himself this way: "I'm a cocaine addict, a father, a husband, a man trying to make a difference in the world." Jim also anchors the nightly news at WRC-TV in Washington, DC, where he's worked since 1969. He was one of the first people to break the color barrier on TV, and he's earned seventeen Emmys and a spot in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. He's also one of the stalwarts of the DC recovery community. A couple of things stand out to me about his story: his humor in telling it, and the way he feels most ashamed when he's being recognized for his success. That sense of being a fraud is so common among addicts. I haven't known hopelessness since 1987, but I remember very well what it felt like. I had a total, complete, full conviction that I was going to die. I did not believe that I had a chance at getting a decent life. I knew I was going to die, and not just die, but die a miserable death. I had decided that if I could get any "good" out of this misery, it would be that I died more miserable than my father. My father died in 1951. I was nine years old. He was thirty-eight. He died of cirrhosis and DTs. I don't know a worse way to die than DTs. Jesus, what agony. But my condition in April 1987 was that I'll find a way to die worse than he did. I think that speaks to the hopeless state of mind that I was in. I didn't want to die, but if I was going to die, then let me die even worse off than my father was. What kind of insanity is that? That, my friend, pretty much defines hopelessness. I'm a broadcast journalist and I had been the anchor at the NBC station in Washington, DC, since 1972. In 1987, in August, somehow or other I was still hanging on, but I had been missing in action for two days again. I was down in Southeast DC, where people were living hard lives, and still are. There was a public housing complex that had been abandoned or determined to be shut down--huge, as most of them were, from an urban renewal program in '62. In one of the buildings, there were two apartments that were still occupied. There were no utilities: no water, no electricity, no telephone, no anything. There were some mattresses on the floor. And for two days, I was in one of those apartments, desperately trying to get one more hit off the pipe. I'm in that apartment, I didn't have any clothes on, couldn't get an erection, and couldn't get high. I don't know how that is for most normal people, but for this colored boy, that was as low as he could get. You couldn't get your dick up and you couldn't get high. What is left? I finally got out of there at some point. I didn't have a car because my car had been repossessed. I went back to where Kathy, who later became my wife, was living and I got cleaned up. She had nothing to say, because by that time, there was nothing else to say. There comes a point when silence becomes deafening and cruel. I mean, silence can cut like a knife. I went to work and got through it, I don't know how. I have some pictures from back then, and I'm not sure why they allowed me to go on the air. Cheeks sunken in, eyes way back in the sockets, dark circles around the eyes because I hadn't slept in probably three days. My teeth were falling out. Literally falling out, because my gums were deteriorating and the bone under the gums was deteriorating. I had to talk in a certain kind of way just to keep my teeth in my head. On a Thursday night, I did the six o'clock show and I left work at seven o'clock. Richard, who worked at the station, had loaned me his car. I was supposed to turn left to go home but I turned right. I drove around for a couple of hours, stopping every now and again at some phone booth, trying to get somebody to get me something. I finally got a guy in another part of Southeast Washington. I went to his place and got an eight balland fired it up. Didn't even pay him, just smoked it right there. When the ball was smoked up, at this point I was geeking. You got to get more. You can't be still, you're bouncing around, kind of like when people want to speed. Geeking was the term at that time, and I was geeking. I told the guy, and he said he had more but he wouldn't give me any more without seeing some cash. I said, "Let me go over to the money machine." I walked out of the apartment and I left the keys to Richard's car because I was just going to walk over to the bank right across the street. But I hailed a cab. As it pulled out from the curb, I saw the guy running out of the house. He had a pistol in his hand, and he ran this way and ran that way looking for me. I got down in the cab, and the guy was still running around when we turned the corner. Oh, he was pissed off. I got home and got Kathy to pay the cab. She went to bed. I went downstairs, got the shotgun, took Kathy's car, and went to Great Falls Park. The Potomac River runs through it, and there's a serious drop that creates some big rapids. The Olympic kayaking team practices at Great Falls. I was upstream, where you don't have the roar of the river as it drops off the precipice. It's more brooklike, more tranquil, but on that night it was deafening where it should have been melodic and soothing. Deafening and discordant. Jagged and unnerving. It was a violent noise that didn't really exist. My, it was horrible! Moments of Clarity Voices from the Front Lines of Addiction and Recovery . Copyright © by Christopher Lawford. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Moments of Clarity: Voices from the Front Lines of Addiction and Recovery by Christopher Kennedy Lawford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
