Broken: Press

NAADAC

FROM JUNKIE TO MESSENGER

By Kathaleen Roberts
Journal Staff Writer (Albuquerque Journal, October 20, 2006)

Twelve years ago this month, William Cope Moyers was lying on the floor of a syringe-strewn Atlanta crack house on the verge of suicide.
Outside, his father had organized a search party while his worried wife and children waited at home.
In a brief flash of clarity, the younger Moyers asked himself, "Now what?"
The answer lies in "Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption" (Viking, 2006, $29.95). Co-written with Katherine Ketcham, the book chronicles the son of famed journalist Bill Moyers' spiral into alcohol and drug addiction, as well as his ascent into sobriety and the vice presidency of the renowned Hazelden Foundation, an addiction treatment center in Minnesota. Moyers will sign books and speak at Garcia Street Books at 3 p.m. Saturday.
In "Broken," Moyers takes great pains to document a seemingly idyllic, church-going childhood as the son of privilege. Speech editor, policy coordinator and press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, the elder Moyers made the covers of both Time and Newsweek. Life as his son meant Easter egg hunts on the White House lawn, trips on Air Force One and weekends at Camp David. Dan Rather was a close family friend. During a Jamaican vacation.
But the shadow of his father's fame would haunt Moyers all of his life. When he decided to follow him into journalism, Moyers was determined to emulate that success. But his work as a top investigative reporter at the Dallas Times Herald and at Newsday, and a plum job as a CNN writer/producer did nothing to fill his "hole in the soul."
"It's this abiding sense that I was never good enough, that I needed to be better than or more than. And this need to be more than human. And of course, that's impossible," Moyers said in a telephone interview while traveling from Milwaukee to Chicago.
"I think in part it came from the bright light and the large shadow of my father," he continued.

In the family

A genetic component lurked within the family bloodlines: his grandmother's brother was an alcoholic. His father's older brother died at age 39, "hooked" on pills.
Moyers blindly followed in their addicted footsteps, bringing his dealers home for dinner and speeding along the Long Island Expressway with the steering wheel in one hand and his crack pipe in the other. Steeped in smug denial, he played the role of the recovering alcoholic when he needed to. Just days before his last try at rehab, he neglected his baby son. He watched the smoke drift over his crying child before he left to load up the pipe again.
Moyers' recovery came when he decided he didn't really want to die during his fourth stint in treatment.
"I was done," he said. "I had a spiritual awakening in detox. I heard this whisper in my ear. It was two words: St. Paul. There was nobody else in the room, and I heard it."
Moyers had already completed two stabs at rehab at Hazelden and had built a thriving recovery network in nearby St. Paul.
Fueled by that whisper, he left his high-powered CNN job in April 1995. By March 1996, he was working at Hazelden. He considers it his mission to "carry the message" of recovery to others and to change public attitudes about addiction in America.
"I think the Bush administration is as divorced from reality as the Clinton administration when it comes to public policy," he said. "America spends $20 billion a year on the failed war on drugs." Yet just 18 percent to 20 percent of that figure is earmarked for treatment and prevention, Moyers said.
"I think it needs to be balanced. It needs to be a three-footed stool approach," he said, adding, "The best way to reduce the supply of drugs in New Mexico is to reduce the demand."

Joining the crowd

In penning his struggle, Moyers knows he is adding to the legion of recovery autobiographies already available.
"I'm not sure the world needs another addiction/recovery memoir," he said, "but that's not why I wrote it."
He's weathered criticism from 12-step groups for breaking his own anonymity. His ancient patriarchal issues still percolate.
"There are times when I realize that some of the attention this book is generating isn't because of me, it's because I'm the son of," he acknowledged.
Since the book's September publication, he's been bombarded by 2,000 to 3,000 e-mails and phone calls from addicts and their families desperate for help.
In Milwaukee, a man waited in the pouring rain to speak to him.
"He reached out and grabbed my hand," Moyers said. "He said, 'It was important for me to hear your story. I've been sober for three weeks. I've lost my wife and my job and my car, and I'm here tonight because I need some hope.' So I bought him a book out of my own pocket."
It was his father, an inveterate and heartfelt letter-writer, who sent him perhaps his most powerful e-mail:
"You've saved more lives in the last 12 years than I've saved in a lifetime," he wrote.
Moyers stays sober by attending 12-step meetings and by using the tools he's learned in recovery through the collective wisdom of the countless numbers of people before him.
"It's communicating with God and feeling gratitude in the day," he said. "When I have a high level of gratitude, I have a high level of humility. It's humility that saves me from me."

From the Library Journal...

Moyers, the son of legendary TV broadcaster Bill Moyers, is a successful journalist in his own right. His gripping account of his struggles with alcohol and crack addiction will have readers rooting for him from the very beginning. The author's idyllic childhood, spent with a loving, attentive extended family in Wilmer, TX, gives way to his first alcoholic run-in with the police in college. The story then chronicles Moyers's wanderings through the valley of the shadow of death in various crack houses and his failed relationship with his first wife, Mary. Eventually, he receives treatment at the acclaimed Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota and moves toward recovery. In his spiritual quest to become a new person, he claims his first name, William. It is somewhat unsatisfactory that the question why someone from such a privileged background would end up a drug addict goes unanswered. But that may be the point: the disease of addiction respects no one.

Strongly recommended for all libraries.
[See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/06.]-Renee Axtell, Independence, MO
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

BOOK SELLER REVIEW

General Acclaim for Broken…
This book, by William Cope Moyers, is one of the best non-fiction books I've read this year. Strong, courageous, a gutsy, heart-wrenching, soul-baring story - a harrowing tale of descent into destruction counter-balanced by ascent into redemption. In telling his story, I hope William found peace. I know that in reading it, I did. This will be a "Staff Recommendation" at our bookstore when it is published in September! I have also sent an email to Dan at BookSense with my recommendation. Thank you for letting me preview this incredible story.

Pam White
Skyland Books
West Jefferson, NC

WEBCHAT WITH WILLIAM MOYERS

webchat.silenttreatment.info
Scroll down to view William Moyers chat transcript.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BROKEN: My Story of Addiction and Redemption
William Cope Moyers and Katherine Ketcham

The sizzle of crack. The euphoric rush. A filthy room littered with empty beer cans and used syringes.

These are images from the opening pages of William Cope Moyers’ candid, unflinching memoir BROKEN: My Story of Addiction and Redemption (Viking; On-Sale Date: 9/25/06; ISBN: 0-670-03789-3; $25.95). In 1994, William Cope, son of famed journalist Bill Moyers, spiraled into a crack cocaine binge that threatened to destroy everything that mattered to him. He hit rock bottom. On that horrific day, his father and his family found him on the floor of a crack house in Atlanta’s gritty inner-city. What happened next transformed William’s life. As William illustrates in his memoir, his decision to make sobriety the center of his life caused him to walk away from a journalism career at CNN and follow an inner-voice that ultimately led to a vocation to help people just like himself – alcoholics and other addicted people. Today he is a vice president of the Hazelden Foundation, a renowned drug treatment center, where he uses his own personal experiences to “carry the message” to others and work to change public attitudes around addiction in America.

In BROKEN, your not-so-typical coming-of-age memoir, William Cope Moyers paints the portrait of his youth clearly and with great affection. Like so many children of privilege, however, the radiant outside image veiled dark, private demons, dominated by the shadow of his father’s public stature. Despite the intense pressure of growing up with a famous father, young Cope, as he was called, found his own strength in writing and reporting. When he stepped out into the world as a budding journalist, he harbored the deep desire familiar to many young professionals: to emulate a hero -- in this case, his father.

As William discusses in BROKEN, his successes in high school and college could not fill what he calls “the hole in his soul” – a relentless fear of failure, a painful recognition of his own imperfections, and a sense that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t good enough. Only alcohol and other drugs seemed to offer some relief, but it wasn’t long before they caused even more problems. During Christmas break his senior year in college, a drunken celebration with friends led him to break into a local fish market, where he stole less than $20. Brought up on burglary charges that made the national news, William Cope writes, “no one close to me ever mentioned the need for an intervention or assessment, because no one could imagine that a clean-cut, well-mannered, church-going young man like me could have a serious alcohol problem.” By his early-twenties he was helpless to stop an increasingly self-destructive pattern of daily drinking and drug use. As he points out, the paradox of his longtime nickname was that “long before most kids ever have to face what it means to ‘cope’ with life, I was painfully aware that I couldn’t cope with much of anything.”

In BROKEN, we learn that it would be a long time before he could cope with much of anything. William paints an intimate portrait of his decade-long addiction to alcohol, cocaine and, finally, crack cocaine, detailing how he would speed along the Long Island Expressway with steering wheel in one hand and crack pipe in the other and describing in harrowing detail his experiences in crack houses in Harlem, St. Paul, and Atlanta. In the end, William’s addiction became even more important to him than his own children. Just days before he entered treatment for the last time, he writes about neglecting his crying baby son. “I watched the smoke drift over him, horrified, but the moment passed and I left him once again to load up the pipe.”

William Cope Moyers made many attempts to change his life but even with multiple stints in hospitals and treatment programs, it took six years before he realized that “everything I had and everything I wanted to hold on to depended on one critical thing – my ability to stay sober.” Through a spiritual awakening and with support from his parents, Bill and Judith Moyers, and his wife Allison, also in recovery from addiction, William Cope understood and accepted the truth that “we are all broken, and the only ‘cure’ for our brokenness is to be broken together.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William Cope Moyers is the vice president for external affairs at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. A former newspaper journalist and writer for CNN, he lives with his wife and three children in St. Paul, Minnesota.

BROKEN
By William Cope Moyers
with Katherine Ketcham
Viking, ISBN: 0-670-03789-3
On-Sale Date: September 25, 2006
Pages: 372 / Price: $ 25.95
Please visit our web site at www.penguin.com

For more information or to schedule an interview with William Cope Moyers contact:

Ben Petrone

Associate Director of Publicity
Viking/Penguin
212.366.2440
ben.petrone@us.penguingroup.com

Sonya Cheuse

Publicist
Viking/Penguin
212.366.2338
sonya.cheuse@us.penguingroup.com

Atlanta Press Club
August 8, 2006

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY...

The prodigal son of Bill Moyers, the exemplary broadcast journalist, wrecked a bright career at CNN and deserted his family in 1994, hitting bottom as a "thirty-five-year-old crack addict." The lurid appeal of his story hinges largely on Moyers's munificent, even saintly father, and the train-wreck spectacle of his son's fall from grace. Moyers conveys with black humor the rapturous allure of substance abuse: "cocaine owned me,body and soul," he writes. It lures him back even after stints in rehab, brushes with death and lucky breaks. As his habit skids out of control, Moyers dodges punishment with smug hauteur. He enjoys plum reporting assignments as a fortunate son and plays the role of "solid, sincere recovering alcoholic," while persisting in his unrepentant behavior. Moyers hits his stride in evocations of his muddled, though quasi-methodical, mindset: the vertiginous pull of addiction, the powerful delusions of denial and the double-edged sword of legacy, which proves a potent enabler. His father, who addresses him in heartfelt letters excerpted at length,looms throughout as both reproving shadow and divine light. Photos. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Broken

NAADAC

FROM JUNKIE TO MESSENGER

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