For anyone who has ever survived being a bar fly, Heather King’s debut memoir, Parched, brought back memories of the glories of the lowlife, not all of them pleasant. In Parched she recalled how she earned her law degree—drunk—while waitressing and how she hated the law so much she continued to work as a waitress. "Passing the bar," began to take on a whole new meaning as one read Parched (Chamberlain Bros.). Redeemed (Viking) examines her road to finding peace in the Catholic Church. Darcy Steinke, in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, wrote that "King’s book is as honest and raw as the model of the spiritual memoir, the ‘Confessions’ of St. Augustine." Steinke also wrote that "King is nonjudgmental, generous and insightful about the spiritual journey, though at times her enthusiasm for Jesus is reminiscent of a groupie’s fervent ravings over a rock star."

King, who has contributed to PW and NPR, sat down with PW senior editor Dermot McEvoy, for a Q&A about Redeemed:

Your first book, Parched, was about your alcoholic past. Redeemed is all about your conversion to Catholicism. Why did you decide to keep the two most monumental influences in your life—booze and God—separated into two books?

Oh, I don’t think they’re separated at all. Almost all the chapter epigraphs in Parched are from the Psalms, or the Gospels, or contemplative mystical poetry, and one of the opening quotes is "Sitio"—I thirst: as legend has it, one of the seven last words of Christ. The whole subtext of Parched was the long desert journey that led me, eventually, to Christ.

I was born and bred Catholic. You are a convert. Do you think your total enthusiasm for everything Roman Catholic annoys those of us who were spoon-fed it—others might say "force-fed"—from the beginning?

I’m deeply respectful, or at least I hope I am, of other people’s experiences with religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. I would never presume to say another’s experience was false or wrong—our experiences are sacred to us, and should be—and I would also hope that no-one else would presume to tell me my own experience has been false or wrong. People very seldom seem to have a quarrel with Christ. They have a quarrel or grievance against the Church. To me, however, the two can’t be separated. That’s what Hazel Motes tries to do in the great Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood: he starts the "Church Without Christ." He’s its only follower, with predictably disastrous results. I tried being my own church for a long time, too. And it proved to be way more dangerous, wrong-minded, and hurtful to myself and the people around me than anything I’ve ever found in the Catholic Church…

Why is St. Augustine so important to you and many other Catholics?

He was smart, he was hip, his friends made fun of Catholicism. And he struggled and questioned and was in crisis for many years. "Deliver me from temptation—but not yet"—was his prayer, and what addict, what human being can’t identify with that? He struggled with lust, and understood that sex isn’t bad—quite the contrary—it’s that we get attached to it, or any number of other things, and the attachment stands in the way of, or becomes a substitute, for God. Of course you can know that intellectually, and know you "should", or even want with all your heart, to detach from whatever you happen to be "addicted" to. But to actually do it…Lord, have mercy. I have been wrongly attached to one thing or another just about my whole life. So this is an ongoing heartache and struggle. St. Augustine eventually found his way, and I’m finding mine as well. Maybe a little more slowly than he did…

One of the fascinating things about Parched was that you put yourself through law school back in Boston while heavily drinking--and finished #7 in the class, if I recall correctly. Yet you hate the law and you hated lawyering. Ironically, it seems the Church saved you from the law. Is there any connection in your hatred of lawyering and the teachings of the Church?

That was #7 my first year: I graduated 28th out of 311, and don’t think that number isn’t emblazoned in my memory! I don’t exactly hate the law; I just hated being a lawyer, partly because I’m cut out to be a writer, not a lawyer; and partly because I came to have grave doubts about the efficacy of the adversarial system. I like the restorative model way better, where the two parties come face to face and make some kind of attempt to see and make amends to each other as human beings. Apparently this system is in place or being tried in various parts of the world, and it’s of course very Christ-like in that Christ, to me, is always counterintuitive, surprising, astonishing. All the stories in the Gospels are about face-to-face encounters: about one person touching or listening to or talking to another. That’s where our hearts are opened: in looking a person in the eye and saying, "It hurt when you did that," or "I’m sorry" or "I love you but I see you’re trying to screw with me." That’s where we see through to our own strategies and the strategies of the other person, and forgive ourselves and each other, and come alive. We never seem to get transformed through an intermediary.

And yes, in a sense the Church did save me from the law. I became a Catholic and a writer at just about the same time. I discovered my calling and quit my full-time lawyering job, though I continued for many years to support myself by doing free-lance legal work. Till my boss stiffed me…but that’s another story.

You freely admit to having had several abortions, yet now you follow Church doctrine to the letter. How do you reconcile your past life with the life you lead now?

I’m the same person I’ve always been; with the same limitations, character defects and weaknesses. I just act a little better some of the time. But there’s nothing "good" about me. I’m not sure I’ve ever performed a truly selfless act and if I have, it’s only because by some incredible grace me and my giant, warped, attention-seeking ego got out of the way long enough to let God act through me. I think we meet God through our brokenness, our wounds, the things we’ve done that we’re ashamed of, and to meet God, for me, means to come more awake. So I don’t feel as if I had one life as a bad person and now I have a life as a good person. It’s just that I see the world with different eyes now, I filter my experiences through a different lens. I don’t have to act better, I get to act better because I’m a little freer. I’ve been freed a bit from the fear that I’m incapable of love and being loved; from the fear that there won’t be enough. And also, I’m in love, I guess you could say, with Christ. Who reconciles the irreconcilable. Who makes it so we don’t have to regret or be ashamed of our pasts, but to see they made us who we are, and that we couldn’t have gotten where we are any other way.

What’s the connection between "spirituality" and "spirits," i.e., the bottled kind.

King: When people ask me what I was before I became a Catholic, I say I was an alcoholic. I don’t mean that facetiously. I was raised in the Congregational Church back in New England, but from the age of 13, drinking was my God. I was willing to sacrifice everything for it: career, family, money, health, reputation, my life, my soul.

My theory is that all addiction is at bottom a misplaced search for God: for connection, for meaning, for relief from the deep sense of exile with which every human being seems to have been born.

Did you ever think of going into the Church as a member of the clergy? A nunnery?

Oh yeah, part of me has always wanted to be a nun. I was on Facebook for five minutes, and under "Interests" I wrote, "Brooding. Sulking. Planning to join the convent." Then I thought, I’ll never get a boyfriend that way!…Actually, I don’t want to be a nun, I want to be a monk; I want to be the lone woman among a whole bunch of virile, passionate, deep-thinking men…who can’t leave…

In other words, I would probably not make a great nun, although I’m very drawn to solitude and prayer and have a couple of wonderful priest friends, and a friend who’s a monk, and have spent a fair amount of time at convents and monasteries. I love being with people, but it’s work; people are hard for me, so my desire to join the convent would probably be at least partly for the wrong reason: to escape from the world. Except I’d only be escaping into people I couldn’t get away from.

In a way, all my work is volunteer work. I make myself available to lots of alcoholics and addicts. I’ll show up at your party, play, wedding, funeral, reading, hospital bedside, potluck liturgy, chamber music concert, punk club, jail cell, dinner you’re giving for your parents who are visiting from out of town. I’ll call you back. I consider that all part of my "work" and I consider myself deeply blessed to be earning, at the moment, enough from my writing to continue with it.

Tell me about your work for National Public Radio.

For about five years now, I’ve been writing and recording three-to-four minute, slice-of-life "commentaries" for All Things Considered. I’m tremendously grateful for the opportunity to get my work out there, and it’s a real challenge, as a writer, to craft a story in 600 to 700 words It’s also a great gig because it’s open-ended: I can pitch as many or as few stories as I want. I myself never know when the story’s going to air until the day of the show. Sometimes I’ll record a piece and by the time I get home they’ll have called to say it’ll be on that afternoon; sometimes a story will sit on the shelf for months. I recently got a new producer, Ellen Silva, and have only done one commentary with her so far but look forward to working with her more.

What are you working on now?

I have a proposal out to my agent for a book based on a 7-week cross-country road trip/pilgrimage I took last fall. I drove myself from L.A. to the coast of New Hampshire, where I grew up, and back, going to Mass every day. I’m glad I went, but it was like a forced march, this trip; by the sixth week, I was starting to look like a member of the Donner Party. It has all the great themes: middle age (coupled with perpetual adolescence), Mother, unrequited love, death…plus it’s funny.

I’m also hooked up with a PBS producer, have written a piece for a Frontline on forgiveness, and am flying to South Carolina in April to meet with him, the wonderful spiritual writer Father Ron Rolheiser, and some other folks to discuss themes for more faith-based documentaries. I took an Intro to Documentary Film-making class last year and cobbled together a 10-minute film on my downstairs gay 78-year-old neighbor of which I’m insanely proud. I just helped produce a play, Big Baby, by my friend Joe Keyes, that got rave reviews here in L.A. So who knows: books, radio, film…the TV series! The call-in show! Where’s Oprah?...

Any final words?

King: That Catholicism is a religion of wonder, marvel, mystery—the two great, inexhaustibly fascinating mysteries of suffering and love. Other than that, just that I need to go get a coffee. I’m fasting from sugar during Lent and the only way I’m possibly going to make it through is to double up on the caffeine.