Heather King has a theory - that all addiction is, "at bottom," a search for God.

The 55-year-old former New Englander began her own quest when she had too many beers at 13 and wound up getting sick and blacking out, which she chronicled in her first book, "Parched, a Memoir," published in 2005.

Sober for more than 20 years now, after a profound religious experience, family intervention and month-long stay at an acclaimed Minnesota treatment center, King continues describing her journey in a new book called, "Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace that Passes All Understanding." With self-depreciating humor, dead-on reporting and astute insight, she writes about moving to Southern California and the breakup of her marriage; an unfulfilled short-lived career as an attorney at a Beverly Hills law firm; recovering from breast cancer; her intense personal search for a meaningful religion; and her unlikely conversion to Catholicism.

Today, the author and commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," believes "anything that is worthwhile about me arose, in one way or another, from the suffering of those 20 years of drinking.

"I just know that only a God of inexhaustible love, infinite creativity and a burning desire to count every last one of us 'in' could have taken a broken-down wreck like me and made something useful out of her."

Staying sober, she also observes, has "proven to be an authentic spiritual path."

Like an I.V. drip
King drank through high school and college, which took her 7 1/2 years to finish (at the University of New Hampshire). She then moved to Boston and supported herself as a waitress while searching out the sleaziest bars in her working-class neighborhood that were the gritty polar opposites of the welcoming, lighthearted atmosphere featured on television's "Cheers."

Her social strategy, in fact, was to find a group of people she had nothing in common with --- who, in fact, held her in "complete contempt" --- and hang out with them eight to 10 hours a day, all the while telling herself that her life was temporarily on hold as she figured out what she really wanted to do.

But then the troubled college grad discovered the morning drink and "bracing up" at home before hitting Misty's, her regular hangout. Her drink of choice became a vodka gimlet, which was cheap and almost 100 percent pure alcohol. The young woman also started having more prolonged blackouts.

After a fellow patron one evening remarked, "You ought to be a lawyer," she decided at nearly 30 to go to law school. Amazingly, she not only made it through Suffolk Law School but graduated cum laude near the top of her class and passed the Massachusetts bar exam while steadfastly maintaining her drinking habits.

Her trick? A couple weeks before finals, she would go on the wagon and study 18 hours a day.

Still, King didn't start practicing law but went back to waitressing, and soon hit bottom drinking "sea breezes" morning, noon and night. At JT's Place near the old Boston Garden, "We drank silently, methodically, the pace as steady as an I.V. drip," she reported in "Parched."

'Deliver us from evil'
Visiting a friend who had moved to Nashville and feeling a sense of impending doom from her "wet-brain" lifestyle, King decided to take a walk in the woods. Feeling emotionally and physically bone-tired, she sank to her knees under a tree, resting her forehead against the bark. I'm dead inside, she thought. If I don't stop drinking, I'm going to die.

The next thing she knew, she felt a force pulling her down. For a split second, she saw heaven and hell, good and evil. And she realized that some cosmic battle was being waged for her very soul. Then, without thinking, the woman who no longer believed in God found herself mouthing words she learned back in Sunday school: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name...."

When she got to "Deliver us from evil," she repeated it several times, knowing quite clearly by evil she meant drinking.

"It was one of the weirdest moments of my life," King said during a recent interview at Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena before doing a reading from "Redeemed." I just saw there was a battleground and that the dark forces were winning.

"I mean," she added, scratching an arm, "it gives me goose bumps, still. I really got there was a malevolent force at work and I need something greater. I'm not strong enough."

A short time later, while visiting the old brick family homestead in North Hampton, New Hampshire, her parents and siblings, with the help of an alcohol counselor, did an "intervention," confronting King about her devastating drinking problem. They also bought her a plane ticket and arranged for a month-long stay at the well-known Hazelden treatment center in Minnesota.

After Hazelden and with the help of support groups, King never drank again, which to this day she finds amazing. "With the whole experience of getting sober with other broken people, I just started to see and the obsession to drink lifted," she said.

"Something happened to me. I had an experience of something that could not have happened by all logical reasoning. If you drink like an alcoholic 24/7 like I did, you're in the grip of that thing, and you just know there's no earthly way this thing is going to be removed."

Spiritual Odyssey
In 1990, King got married to a friend named Tim from an adjacent small town in New Hampshire. They moved to Los Angeles, where she passed the California Bar exam and wound up practicing with a Beverly Hills lawyer. For the first time in her adult life she was making good money, but discovered that she hated the antagonistic atmosphere of litigation.

After a few years, she got up the courage to pursue her first love - writing - with a freelance job doing legal research helping to pay the bills.

In the beginning, her goal was to just sit down at her desk for four hours, the way Flannery O'Connor did, and write every day. Her first published piece, about a yellow-and-white gingham dress with little ruffles her mother made for her when she was three, was in an obscure Midwestern literary journal.

"I just thought I can die now," she remembered. "I have made it as a human being."

Then she published an article in "Commonweal" about the Los Angeles Catholic Worker's soup kitchen, a couple of stories in "Sun Magazine" and, eventually, the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, King was also on a spiritual odyssey. "I just started observing and noticing and thinking, 'How could I have ever thought there wasn't a God?'"

She was going to different Protestant churches, the kind she grew up with, but found there wasn't much "meat" to the services. Looking for something more stringent and structured, one weekday she wandered into the noon Mass at St. Basil Church, up the street from her Koreatown apartment.

"I just saw Christ on the cross and that was it," she recalled, holding up her hands. "I just went, 'Oh, my God! He gets it. He came to address the very things that I've been pondering and conflicted about and looking around for answers to.'"

King was also impressed that St. Basil's was a quiet sanctuary on hectic Wilshire Boulevard, with workers taking time out to worship. She thought of it as a parallel world. Moreover, she was struck by people responding, before they received the Eucharist: "Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed."

As an alcoholic with a failed marriage (she and Tim had broken up) and longtime nonbeliever, she felt like a prodigal daughter who got invited to the banquet table late, but still invited. "I'd been forgiven," she confided. "I just felt this incredible sense of having been forgiven."

She went through the Rite of Christian Initiation and became a member of the Catholic Church 11 years ago. She's been a sober alcoholic for more than 20. And is immensely thankful for both.

"In writing 'Redeemed,' I hope the whole book is really about gratitude," said King, who attends St. Basil and St. Thomas the Apostle parishes. "My whole sense of Catholicism and Christ is a sense of astonishment, of mystery, of wonder. All the experiences of our lives that we wished the heck didn't happen as we're going through them, and yet, in retrospect, I see that 20 years of drinking - and I'm not advocating drinking in any way, shape or form - but I see it served a purpose.

"And my sense is of a God who's so merciful that if he could lead us to him with one second less of suffering, with one second less of conflict, with one second less of squandering our inheritance, he would do it. And if we could do it one less second, we would, too."