After years of drunken blackouts, passing out in the hallway of a filthy apartment complex or otherwise sleeping around, Heather King finally woke up.

“I was dead and now I came awake again,” she said. King has been sober for more than 20 years since her family intervened with her drinking problem and booked her into a rehab center.

The previous 20 years had been increasingly ruled by alcoholism, to the point that King spent days on end drunk, starting with straight, cheap hard liquor at odd hours of the morning.  

Having seen the light, she has written two books about her experience. Released in 2005 and chosen as that year’s Most Memorable Memoir by Publishers Weekly, “Parched” details the drinking from beginning to end. King’s second book, “Redeemed,” was released this year and picks up where “Parched” left off, after rehab. King will sign copies of her latest book at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter on Saturday, Aug. 23, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Seeing the light, King says, means not only escaping the darkness of alcoholism, but also answering her calling in writing and her spiritual awakening. “I came to writing and Catholicism at almost the same time,” she said. “That is so not an accident.”

King is from the Seacoast and graduated from the University of New Hampshire. After moving to Boston and working as a waitress for a series of distasteful restaurants, she had the inebriated inspiration to go to law school.

As she humorously writes in “Parched,” “I lived in constant tension between the longing on the one hand to come alive, create, contribute; and on the other, the obsessive-compulsive drive to self-destruct. I had to do something. And so, as I approached my thirtieth birthday, I did what any sane person would do who was terrified of confrontation, pathologically afraid of public speaking, and so panic-stricken at life in general that she’d become a nightly blackout drinker: I decided to go to law school.”

King graduated from Suffolk Law School in fewer years than it took to finish UNH, passing through both with honors, and then got right back on the bar stool.

King’s newest book reveals that after sobering up she became a lawyer, married and divorced, survived breast cancer without chemotherapy and mourned the death of her father. For all of these life changes, an invisible force eventually got her through. “Things happen in a realm that we can’t see, like prayer and forgiveness,” she said.       

“There seems to be some guiding order that’s led me to the light ... or toward sanity,” King said. “We really stumble through life mostly in the dark and we do the best we can. I just like to encourage people to keep going.”

Though King said her message is that people don’t have to struggle like she did, she doesn’t consider her writing advice, therapy or confession. “I don’t feel like I’m in a position to give advice, but I feel like I’m in a position to tell my story. That’s what I can do. Hopefully, there’s something universal people will identify with,” she said.

Indeed, readers are likely to find something to identify with, whether they have a problem or not. King’s relationships with her family, friends and boyfriends, and her need for a connection in general, is easily relatable despite her unique circumstances.

She also doesn’t consider her memoirs overly revealing. “My life of my inner heart is secret and intensely private and hidden, so I don’t feel exposed at all,” she said. “People don’t know me at all in the secret recesses of my soul.” 

King has written that she was wasting her life while getting wasted, but she said it also helped her become who she is now. “I don’t have regrets. I feel that I was born an alcoholic, so I didn’t have any choice in that,” she said. “Maybe if I didn’t have this thing that brought me to my knees, I never would’ve gotten humble enough to ask for help.”

However, she said, she regrets the harm she caused to others, namely her family. “I regret that I squandered my inheritance. I went to law school and I was just shit-faced,” she said.

Part of King’s attraction to the Catholic church was the acknowledgement of suffering as part of the human condition. She said she responded immediately to the sight of a body on the cross, whereas her former Protestant church had the symbol of a cross alone. She was able to relate to a deity with a body that, like all humans, yearned to love. 

King said writing has brought her peace of mind. She intends to write a third book called “Holy Hell,” her synopsis of life with both a vast nothingness and an intense beauty. She does, however, have a remaining weakness. “The whole love thing, that’s always been my downfall. Maybe it’s everybody’s downfall, or maybe every woman’s.” she said.

King said she’s looking forward to her annual visit to the Seacoast, where she has fond memories of her grandparent’s house and where the scenery brings her to tears. “Even though I live in L.A., New Hampshire is my home and the landscape of my heart,” she said.