*Whoopi Goldberg opens up about overcoming her cocaine addiction in her upcoming memoir, “Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me.”
“I had stayed pretty far away from drugs, except for pot, after getting cleaned up in the early 70s,” she writes in the tome, Page Six reports.
“I was invited to parties where I was greeted at the door with a bowl of Quaaludes from which I could pick what I wanted,” the Oscar winner, 68, recalls. “Lines of cocaine were laid across tables and bathroom counters for the taking.”
Goldberg said cops were known not to raid the homes of the rich and famous, so these drug-fueled pirates were “very relaxed,” and “everyone partook.”
Goldberg, who went to rehab before she was famous, explained how she believed she could “handle” cocaine because it didn’t appear “dangerous” since everyone was doing it. But once she began feeling like the drug “started to kick [her] ass,” and she was having hallucinations, she knew she had to quit the habit — and it wasn’t easy.
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“I knew I’d have to change out my friends and turn down invitations but I could do that,” she said of the turning point when she decided to get help. “I didn’t want to die.”
Elsewhere in her new memoir, Whoopi reminisces about a poignant moment from her childhood. At the tender age of 8, she witnessed her mother’s struggle with mental health, leading to a harrowing experience of undergoing electroshock therapy. The profound impact of the treatment resulted in her mother, Emma Harris, losing all memory of her two children, Whoopi and her older brother, Clyde Johnson.
“My mother at one point when I got older … said, ‘Can I tell you a secret?’ I was like, ‘Sure,’” Goldberg told People in a new interview. “She said, ‘I didn’t know who you were when I got out of the hospital.’ It’s like, ‘I’m sorry, what? I’m sorry, what?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I had no idea who you were.’”
“I said, ‘So you carried this for 40 years?’ She said, ‘Well, what else was I going to do?’” Goldberg added
“Living without my mother, who was always my world, who had always been that center of gravity. Suddenly the center of gravity wasn’t there,” she said of her mother’s hospitalization. “If I needed information, I was to ask somebody, explain why I was asking and do all the things that I would do with her when she was not there.”
Harris died in 2010 at age 78, and Whoopi’s brother passed away five years later at age 65.
“Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me” hits bookshelves on May 7.
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