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Once a pill-popping, alcoholic job-hopper, Harry Turner is now a relatively straight-laced, dedicated and loving single father. The 81-year-old retired journalist and Chevy Chase resident reveals the details of his anything but ordinary past in "Dear Frank: A Memoir."

Turner felt it was important to write an honest memoir for his 32-year-old son Frank.

"In journalism, all of the stories are forgotten about in a day or two and I wanted to write something that would last," he explains.

For 40 years, Turner worked as a reporter and editor, mostly for the San Juan Star. He served as managing editor, then as Washington correspondent.

His childhood was a mixed bag. He tenderly reminisces about simpler times, when he spent hours dreaming about movies or playing marbles and hide and seek with his friends. Yet he also writes frankly about the five years he spent living in a dark one-room apartment with his mother and alcoholic father.

Turner recounts his subsequent experiences in Hawaii and the Caribbean, where he and his first wife spent their days romping on the beach and catching their nightly meals. During the roughest times, particularly during that tumultuous first marriage, Turner disappeared into his work as a journalist to cope with trouble at home.

"I have a great need to create," he says. "…That's really what pulled me through."

In addition to his own ongoing battle with the bottle,

Turner's first wife was a morphine addict. After her death, he remarried and became a father. His feelings for baby Frank are evident in the caption he wrote for a photo of them together, reproduced in the book: "He taught me how to watch the wind, and marvel."

When Frank was 3, his mother left. Becoming a single father, Turner says, changed the direction of his "pretty vagabond, drunken" lifestyle.

The project began in the form of essays addressed to his son. Over about a decade, it developed into a book.

"I tried to be honest," he says. "I think it's not going to work out too well if you're not honest."

In Turner's explanation of his goals for the memoir at the end of the first chapter, he offers insight into what turned his life around.

"Love, like its cold sister indifference, survives the individual, passing in one family from generation to generation, from bone to bone, from the ancient to the unborn, a blessed bequest that spreads to others who need only permit its embrace."

"Dear Frank: A Memoir" is available for purchase at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda, and at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. The book also may be purchased by calling 301-654-4923.