Whoopi Goldberg Reflects on How She Went From Hitting 'Rock Bottom' Amid Drug Addiction to Getting Sober: 'I Like the Idea of Living'

Whoopi Goldberg reflected on being a former addict in her new memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me.

While recently talking to a reporter about her experience getting sober, The View host noted how she had no other choice than to quit drugs.

“You do not shy away from a point in your life where you say you were deeply addicted to drugs, you called yourself a ‘functioning addict.’ What do you credit now to maintain your ability to stay clean?” the journalist asked Goldberg, 68.

“It was very simple. Do you want to die or do you want to live? Very simple,” the Sister Act star said, to which the reporter asked, “You hit a rock bottom?”

“I thought it was rock bottom. I was making a lot of money and I had a lot of access to thing I really didn’t need to. I found myself in a position of having to make the decision of do you want to live or do you want to do this for the rest of your life? This is too much to take on so I decided to get straight and I did. I like the idea of living,” Goldberg shared.

“We like that idea for you too,” the correspondent replied.

“Not always, people didn’t always like it, but for the most part they did,” Goldberg pointed out.

In the TV personality’s book she discussed her addiction in detail, recalling when her habit became a real health concern.

"I had stayed pretty far away from drugs, except for pot, after getting cleaned up in the early '70s," Goldberg penned. "But Los Angeles and New York started to redefine what 'recreational drug use' meant in the '80s."

"It was a really good time for about a year," she recalled. "Then I fell into the deep well of cocaine and sank to a new low. Nobody around me caught on to where I was at with it. At least, that's what I wanted to believe. I would have called myself 'a very high-functioning addict.'"

Goldberg noted how she was able to be professional for the most part until “cocaine started to kick my a--."

"I'd go to work and realize I was getting sloppy," she shared, adding the turning point came when she had "one of those slap-in-the-face moments that make you see pretty f------ clearly that you've hit bottom."

She recounted one birthday at "a very upscale hotel in Manhattan," where she received an ounce of cocaine.

"I was sitting on the closet floor, just putting it up my nose," Goldberg noted. "All by myself. I didn't hear the housekeeper knock or let herself in the room to clean it up."

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"Get up, get out, and fix your life," she remembered thinking. "You've been sitting in a closet for two days. It's not good."

"I had already decided that I was willing and ready to stop," Goldberg stated, "so I was going to do whatever I needed to stop putting drugs up my nose."

ET interviewed Goldberg.