Leonard Nimoy’s Son Hopes Memoir Will Help You Live Long And Prosper

For millions of people around the world, actor Leonard Nimoy will always be synonymous with Spock, the Vulcan Science Officer aboard the USS Enterprise in the original iteration of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.

For Adam Nimoy, Leonard carries a much different title: Dad.

“I really enjoyed the success, I was really proud of the work, and I’m still feeling the reverberation of that,” Adam recently told me over Zoom. “Here we are, almost 60 years of Star Trek later, and I still feel the love that my dad created across generations. But to have that experience, the good stuff, I think I had to have a a dad like Leonard Nimoy, who could be very tough and very difficult to deal with. There always is a price to pay.”

While he succeeded in bringing joy to so many people week after week, Leonard often struggled to do the same for his own family.

“He was a renaissance man—writer, director, actor, producer, poet, photographer,” Adam said. “I mean, the guy could fly a plane and captain a boat. He was a patron of the arts, asocial activist. But on the subject of parenting, he was challenged.”

After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1940s to pursue an acting career, Leonard received no financial support from his parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants who had wanted him to become a doctor or lawyer.

“His parents were not demonstrative, as he liked to say,’ Adam recalled. “They were not the warm and fuzzy type. So, the modeling was not really there.”

Nevertheless, that upbringing did play a crucial role in Nimoy’s approach to Spock that made the character iconic. Growing up, the young actor dreamed of escaping the Boston’s cloistered West End neighborhood and integrate into “broader American society,” Adam shared. “By the same token, my dad explained to me that although the key crew on the bridge of the Enterprise is multi-ethnic, multinational, multi-racial, there’s only one alien, and that’s Spock. And Spock’s objective was to integrate himself into the greater humanity of his colleagues onboard the Starship Enterprise.”

When Adam (who eventually went into television directing) was born in 1956, however, Star Trek—and job security—was still a decade away.

“[My father] was working odd jobs all the time, trying to get bit parts in TV and movies,” he said. “So, he wasn’t really paying attention to family matters, and particularly not to me. When I became a teenager, this kind of cool relationship we had towards each other exploded into verbal conflict. For the next 30 years of my life, I had this weird experience. A combination of these wonderful experiences with my dad … coupled with regular episodes of flat-out conflict, made all the worse by the fact that I was a wake-and-bake pothead, and my dad was an admitted alcoholic.”

It wasn’t until they began attending addiction meetings, that Adam and Leonard could boldly start to mend their fractured relationship.

That emotional journey towards familial catharsis takes center stage in Adam’s poignant memoir, The Most Human (now available in trade paperback from Chicago Review Press), which “celebrates the success of our relationship as much as it points out the difficulties that we had to overcome,” Adam noted.

“The book is the result of being in recovery for almost 22 years now,” he continued. “A lot of my recovery has been dealing with relationship issues, particularly with my dad. Resentment is a big obstacle to recovery, so says the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. We like to say that keeping a resentment and anger towards somebody is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. This was my spiritual malaise that I had to deal with most of my life because of problems I had with my father. He was my number one problematic relationship.”

Thankfully, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon meetings provided a basis from which Adam and his father were able to patch up old differences and enjoy “a very close and loving relationship during the last years of his life,” shared the former. “I was with him in the room after he had passed away and these feelings of gratitude, relief, unity, and love washed over me. I had no regret whatsoever. We figured it out. We just let all the dirt from the past go and moved along in our relationship.”

Adam, who previously explored the topic via his 2016 biographical documentary, For the Love of Spock, decided to do a much deeper dive in book form after realizing his experiences regularly struck a chord with other people in the “recovery community,” he explained. “When I would share this anonymously, people didn’t know I was related to Leonard, [but] it seemed to resonate with them. People were saying, ‘I’m going to call my dad. I’m going to call my mom. I really appreciated the share.’”

The Most Human, he went on to stress, is not just pertinent to individuals struggling with substance abuse. The notion of a rocky father-son dynamic is a universal occurrence—something that “happens all the time with people,” Adam said.

“You don’t need to be an alcoholic or an addict to be in recovery. That’s just a fact. Everybody’s recovering from something. If it’s not drugs and alcohol, it’s a failed career, a failed marriage, the loss of a loved one, a physical infirmity. Everybody is dealing with these kinds of issues [and] can still learn about the tools of recovery. It’s just to help people ‘live life on life’s terms,’ as we like to say.”

One thing Adam hoped to prevent was the memoir devolving into a tell-all exposé airing the family’s dirty laundry. “The book is not a vent,” he said. “It’s not a laundry list of my problems. It’s not Mommie Dearest [an unflattering 1978 account of life with Joan Crawford by her daughter, Christina]. It’s not a blame, it’s not judgment. What I want readers to take away is that even though I think my father was basically a good guy, there were a lot of issues.”

To that end, he hired an editor who absolutely nothing about Star Trek for a more objective point-of-view.

“It’s a fine line,” he affirmed. “How much do you tell and what do you leave out? I gave her the list of all the stuff that happened with him and she starting crossing things off and said, ‘We [only] need two or three really detailed situations where you show the kind of conflict you were dealing with. What the shortcomings were in terms of his parenting ability, and that’s it. Then leave it alone.’ Going back there and remembering that stuff, dealing with that stuff, is difficult. They’re not pleasant memories of when Leonard was a challenge for me to deal with.”

But the process was as psychologically cleansing as it was difficult. If his book can help someone to—dare I say it—live long and proper, then he’ll consider his job a success.

“Not only did I learn to let go of my resentments towards my dad, but he did the same towards me,” Adam finished. “The tools of recovery gave us the model to do that. People should look at these seriously and think about going to an Al-Anon meeting, a 12-step meeting, because I think it can be really helpful to people in dealing with personal relationships. I’m just trying to be of service, which is a part of my own recovery.”