An Ugly Saga of Everywoman : NOW YOU KNOW <i> by Kitty Dukakis, with Jane Scovell (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 315 pp., illustrated; 0-671-68458-2) </i>

The 1988 presidential campaign offered one picture of Michael and Kitty Dukakis. They were a perfect American couple, with successful children, a lovely but modest suburban home and an almost unbelievably strong marriage. One reporter, sneaking through the bushes outside their house, discovered only the Dukakises dancing together in their living room.

Kitty Dukakis’ memoir, “Now You Know,” tells another story, not about her marriage to the governor of Massachusetts but about her own internal turmoil. Although parts of this story emerged during the campaign and have been reported since then, much that is new, surprising and disturbing emerges in this often brutally frank first-person account.

Behind the smiling faces of this would-be First Family lies a story of addiction and depression, a long-held and only partially successful battle with the demons of self-doubt and hidden substance abuse. If the Kitty Dukakis we saw on television in 1987 and 1988 represented Everywoman, then the Kitty Dukakis of “Now You Know” represents an equally familiar, if often troubling, modern figure: the woman who appears to have everything but is tortuously convinced that she has nothing.

Katharine Dickson Dukakis was addicted to amphetamines for 26 years. She entered treatment in 1982 and announced herself cured in the midst of the 1988 campaign. In the wake of that same disastrous campaign, she began a rapid descent into alcoholism. She entered treatment again, and emerged taking Prozac, an anti-depressant drug. By the end of 1989, she was no longer taking Prozac but had started drinking again.

One evening last November, when she was depressed and desperate for a drink, Kitty Dukakis consumed nearly enough rubbing alcohol to kill herself--although she insists that suicide was never her intention. After more treatment, she returned home. Within weeks she had swallowed large amounts of Tylenol with codeine and enough assorted household products--including vanilla extract, men’s after-shave, nail-polish remover and hair spray--plus alcohol, to require treatment once more. Dukakis now declares herself a recovering alcoholic, drug addict and depressive; she takes Lithium to control her dark moments, and puckishly hopes for the best.

Substance abuse is not the only secret in Kitty Dukakis’ past. She also has a tangled family history. Her mother was the product of an illicit tenement union between two teen-agers, one Irish and one Jewish. At the insistence of both sets of parents, and with the help of esteemed Rabbi Stephen Wise, Kitty Dukakis’ mother was adopted by a wealthy German-Jewish family, while her own mother served (covertly) as her nursemaid for the first three years of her life. The wealthy Goldbergs sent Dukakis’ mother to school in Europe at age 10; they divorced shortly thereafter.

However, “Now You Know” is not merely an airing of Kitty Dukakis’ dirty laundry. This is because the image projected in 1988 was not all wrong; the memoir is as faithful to the clean, and often quite uninteresting, details of her mid-century, middle-class existence as it is to the gritty, interesting ones. The reader learns, for example, that with the exception of a short-lived first marriage, Kitty Dukakis has lived in the elite, largely Jewish Boston suburb of Brookline for the entirety of her adult life.

The town, the era and her status-conscious mother helped make Kitty a popular girl, a “May Queen” at Penn State and a bride before her 20th birthday. Her mother taught Kitty that she could never be too rich or too thin, and by the time she met Michael Dukakis in 1961, she had developed a steady habit of taking amphetamine diet pills.

By 1988, the threads of Kitty Dukakis’ existence had nearly unraveled: Her children all were working or in college; Michael was a household name, and his wife had no more independent power than she had had at the Penn State Homecoming three decades earlier. The head-rush of the presidential campaign thrust Kitty Dukakis into the limelight even more precipitously than it did her husband. She liked it there. Important people asked her questions, and they left the camera running while she answered.

It could not last. By the fall of 1988, it was increasingly clear that Michael Dukakis would lose the election. No one will pretend that losing a chance at the presidency of the United States is easy for the man who does it, but at least he had a job to come home to. As she started her problem-drinking, Kitty Dukakis must have known she was on her way back to Brookline and solitude. Her worst fears were confirmed in November:

“To say the rug was pulled out from under me when Michael was defeated would be far too feeble a description; the world was pulled out from under me, a world of constant activity, motion, energy--everything I thrive on. I felt as though I had been squashed in a giant compactor; all the breath went out of me. . . . Two mornings after the election, he was working in his office at the State House while I was drinking in our bedroom on Perry Street.”

Her fear and dissatisfaction were compounded by a sense of guilt. At one of her many treatment centers, she remembers, “I felt guilty, too, surrounded as I was by others whose histories were far more severe than mine. I did not come from a dysfunctional family. I have a loving husband, wonderful kids, financial security and a position of prominence. I had everything, and I had nothing.”

Kitty Dukakis never blames her husband for any of her troubles; but neither, in her presentation, does he seem to have been much help. Perhaps this is because Kitty Dukakis is so determined--in a way every “12-step” program would approve--to take full responsibility for her own actions. But it is possible to take this philosophy too far. In the dynamics of addiction, one person is rarely solely responsible. Kitty Dukakis says this obliquely when she writes about admitting her alcoholism:

“I remember (a relative) saying, ‘Alcoholism is a family disease.’

“Michael reacted violently: ‘I don’t care what kind of disease it is, my wife needs help.’ ”

Feeling sorry for Kitty Dukakis is different from excusing her political remembrances, which are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. In her take on an afternoon with British royalty, for example, most of which she spent with Prince Philip, Kitty Dukakis sounds like a candidate for the Miss America crown: “What a charming man,” she assesses. “What an exciting day!” Similarly, in evaluating vice presidential nominee Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Dukakis positively gushes. And in analyzing her husband’s candidacy, Dukakis offers little that is new:

“Why did my husband lose the election? My personal belief is that Michael Dukakis was not identified strongly enough in terms of any of his attributes before the other party began to attack him. . . . He doesn’t show his emotions easily, but, dammit, he has them. I wouldn’t be married to him if he didn’t! . . . In politics, honor is quaint. If you want to rise to the top, it seems you have to stoop a bit first.”

Believing that his “honor” and Republican dirty tricks were all that stood between Michael Dukakis and the presidency may make things easier at home, but it won’t help the Democrats win elections.

They might come closer to winning if they figure out what Jesse Jackson had in 1988 that the official candidate so desperately lacked. Kitty Dukakis’ gossiping jibes at Jackson are the worst part of the book, not least because they lack originality. (The second-worst part is her repeated effort to “dress up” her prose with sophomoric references to Greek mythology and morsels of Great Western Literature.) In remembering the first Jackson speech she attended, Kitty Dukakis offers the familiar critique:

“As often happens with Jesse Jackson, there weren’t many specific proposals for change, but that didn’t seem to bother his listeners. . . . . That first time I heard Jesse Jackson in person, all stories of his ‘charisma’ were borne out. . . . Nonetheless, persuasive rhetoric aside, I had real reservations about Jesse Jackson’s qualifications to be President of the United States. He was a preacher who had never held an elective office. . . . Beyond the sound and the fury, his speeches lacked significance.”

Kitty Dukakis has written an occasionally eye-opening memoir of a largely straitened life. Her message may ring true for many readers, those of us who were never nominated for “May Queen” as well as those who were, those who grimace at our morning coffee consumption and midnight binges, as well as those with graver problems of substance abuse. Sharing another woman’s experiences may not cure us--but, at any rate, now we know.