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that fifteen-year-olds do, blowing off school and going to the beach together.
    Growing up, we all knew that Tony was gay, but he wasn’t ready to tell his parents. He finally came out of the closet in his mid-thirties. We’d stayed in touch over all the years. Tony has a big personality. He’s funny and has a lot of energy, so he brings a certain amount of excitement with him to even the most mundane lunch date. I’ve always been drawn to people like that, and I do best, it seems, with gay men.
    Once Tony and I reconnected, we took up where we’d left off. He was also sober, although he was having trouble staying so, and we started going to a meeting together every day. We had lunch and dinner all the time. I thought, Okay, great. At least I have one person here whom I know and can talk to, who is sober. Or at least trying his best.
    Over the next six months, I settled into my new life, attending meetings every day, going to the gym, taking my dog for walks, spending time with my son Sean, reconnecting with old friends and trying to meet new ones, and auditioning.

Chapter Three
Father and Son
    A SERIES OF events led me back to Ryan, but most of all, it was my younger son, Sean. Ryan and I had been estranged for years and years. It began in 1979, when I was fifteen years old and he moved out of the house; continued through the rest of my teens; and kept on during my marriage to John, who didn’t trust Ryan as far as he could throw him. Given John’s strong personality, it was easier for me just to have little contact with Ryan for most of our eight-year marriage, which lasted from 1986 to 1994. Most recently, the scandal that came between us was my publication of A Paper Life, which exposed to the world for the first time how Ryan had treated me when I was growing up. Writing the book was torture, but being on the other end of it can’t have been pleasant. Needless to say, my father didn’t call to apologize and make amends. We didn’t speak directly about the content of A Paper Life —my father claimed not to have read it—but I knew full well what his reaction was to the book’s revelations. He was angry. How dare I talk about our personal lives that way? I had always been warned against that—warnings so powerful that they wove themselves permanently into my young brain. He was and is a private man. Even now, with my father’s tentative consent to write this book, I worry about hurting and upsetting him.
    I didn’t intend A Paper Life to be an attack on Ryan, but I wasn’t surprised that he sought to defend himself. Everything that I described in the book Ryan denied to the press, and we never spoke of it. Since the publication of A Paper Life until very recently, I harbored anger for all that had happened, and my best guess was that he was equally angry at my having exposed it.
    Those are the broad brushstrokes of Ryan’s and my estrangement, but my relationship with my father is a canvas layered with years of paint in myriad colors—some harsh and sharp lines, some gentle and curved, some light, some dark. As new strokes are added, the overall tone of the painting shifts. No single stroke tells the whole story, but maybe some of the smallest, most muted corners of the picture can best hint at the whole.
    In 1994, I entered Hazelden for my first trip to rehab. I’d been addicted to heroin for several months. It was a very rough time. I wanted to be off heroin. But heroin was also the only thing that made me feel like I was meant to be alive. Ever since my divorce earlier that year, my life had tumbled quickly and steeply downhill. Heroin was the only way I had found to feel inner peace. It was the sole antidote to my pain, and yet it was ruining everything: my career, my relationship with my kids, my life. I couldn’t wrap my head around that fucking contradiction. Anyone who had been through what I’d endured, and found a way to take