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away the pain, would have to understand that I couldn’t let go of it. I had tried suicide three times without success. Without killing myself, taking the drug was the only way to endure. It was the best I could do.
    I spent Christmas at Hazelden with snow up to the sky, shivering my ass off, not knowing how I’d ended up there. I was alone and needed my family. What family? I called Ryan. I don’t know exactly what kind of support I was hoping to get from him. But all he said was, “Don’t blame me for the fact that you’re smoking the dragon.” The phone went dead. My dad never did make a habit of saying good-bye. I stared at the disconnected phone, listening to the dull dial tone, having a conversation in my head. Hang in there, Tatey, your dad loves you.
    Love you too, Dad, I said to the empty phone. And P.S., while we’re on the subject, the proper terminology is “chasing the dragon.” He was right. This mess was my fault. But it was hard to hear him say it that way. For me, the alienation came from moments like that, seemingly inconsequential brushstrokes that further shadowed already dim corners of my being.
    As for my father, he saw things in more black-and-white terms. He was angry and hurt that I’d chosen to distance myself from him in the first place. He did not participate in my rehab process and, eventually, I emerged. The 2004 publication of A Paper Life was just another black mark against me, as far as he was concerned. But it was a necessary phase in the healing process for me. I needed the truth to be told. Since then, my father and I had had only small encounters, fraught events where we never addressed what had come between us, and it seemed like that was how we would go on in perpetuity. He later would say that he erased me.
    Until: “May I have Grandpa’s phone number?” It was Sean. My twenty-year-old son, Sean, had met Ryan only a couple of times in his young life. A decade earlier, around the time my mother passed away in 1997, we had taken a family trip to Hawaii together when the kids were really little—me, the three kids, Ryan, Farrah, and their son (my half-brother), Redmond—and around the same time, we’d spent a few weekends out at Ryan’s beach house in Malibu. But for the most part, Ryan was a stranger to Sean and his siblings, a larger-than-life figure he knew from Ryan’s movies, from magazines, and from family photos. Now Sean was studying theater at Occidental College, in L.A. He was a third-generation actor and had been yearning for a connection to his roots, to the family vocation, to the O’Neal family in general. He wanted to experience the connection with my side of the family.
    I thought long and hard about the decision to make the introduction. I asked God to guide me toward the right answer. Part of me had always thought the kids needed to have relationships with my family. But, as my ex-husband had put it more than once, “No, actually, they don’t.” Fair enough. My family was fractured, a stew of drama, drugs, violence, and tragedy. Only four years earlier my father and my brother Griffin had been in the news for an epic fight that ended in gunshots and my dad’s arrest. Nobody knew my father’s faults better than I. But he was older now. I hoped, the way a daughter does, with hope against hope, that Ryan had changed. Maybe he would surprise me. Maybe when his young grandson called—this handsome, worthy young man who was so ready to love his grandfather—Ryan would rise to the occasion.
    My heart wanted Sean to find a strong male role model in Ryan. And I missed my father. Our good years together in Los Angeles—when he took custody of me and Griffin, and Ryan and I made Paper Moon —had been some of my happiest. Even when we weren’t speaking, I always felt his presence. He was the most important man in my life, forever.
    I did it. For better or worse, I