Tatum O'Neal: How many memoirs is too many?



Lunar Eclipse (Photo by Jiyang Chen)

It’s 2011 - which means that seven years have passed

since Tatum O’Neal’s first memoir, A Paper Life. 

The title of this first memoir refers to the movie, Paper

Moon, for which O’Neal famously won an Academy

Award at age 10.  This looked amazing enough to the

public’s unblinking eye – but would have looked even

more amazing had the impending eclipse of that Paper

Moon been fully visible.

In 2004, O’Neal revealed the details of this emotional

blackout.  A Paper Life digs way down into the deepest

craters of her troubled childhood. Dateline NBC’s Stone Phillips summarizes this childhood as follows:  Beatings, hunger, neglect, sexual molestation, underage drinking, car crashes, suicide attempts, and drugs virtually everywhere.  O’Neal’s immediate response to that summary was this:  I thank God everyday that it is so behind me.

However, a wise “Yogi” once said:  It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.  And for O’Neal (as for the rest of us), “it”

seems far from over…

Nevertheless - O’Neal’s second memoir, Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home, seems farther along on the road to healing than her first.  “This book,” O’Neal writes, “is about building a life.”  A large part of this healing seems to be finding a way back to some sort of relationship with her father.  In fact, she and Ryan O’Neal are currently traveling side by side for at least some of this journey.  The release of “memoir two” coincides with the debut of the Oprah Winfrey Network docu-series, Ryan & Tatum: The O’Neals.

Craig Wilson of USA Today asks skeptically whether Tatum is “turning her addictions and turbulent family

life into a cottage industry.”  He then adds:  Will there be a third memoir?

There’s a saying in karmic circles:  The only way out is through.  Therefore, there will be as many rewinds of old tapes as it takes to get us through.  No more, no less…

Resources

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6254330/ns/dateline_nbc/t/tatum-oneal-shares-survival-story/

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2011-06-13-found-tatum-oneal_n.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatum_O'Neal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_O'Neal

Copyright July 31, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved