A Paper Life Analysis

874 Words4 Pages
daughter thus treated may grow up to hit the thank-you trifecta (therapist, co-writer, her own cherished children) as she evens the score. That's how Tatum O'Neal begins "A Paper Life," her slash-and-burn family album about ... oh, go read it. You know you want to. And thank Hollywood and hippies for the excesses that are described here (like a movie star dad who explains that marijuana is an herb, like parsley). Tara Bray Smith, whose "West of Then" describes growing up in Hawaii with a drug-addicted mother, has her own version of a trouble-in-paradise story. But as these two books illustrate, there's a difference between telling the truth and spilling the beans. Ms. Smith's book - which she wrote herself, hauntingly - conveys the real…show more content…
O'Neal has set her hair on fire by page 20, "A Paper Life" does not have an overwrought tone. It prefers understatement, as in an episode when 5-year-old Tatum fights with her mother's 15-year-old boyfriend and throws up after sneaking sips of the adults' beer. She passes out and wakes up on the bathroom floor. "But at least the floor felt cool," she points out. As some combination of Ms. O'Neal and Ms. Petrini writes, in the synthetic-sounding first person: "I loved my big, handsome daddy and thought if I stopped sucking my thumb, that would prove it. Then, like the angel horse, he would carry me away, taking me home to live with him." The book then gives this "angel horse" the full "Mommy Dearest'' treatment, with scandalous stories of his wild partying and wilder temper. One humorous family ritual involved mimicking the way Dad foamed at the mouth. But as "A Paper Life" innocently explains, a sexual overture from one of her father's girlfriends provides "the motherly glow I was always looking for." Other excesses are 12-stepped into evidence of "the classic abuse syndrome." And just for the record, Pauline Kael is invoked to savage "Barry Lyndon" (in which Mr. O'Neal starred, and for which he had high hopes) as "an ice-pack of a…show more content…
Smith didn't run around with rock stars. ("I guess I needed attention," Ms. O'Neal says, about setting a fire at Rod Stewart's house and stealing his girlfriend's shoe.) But "West of Then" is good enough to make her own experiences just as memorable. This book's phantom is Karen Morgan, Ms. Smith's photogenic mother, who began life as part of a privileged Hawaiian family with a lineage tracing back to the Mayflower and wound up homeless in a Honolulu park. The tensions within this family are piercingly evoked. "This was my grandmother: cool and shaded and off-limits," Ms. Smith writes. "This was my mother: She cut wires on alarms; she stole silver. She hocked her graduated pearls. She was a thief and a rebel and she was my hero." But the book spans enough time for Karen's heroism to become something quite different in the eyes of this daughter. (Karen has several children, geographically scattered, with different fathers.) One of the things that makes "West of Then" so potent is the absence of easy explanations or answers. In a book that mingles a rainbow of intoxicating Hawaiian memories with the multigenerational story of her family's disintegration, Ms. Smith winds up capturing all the strain and anger and messiness of the trouble she
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