Kevin McEnroe Calls Writing on Addiction, Almost Dying and His Mom Tatum O’Neal ‘Life-Saving’ (Exclusive)

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• Kevin McEnroe has been sober for seven years and shares his story on his Substack newsletter Serenity Side Down

• He looks back on his family saga, including when he became mom Tatum O’Neal’s medical proxy after her 2020 stroke. “In helping her, I started to believe I could become a better man.”

• McEnroe discusses his family’s recovery journey and says of his mom, “The fact we’re both such bad alcoholics makes us closer because she can be honest with me.”

Kevin McEnroe had been in drug rehab for several months when his sister Emily called him in May 2020 about their mom, Tatum O’Neal.

“She’d had a stroke and was in a coma and might not make it,” Kevin recalls. “She had overdosed again. I spent the next month fielding calls about her progress — checking if she’s alive. I had to show up and be there for her. It was you need to do this, and I did.”

As he emerged from his own years-long perilous struggle with addiction, “in helping my mom, I started to believe I could be a better man,” says Kevin, 40, the oldest child of the Oscar-winning actress, 63, and tennis great John McEnroe, 67. Now seven years sober, he’s writing about it all — his legendary family (his grandfather was the famously volatile actor Ryan O’Neal), generations of addiction and his and his mom’s journeys to recovery — in his Substack newsletter Serenity Side Down.

“I started sharing openly about the past and taking care of her and loving her through all of it,” he says. “I realized that it wasn’t helping her or me to have this enormous amount of secrecy, and I just decided to let it rip.”

Kevin was 6 when his parents split in 1992 and became embroiled in a bitter custody battle. He and his siblings Sean, now 39, and Emily, 35, initially split their time between parents until Tatum’s escalating drug use forced her to relinquish custody in 1998.

“She’s had a drug problem as long as I can remember,” says Kevin. “My entire life it felt like there was this unbelievable chasm between how she presented — the Hollywood actress — and who she actually was. She would leave often in the middle of the night, try to get back before we were awake, but sometimes we would wake up and she wasn’t there, and that’s pretty scary.” Still, he remained protective. “I had this deep feeling that if she lost us, she would die,” he says. At court-ordered therapy, “I would hold a pillow over my head and refuse to talk.”

Kevin began drinking in high school and first tried painkillers in college: “For the first time in my life I was comfortable, and that very loud negative voice in my head was suddenly quiet.” He discovered the catharsis of the page after a class assignment in college to write from a child’s perspective. “Because it was fiction, I thought I could,” he says. When his professor returned the paper, he said, “You need to keep doing this.”

For the next six years he tended bar at night and wrote fiction on the side. In 2014 he got a book deal for his first novel, Our Town. He and his dad, by then remarried to rocker Patty Smyth, had dinner to celebrate. “He’s worried,” recalls Kevin. “I take that as [he’s] not excited for me. I storm off, go buy drugs and get arrested the same day. I spend the night in jail. I’m on the cover of the New York Post: ‘McEnroe’s Dopey Son.’ A nightmare.”

The judge offered him the choice between treatment or jail, and he chose rehab. After spending 120 days getting clean, he says, “on day 121 I got a drink. And for the next five, six years, I almost drank myself to death.”

He developed pancreatitis, went into treatment a second time and again resumed drinking. Then his dealer offered him heroin. “And now I am using heroin like my mom did,” he says. “Xanax, vodka and heroin.” As he recalls, “My dad would try to visit. I would cancel. One day he just showed up. There were bottles of alcohol everywhere. He looked around with a tear in his eye. He told me to stand up. I remember, because I couldn’t stand up. He gave me a hug and told me he loved me.”

Recalling that moment, John McEnroe says, “I felt maybe if I said ‘I love you’ and not insist he go to rehab, at least he would know how I felt.”

One day in October 2019 a girlfriend showed up and urged Kevin to go to the hospital. “I’d like to thank her,” he says. “One of those things that feels sort of beyond my understanding—is that I went.” He spent a month in the hospital with liver failure.

“They told me I’d probably need a transplant, and somehow I [stabilized] enough to go to treatment,” he says. Then after his mother’s stroke he became her medical proxy and was tasked with making difficult decisions about her care. As she slowly began to improve, he says his sister Emily, also newly sober, “gave me this idea that people could change.”

He found a community in recovery. “The lengths to which I’d gone allowed me to understand my mother’s disease, which led to true forgiveness,” he says. “The fact that we’re both such bad alcoholics makes us closer, because she can be honest with me. There is no shame.”

When he began writing again, his Substack offered an unfiltered outlet. “He has brutal honesty, which is beautiful,” says his mom, who’s still recovering from her stroke and is now two years sober. “I’m so proud.”

Still, his dad admits, “when he was really struggling, it was difficult to read that at times, as a father. Writing has made him feel good about himself — more whole — and so to see him have that opportunity, there’s nothing better than that.”

For his family (including John and Patty’s three children), “recovery has brought us all together in a way that is just crazy in the best way,” says Kevin, who married actress Fern Cozine, 31, in 2025 and is now writing a memoir. “I was so close to dying — to none of these things ever happening. So was my mom. My dad would have lost his son at 33. Being honest about myself and able to show that it gets better, not only is that freeing, but there might be somebody who sees I’m still here, and perhaps that gives some hope. If I accomplish that, what the hell else is there?”

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