NEED TO KNOW
After his mom, Tatum O’Neal’s near-fatal stroke in 2020, son Kevin McEnroe says, “They asked me if I wanted to pull the plug. They said would she want to live this way?”
He says his 2016 book tour was “skewed to make things seem a bit sunnier and rosier than they were.”
Now, McEnroe writes about it all on his Substack, Serenity Side Down
When Kevin McEnroe was in rehab for drug and alcohol addiction in May 2020, his sister Emily called to say their mom, Tatum O’Neal, had suffered a near-fatal stroke after a drug overdose. “I spent the next month there fielding calls about her progress and if she’s still alive,” he says. “She was having seizures. She was having sepsis and it’s so crazy, I don’t have time to consider my own bulls—.”
As his mother’s medical proxy, he was suddenly in charge of making decisions about her care. “They asked me if I wanted to pull the plug. They said ‘Would she want to live this way?’ I said ‘I don’t know. I think she would want to try.’ Thank God. In saying ‘I don’t know,’ it was the first time I was open and not so resistant.”
Now seven years sober, Kevin tells PEOPLE helping his mom helped him believe in himself, too.
“In helping my mom I started to believe I could help other people and then i just wanted to be a better man,” says Kevin, 40. He writes about addiction, recovery, his mom (the youngest Hollywood actress to ever win an Oscar) their relationship and much more on his Substack newsletter Serenity Side Down. “I had grown up having to hide what was going on with my mother,” he says. “It wasn’t helping her or nor me to have this enormous amount of secrecy.”
Tatum O’Neal and Kevin McEnroe circa 1986
Credit: Courtesy Kevin McEnroe
“My entire life, it felt like there was this unbelievable chasm, between how she presented the Hollywood actress and who she actually was,” he explains. “She was looking to get work and couldn’t really be honest with how she was really doing.”
After O’Neal was arrested for crack cocaine possession in 2008, he says, “I felt like I abandoned her going to college because she was really struggling.” By then, he was drinking and using painkillers himself. But it was also then that one of his professors encouraged his early forays into writing. In 2014, he got a book deal for his first novel Our Town, a fictional account of his maternal grandmother actress Joanna Moore, the first wife of Ryan O’Neal, who was also addicted to drugs.
The 2016 press tour for the book which he did with his mom was “painful,” he recalls. “Now I’m doing what my mom was doing. We’re presenting this idea of how we want things to look but we’re not behaving that way behind the scenes. It was skewed to make things seem a bit sunnier and rosier than they were. She needs work. So now I’m responsible for showing she’s a good mom. We’re in this together. But she’s struggling and so am I.”
“And listen, she is the champion of me,” he adds. “but she wasn’t doing very well.”
Kevin McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal
Credit: Courtesy Kevin McEnroe
“Presenting this idea of how I want things to be, it’s breaking me emotionally,” recalls Kevin, whose drug use continued to escalate. “I remember thinking my mom is going to be at my funeral. That doesn’t seem right.”
In late 2019, he was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital with liver failure, and from there, went back to rehab. That’s when he got the call about his mom’s overdose and stroke.
At the same time, Emily had just gotten sober, “and that inspired something in me,” he says. “I’m not alone in this.”
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In recovery, he says, “I learned how to show up for people and it helped me to understand my mom better. To actually feel she wasn’t choosing drugs over us. I don’t have to be angry anymore.”
Tatum O’ Neal and children Kevin, Sean and Emily
Credit: Jim Smeal/BEI/Shutterstock
He began writing again and within a few years, launched his Substack newsletter. “He has brutal honesty, which is beautiful,” says O’Neal, 63, now two years sober and making a slow and steady recovery since the stroke. “I have brutal honesty myself.”
“Kevin’s always had an ability to be almost unnervingly honest,” notes Emily. “He’s taken on a lot of my mom’s approach without trying, just how raw and honest he is and I think that let’s people in.”
As Kevin puts it, “If they like the glamorous Tatum O’Neal story, that’s out there. But the reality, which I think is a much better story, is here too. It’s a story about survival and resilience and getting through hardship.”
PEOPLE VIPs can read our full conversation with Kevin McEnroe in this week’s issue, available right now in the app
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