Free Found by Tatum O'neal Page A

lives had to be that way. Sweet Sean.
    I thought about that sensitive boy in the hands of my dad. I couldn’t stop worrying that any one of the traumas I had suffered would befall him. My God. He was not a hardened, wild child like my brothers and I had been. I was only spending weekends at the beach house, and I grew anxious about leaving Sean there with Ryan for the remainder of the week. If anything happened to him, how could I live with myself? I started trying to convince Sean that he needed to move out.
    â€œI’m not liking this. I want you out of there” became my everyday mantra.
    It was naive, but when Ryan and I made amends, I really wanted to believe that we could never be angry at each other again. Our relationship seemed entirely different and better than when I was a little girl. So many years had gone by without my dad. How could I have been apart from him all this time? I had missed so much. Now that we had found our peace, I thought it could and would never end. The fairy-tale ending was within our reach and I assumed we both wanted it more than anything.
    I should have known. Why didn’t I know? If I hadn’t been swept up in the fantasy, I would have admitted to myself that underneath it all, things really hadn’t changed.
    Now Ryan was going after Sean. I was much better at seeing reality when it involved my children. I lifted up the proverbial rug to see what else Ryan and I had swept under there. Weren’t we sidestepping the past at every corner? At one point, he said, “I’m reading my journals. I really wasn’t that bad. I took you to the doctor.” My book A Paper Life, which damned his parenting, was the 900-pound gorilla in the room (or, to mix metaphors, the 900-pound metaphoric gorilla “hidden” under that metaphoric rug). From his telling me that he had taken me to the doctor, I inferred that Ryan was defending his behavior in the past and denying all I’d written about it in the book, but neither of us was really ready or willing to come straight out and talk about it. He had his own reasons; I was simply terrified to go there and jeopardize our new, fragile peace.
    Sean and I conferred about Ryan’s mood. The grumbling to himself. The closed door to his room. He seemed frustrated with Sean, or frustrated in general. We observed the change, but there was nothing concrete to address: no actual conflict, no argument to resolve. Besides, I didn’t exactly dive into confrontation with my father. So we did nothing.

Chapter Eight
Down to the Wire
    DESPITE THE SHADOWY backdrop of unresolved conflict, Ryan and I had now settled on a production company, Endemol, for our documentary-style series. If we sold the show to a network, Endemol would be the company to put it together, doing all the planning, shooting, editing, and production of the final product. We all agreed that it wasn’t going to be a reality show. I see reality TV as titillating drama that is created for an audience. With the infusion of plenty of alcohol, reality TV shows feature women fighting, women wearing couture and fighting, and women with money fighting. Our series would be different. It would show our real lives. It would be the authentic investigation of a father-daughter relationship. Instead of calling it a reality show, we referred to it as a docuseries. I liked the sound of that. The first step toward selling the show to a network was shooting a “sizzle reel”—a short sample video that gave a glimpse of who we were and what the show would be.
    We filmed the reel over two days in September at my dad’s house. In the days leading up to the shoot, my dad and I were both antsy. Two months had passed since we first had the idea. At first Ryan was raring to go and wanted to start shooting right away. As the days rolled by, I saw his initial enthusiasm waning. In the days leading up to shooting the sizzle reel, he hurt his back, and I worried that