Tatum O'Neal on How She 'Found' Herself

June 14, 2011 -- Academy Award winning actress Tatum O'Neal was born in the spotlight, the daughter of Ryan O'Neal, an Oscar winner by age 10, addicted to drugs and alcohol by her teens.

In her new book, "Found: A Daughter's Journey Home," O'Neal, 47, candidly takes readers insider the addictions, family discord and career struggles that came with living a life in the public eye.

In "Found," a follow-up to her New York Times bestselling memoir, A Paper Life, O'Neal delves further into her struggle to beat her addictions to drugs and alcohol, and explores how she got to where she is today, a single mother of three grown children, an actress and ex-wife to tennis legend John McEnroe.

PHOTOS: Tatum O'Neal and Other Celebs Who Bounce Back

"Found" is also a father-daughter love story, documenting O'Neal's fragile reconciliation with her father, actor Ryan O'Neal, after 25 years of estrangement, a process they will open even more to the world when their docuseries. "The O'Neals: Ryan and Tatum," debuts on "OWN," the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Read an excerpt from "Found: A Daughter's Journey Home" below, then check out some other books in the "GMA" library

Introduction

How Do you pick yourself up, day after day, when people don't believe in you and you have every reason to give up on yourself? How do you survive when you've nearly lost your children for good, when your addictions have led to an arrest, when work becomes hard to find and the life you once expected to lead seems more and more remote?

only now, years after A Paper Life, am i starting to find the answers. After the arrest—and the near relapse that led to it—after all the pain that has come to the surface, my exit wounds are starting to close. scars have formed and healed. The burden of all that chaos and tragedy has lifted, and i am seeing reasons for everything i've endured. Telling my story has brought me some relief. i feel a lightness i've never known before. And the moment of realization has finally come. i am okay. i am really okay. And no matter what happens, i am going to stay okay. yeah, i'm whole—well, almost. i'll get to that later.

THIS BOOK is about rebuilding a life. it's about how i kept going, with a public childhood and a famous father, a public marriage and an acrimonious divorce, a public addiction for fifteen years and an imperfect record of sobriety. it's about how i kept going in the face of criticism, judgment, and my own incomprehensible demoraliza¬tion. it's about how, after all i went through as a child and an adult, all the trauma and the self-destruction, a decent life emerged. it's about how i realized that there's never a time to give up, not if you have kids and the slightest sense of purpose on the planet. giving up is not an option. No matter how much others and you yourself condemn you. No matter how close you come to losing who you are.

IN A PAPER LIFE, i told my story, and it was mine alone—the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction saga of being a child star in a dys¬functional show-biz family. but the story of my recent years is much more universal. This is the story of how i got sober, conquered my addictions once and for all, and am working to preserve that victory one day at a time. it is about the challenges and joys of being a mother; an ex-wife; and a single, middle-age actress. (yes, i said it.) it's about a woman who was once scared to get close to people but has learned how to be a friend and to trust in intimacy with others.

rebuilding a life means taking stock of what you have and what you've lost. As hope grew and i reemerged, i saw that there was an important person missing from my life: my father. Daddy. ours was the most important relationship of my life, and it was nonexistent for nearly twenty years.

more than anything, this is the story of a father and a daughter. when i wrote A Paper Life, i realized that there was no fairy-tale ending, that no life, particularly one in which a child is trauma¬tized, is ever perfectly resolved. in the ongoing process of rebuild¬ing my life, it was time to deal with my biggest unresolved issue. my dad. ryan o'Neal.

That strong, compelling movie star who was, at one time, my hero and my savior. yet we had barely spoken in eight years. even at my mother's funeral in 1997, we acknowledged each other but did not speak. Now i felt confident, strong, and certain of what i wanted. i was ready to try again, to rebuild my relationship with my father after so much private and public estrangement. And so i began a slow, careful attempt to reconcile with him. That reconciliation ran an uneven path, growing, faltering, and, ultimately, persevering.

when ryan and i first had the idea to share our efforts to mend our fragmented relationship with a television audience, we both thought long and hard about whether to do it. The risks and pitfalls were obvious—we might reinjure our new, delicate rela¬tionship and/or expose our private lives. but the honesty that the camera brings appealed to me. i wanted us to face each other in a harsh spotlight, where we couldn't hide anything, where each of us would have to take responsibility for how we had behaved in the past and who we were in the present.