TALK SOFTLY

The author, a life-threatening-illness support leader and wife of the late actor Patrick O’Neal, recalls a roller-coaster life that steadied into meaningful depth.

With a light hand, O’Neal makes it clear that her life could have taken her to a very different place than where she is now as an emotional-support figure at Friends In Deed, a crisis center for critically ill people that she founded. Before she met her husband she was already an actress and successful model, and he brought just that much more glamour to her days. They lived in a series of envy-inducing apartments, moved in the company of tony friends and had the wherewithal to act on their desires. O’Neal recounts plenty of tribulations as well—her husband’s drug and drinking problems, a son who appeared to be taking after his father, the deaths of friends and acquaintances, which began to steamroll as the AIDS epidemic made its way through her milieu of artists. The deaths tripped a switch. “I could not live with the idea that someone was ill, frightened, alone, and not try to do something about it,” she writes. Any do-gooder suspicions are neatly laid to rest by O’Neal’s frequent skirmishes with her motivations and her candor about her ill-preparedness for such passion. “I think crisis holds a real seduction for me, and certainly there is some magical thinking involved,” she writes. “There’s a primal place in me that thinks that if I do my very best to help other people in their crises, disaster will stay away from me and mine.” Eventually, many of the “me and mine” became the men and women who found themselves at Friends In Deed, a handful of whom are profiled here with respect and honor. O’Neal made her share of mistakes, and her spiritual quest to face death is rocky, but she doesn’t lose sight of those who benefit from her compassion.

Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.