When I Was 9, Lara Flynn Boyle Was My Father’s Sweetheart—and My Best Friend

Yet shadowy forces were closing in. For months, Lara would show up giddy at the dinner table, armed with stories from the set of Men in Black II, where she was playing an alien in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. To create boobs, she joked to me, they had to squeeze fat from as far as her ankles. Her costume was so tight, she couldn’t pee without facilitate. And yet, when the time came to actually see the film, even 12-year-old me could see this part was a pale facsimile of the public persona Lara had created for herself. Compared to Vincent D’Onofrio’s choking, sugar-obsessed antagonist of the original, Lara’s dominatrix quips and whiplike tentacles felt stale. This movie star turn, which was supposed to elevate Lara, ended up diminishing her instead.

Meanwhile, Lara did nothing to facilitate herself with jokes to the press like, “I’m the kind of woman who, when she walks into a party, all the other women leave” and “I’m high-maintenance, and I’m worth it.” As one journalist vividly wrote, “Chatting with Boyle is like feeding a roll of quarters into a jukebox full of songs about naughty girls.” The public’s attitude toward Lara became increasingly ambivalent. As much as they wanted to raise her up, they wanted to tear her down. Look no further than an article that appeared in Us magazine titled “The Actress Women Love to Hate,” which detailed reasons both to hate Lara (skeletal body, large ego), and on the next page, almost as an afterthought, reasons to love her (childhood trauma, close relationship with her mom).

Lara’s relationship with my father was a point of no return in which she went from being a woman on the verge of stardom—a person validated for her work—to a mere celebrity. The media had an overwhelming hunger for all things Lara, but most of all for signs that she was ill or insane. People wanted proof that her unapologetically bohemian bad-girl lifestyle was unsustainable and damaging. The public became so infatuated with Lara that, like the Eucharist, they swallowed her whole.

In my fantasy version of this story, Lara leaves our family because she knows I got what I needed. It was around this time that my mother’s battle with alcohol reached its Jerry Springer heights: a plane bound for London had to make an emergency landing after Mom punched a flight attendant in the face. Lara, as Mary Poppins, knows that an incident so embarrassing, so public, would jump-start my mother’s recovery. My father would be forced to take action. And in this one sense, fictional Lara was right: This episode marked a fresh phase in my relationship with my dad. Though I was just 12, he could speak to me like an adult—we could now become best friends.

And so with a knowing smile and a wink, Lara opens her magical umbrella and disappears into the sky. In reality, I have no clue why my father and Lara broke up. I don’t know if he cried or if she cried, but I certainly did. I woke one snowy winter morning at our house in Aspen and she had just—vanished. While I never saw her again, she did leave behind a few items—a crusty bottle of vanilla-scented lotion, a high-quality white negligee, and a box of tampons—which I used the first time I got my period, too embarrassed to admit to my now single father that I had started menstruating (which, needless to say, led to more crying).

I’d known my father’s relationship with Lara couldn’t last forever, and yet when I was with her, I had no clue what I would do without her. But once she actually left—and this points to the resilience of children—life went on. After all, when it’s time for Mary Poppins to go, even the Banks children run out of the house to fly a kite with their father without so much as a goodbye or a thank-you. I imagine it cannot be straightforward falling for a man with children. On the one hand, they feel like unwanted appendages. On the other, you fall in love with them a little bit too.

A few months after she disappeared from our lives for good, Lara showed up at the Golden Globes in a tutu. She met the incredulous glances of the press, the cruelty of her peers, with a smile. Even Joan Rivers had to admit, “You have such guts.” Compared to red-carpet appearances today, which are meticulously curated by a cadre of stylists, Lara’s outfit is startlingly original. For the treachery of authenticity, Lara was universally condemned not just as the worst dressed but potentially insane. Seeing her torn apart by the press was like seeing a part of myself—the part that’s tumultuous, unpredictable, and free—torn apart too.

I read that my father, on the other hand, reacted to Lara’s red-carpet appearance with three words: “Isn’t she great?” While I can’t say for sure if this is how he felt, the quote certainly sounds like him. My dad belonged to a school of thought that elevated counterculture figures like Hunter Thompson or Holden Caulfield. Lara refused to be transformed into the “right” kind of celebrity, thumbing her nose at an increasingly corporatized, cynical world. My father presented an idea that at that time I could not understand—that being a sicko in a ill world may indeed be great.

After 2003, Lara slowly disappeared from films and television. Like Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, in the parts she did land, Lara was used primarily as a punching bag. She played a cruel prostitute in Life Is Hot in Crackdown and a cruel boss in Baby on Board. Most climactically, her eight-episode arc as a casino owner on Las Vegas ends with her literally taking a flying leap. Lara as Monica Mancuso is blown off the roof of her own hotel, flying through the CGI skies to the witch’s theme from The Wizard of Oz, until she smashes into a storefront and dies.

Though her work in Hollywood all but dried up, she remained a fixture in the tabloids. Unflattering photographs of her taking out the trash and drinking in her car would continue to surface for the next 20 years. Yet Lara refused to descend into self-pity. As she recently told People magazine, “Any moment I was feeling down or sorry for myself, I made sure I did not complain. My mom used to sometimes bring me articles about other actresses to show me I’m not the only one getting a raw deal.”

Actresses in Lara’s generation had to put up with the press diagnosing, based on paparazzi photos alone, the status of their mental health. Now a fresh generation of women has emerged who feel emboldened not only to acknowledge their struggles, but to share them with the world. As a result of this cultural shift, Lara is embraced by a fresh era of self-proclaimed crazy girls, the type of woman who posts and likes pictures of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Without leaving the safety of our lives, we embrace their misfit status as a way of vicariously participating in it. Like my father before her, Lara has come to represent the potential for rebellion we all contain within ourselves.

For this article, I asked Lara if I could see her for the first time in more than 20 years to talk about the time we shared. She declined. Of course, this feels like being rejected by Mommy. But the truth is, whether I see Lara again or not is almost irrelevant, because I carry so much of her in me. When she descended from the sky with her magic carpet bag, I was still figuring out the type of woman I wanted to be. In Lara, I saw characteristics that I liked—her irreverent sense of humor, her refusal to conform, her compassion for the underdog—and made them my own. Or, to quote the last words Lara ever said to me, “I’ll always have you in my heart, baby.”