Creating Myself

July 21, 2008
Tyler, daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and sister to actress Liv, feels she’s had a difficult life. Growing up, she disliked her mother and longed for more time with her famous father. After her parents split up, she and her mother lived in New Hampshire before moving to Manhattan, where Tyler was enrolled in several fine schools—only she spent her time hanging out with her buddies getting high on pot, acid, cocaine, Ecstasy, etc. Her father intervened after she suffered a massive overdose: “it paid to have a rock star for a dad,” she says. Once on her feet again, Tyler was kept therapeutically busy with a lucrative offer from Lane Bryant to model clothing for plus-size teens. Months later she came to visit her mother and found her slimmer and in love. They bonded—but then her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor that proved fatal. Tyler, constantly falling in and out of love, finally realized that the point wasn’t to find herself, but to create herself, a questionable insight. Not only that, she comes across as spoiled and shallow.