Eric Roberts Says Daughter Emma Became the Parent He ‘Couldn’t’ Be

In his memoir, Eric Roberts praised his daughter Emma Roberts for becoming the type of parent he wasn’t able to be.

“I loved my little daughter with the strength of Hercules, despite my own weaknesses,” Eric, 68, wrote in Runaway Train: Or the Story of My Life So Far, published on Tuesday, September 17, as reported by Entertainment Weekly.

“However, I couldn’t handle the realities of an infant coming into my life, and I couldn’t handle being a parent!” Eric continued. “I’m still not a father figure. Emma, on the other hand, certainly knows what that role is — now grown up and a mom herself. She’s that person to her first child, Rhodes.” (Emma, 33, shares son Rhodes, 3, with ex-boyfriend Garrett Hedlund.)

Roberts, who welcomed Emma with ex-partner Kelly Cunningham in 1991, cited his drug addiction as a major factor behind his lack of parenting chops. “The biggest consequence of my drug use was losing Emma,” he wrote. “I was still impossibly coked up when she was born, which explains everything.”

He added, “I had abandoned Kelly when Emma was just seven months old. We went through a lot, and [Kelly] saw me at my absolute worst — yet she stayed, for a time, though I’m sure she questioned whether or not she should. We both wanted a child — maybe I did more than she — but we both wanted to become parents.”

He noted: “I fell madly in love with Emma the first minute I saw her,” adding, “We were a nice little family for a while, but it didn’t last. I was in too much trouble.”

Emma, who has gone on to have a successful career in Hollywood with iconic roles on shows such as American Horror Story and Scream Queens, attributed her confidence to mom Kelly in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly earlier this year.

“I feel like my mom was always the one who was like, you can do whatever you want. No dream is too big, and I’m super grateful for that,” she told Us in June 2024. “Now that I’m in my 30s and have my own son, you just have more of a sense of the reality of the world.”

Emma added that it was her mom who raised her “to believe that I was the best and could do anything,” a belief system that she intends to pass on to Rhodes. “You don’t realize how rare that is until you get older,” she said.