On the Shelf
Say All the pieces
By Ione SkyeGallery Books: 304 pages, $30If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help unbiased bookstores.
“I often fantasized that one day my dad would stumble across my face on a magazine cover and be overcome with regret for not getting to know such a wonderful girl,” writes Ione Skye. The 54-year-old actor and Gen X it woman items collectively her turbulent life in her memoir, “Say Everything.”
Her father, the well-known people musician Donovan, didn’t acknowledge her till she was 17. In 1987, not lengthy after Skye starred in “River’s Edge,” her father’s lawyer despatched an official letter to Skye’s mom requesting that Skye undertake a DNA check to ascertain whether or not or not she was Donovan’s organic daughter.
Was that why her father had at all times referred to her as “the girl,” she puzzled?
Skye says, “There’s so much I relate to with my father: his avoidance and fear of intimacy, his selfishness. But, for sure, it’s very different the way my brother, husband and [my daughter] Kate’s fathers are so dutiful. … My father wasn’t alone in being that kind of [absent] father, as an artist of his generation.”
However Skye’s dad is the least fascinating facet of her life, as her ebook reveals. Skye’s mom and her mother’s curious, eccentric boyfriends in addition to Skye’s older brother Donovan Jr. present loads of tales. Rising up in Hollywood with aspiring actors, musicians and starstruck followers additionally makes for countless drama.
“I’m pretty open as a person,” she says. “Whether that’s growing up in L.A., where people have a very open culture because everyone does therapy, or whether I’m just like this. … I’m not rattled. It wasn’t a divergence from how I am naturally. When I feel that I can trust people and share, I’m good at it. With this book, I want people to get to know me, in a way.”
As for the timing, Skye says, “I’m at an age where I trusted myself. I felt really supported by my husband and the publisher and editor. And while the book definitely gets vulnerable, people seem really interested in the ’90s and what it was like to be an actor, to know those people.”
Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye starred within the 1986 crime drama “River’s Edge.”
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Getty Photos)
Skye remembers her formative years and the sense of desperation for love that drove her into whirlwind romances with Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares, (a heartbreakingly heroin-addicted) Anthony Kiedis and Robert Downey Jr., amongst others. She married Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz within the Nineties. The pair divorced in 1999 after seven years and Skye’s affairs with ladies. She wed one other musician, Ben Lee, a few decade later. Her marriage to the Australian singer is the epilogue, deliberately faraway from the previous life and lovers she paperwork.
“I’d thought that would be one of the hardest times of my life, when Adam and I broke up. But I kind of liked all of that freedom I had when I was in New York, and I had my own apartment. It was the first time I was doing what I should have been, what was age-appropriate in your mid-20s,” Skye says.
Till that time, Skye rues that she had lived like an grownup since childhood, the inevitable consequence of coming into Hollywood as an adolescent and missing typical parental steerage. Now a dad or mum herself, Skye says she understands her father, even when her method to elevating kids is vastly totally different.
The ebook is a wild trip — from the incredible, messy Nineties Hollywood events of her youth to ashrams, backstage at rock reveals and on film units like “Wayne’s World,” “River’s Edge,” “Say Anything” and “Gas Food Lodging.” She remembers a soft-spoken, lovely younger Reeves getting ready to stardom in “River’s Edge,” the assuredness of director Cameron Crowe on “Say Anything” and the extreme friendship she developed with John Cusack on that movie, although the pair by no means dated. At 15, Skye sought to be legally emancipated as a result of different youngster actors had accomplished the identical as a way of averting the authorized necessities of minors on set. She writes: “It was a dream, going from high school to this incredible universe where I got to play make-believe all day long.”
She additionally needed to embrace an grownup life whereas barely out of childhood. Skye’s first critical relationship threw her proper into the quagmire of attempting to like, take care of and depart a heroin addict. “There was me before Anthony, and me after,” she writes of her relationship with Crimson Scorching Chili Peppers frontman Kiedis. “Sometimes I’d drive all night looking for him, trawling the usual spots over and over: the corner of Sixth and Union, the market where he bought bleach for his needles, the Eat’n High Thai restaurant on Fountain. … My world-inside-of-Anthony’s-world was shrinking by the day. Little by little, I was closing myself off to anyone who cared enough to question my choice in dating a junkie eight years my senior.”
Ione Skye writes in her memoir about ex-boyfriend Anthony Kiedis’ heroin habit.
(Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic through Getty Photos)
It’s a relationship Skye views otherwise because the mom of a 16-year-old daughter.
She has no regrets in recalling the heartbreaking teenage years she spent watching her boyfriend within the hooks of habit, since Kiedis bared his personal demons in his 2004 memoir.
“I don’t want to expose someone’s life, and legally you can’t anyway. He really laid it all out in [his book] ‘Scar Tissue,’” she says. “I thought people might be interested in my side of the story.”
Skye concedes that writing a memoir is a problem, however not a lot emotionally as narratively — contouring the circulate and storytelling with an editor’s sharp eye.
“I’ve loved writing since I was young so I have a good memory. It wasn’t as if I was uncovering any of these stories that I’d mentally locked away; I’ve thought about it. So writing this was good, and hard, to do. Some of those chapters were harder to go through during editing, while some were really delicious.”
It’s straightforward to attract a transparent parallel between her father’s early rejection and her starvation for acknowledgment, need and a spotlight.
Nonetheless, she counters, “I didn’t want it to be all about chasing love and romance. I don’t want to use the word ‘love addict,’ but I saw that I was really looking for security and the minute someone was out of sight, it was ‘out of sight, out of mind!’ What calmed me down was having someone with me, even my girlfriends. I needed a sidekick at all times, which I saw very clearly in writing this book.”
She provides, “More clearly than ever, I saw that if I could do over one part of my life, it would be to meet the whole [Red Hot] Chili Peppers scene when I was 10 years older, or just to have been friends with them. I wished I’d had a lighter touch with that whole group. I love a lot of people in that group, but it definitely went too deep, and that’s partially why I got married so young. I thought I was so mature.”
Having purged tales each unhappy and seductive, Skye wraps her memoir with an homage to the husband and grownup kids she adores. And — with movie roles and work as a painter — this memoir is much from a full cease to her inventive life.
