When Ione Skye was in middle school in the early 1980s, a group of popular, mean girls she calls “the Aprils” brought her — shy, bookish, not yet famous — into their intimidating fold. She was surprised they even knew her name.
“Part of me wanted to punch the girls’ smug faces,” she writes in her memoir Say Everything, just released through HarperCollins. Another part of her, though, “burned with excitement”.
Those preteen memories, which she wrote down, felt important. Cinematic, even. “My own story captured my imagination,” Skye says during a video interview from Los Angeles. “I had a big ego, I guess.”
For almost 40 years, since Skye made her film debut at 15 alongside Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper in the teen crime drama River’s Edge, her name has been associated with powerful people, mostly men. There’s her father, Scottish folk singer Donovan, whose early abandonment of Skye, her mother and brother, connects her experiences from Girlhood, as the first section of the book is called, to Womanhood, the second.
There’s her relationship with Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, which started when she was 16. There’s her marriage to Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, which ended in divorce after Skye (“I was a serial cheater,” she writes) rediscovered her bisexuality and embarked on a series of affairs with women, including Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares and Alice Temple. She’s now a mother of two and has been married to Ben Lee, a musician, since 2008. They live in Los Angeles but just spent the last year in Sydney.
In the epilogue of Say Everything, Skye says that by writing this memoir, she hopes to let some of her stories go.
When I asked about that sentiment, she says, “This book made me realise that I’m not great with loss or with grieving my past. I don’t want the past or my stories to control me in a heavy way. I want to be attached to my life now.”
As a gen Xer who followed Skye’s career ever since I saw her in River’s Edge (1986) and then Say Anything (1989), I’ve always thought of her as a beautiful, intriguing enigma. Was she like Diane Court, the valedictorian “trapped in the body of a game-show hostess,” like her Say Anything character? Or was she rebellious and scrappy like Trudi in Allison Anders’ still-stellar 1992 indie Gas Food Lodging? She never felt like a performer who was striving for an Oscar. She seemed more like a cool girl who’d somehow appeared in the centre of 1990s culture via Old Hollywood.
When I ask Cameron Crowe, who directed Say Anything, about his impressions of Skye, he describes her as quiet but a “raging emotional force”.
“She’s a real person that steps out of life to act sometimes,” he adds. “She’s had an idiosyncratic, soulful career, and that’s reflected in the book.”
John Cusack, who hoisted a boombox over his head to woo Skye’s character in Say Anything — neither of them could have foreseen the meme this would become — says he was instantly struck by her integrity. “One had the feeling she was an artist who had zero interest in being an It Girl,” he says, “which made her one, in a way.”
With her memoir, Skye finally gets the chance to tell all, and then some. Not many teenage girls get to hang out at Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall’s house (Skye was and is close with Jagger’s daughter Karis) or meet a tween River Phoenix when he popped by one Saturday. She writes about trysts with some of her co-stars, including Reeves, Cusack, Robert Downey Jr. and Matthew Perry, and reminisces about Christmas parties at Madonna’s house and vacations in Cabo with Gwyneth Paltrow, who briefly dated her brother, actor Donovan Leitch. Of Paltrow, Skye writes, “If Gwyneth had been at Immaculate Heart, the Aprils would have been called the Gwyneths.”
As juicy as the book can be, it doesn’t come across as mean-spirited or salacious. It’s just Skye, 54, letting us into her world, one that’s romantic and glamorous one minute, heartbreakingly candid and searching the next. Her stories, fun as they are to read, are grounded in some of the most relatable human experiences: the search for love and a little understanding.
“A book is one of the most satisfying ways to be seen because it’s literally your thoughts and stories,” Skye says. “It’s not a character.”
Beyond her early scribblings about the Aprils, Skye didn’t think seriously about writing a book until 2021, when she saw her relationship with Kiedis being picked apart on, of all places, TikTok.
“They were saying how could Ione Skye’s mum let her be with him at that age, so I did a sort of clapback saying that my mother and brother were really upset about it at the time,” she says. “It got me thinking that I guess people are interested in my side, not just of being with Anthony, but in my story.”
She went on a “memoir-reading jag,” she said, devouring titles by Carrie Fisher, Demi Moore, Al Pacino and Rob Lowe. She read Barbra Streisand’s 970-page tome about her life and got advice from her longtime friend, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, based on his experiences writing his 2019 memoir, Acid For The Children.
“I could tell it was a big experience for Flea, but I didn’t really know what that would mean for me until I started writing,” Skye says. Digging into her past was painful but cathartic. She could write about her reconciliation with her father, her grief over her divorce, becoming a mother and, with Lee, discovering true intimacy.
The book also gave her a chance to reflect on her work. “Acting hasn’t always been front and centre for me,” she says, but at the same time, “I wanted to give myself less of a hard time about my career not being Winona Ryder’s career.”
That eclectic career has allowed her to work with David Fincher (she had a small but memorable role in Zodiac) and Lena Dunham (Camping), and star in Lifetime movies with sublime titles like A Secret Promise and A Perfect Mother.
“I did so many jobs just to be a working actor and I used to be kind of embarrassed,” Skye says. “Now I’m like, it’s so cool I did Lifetime movies because Lifetime movies are amazing. Especially the ones in the 1990s.”
Toward the end of Say Everything, Skye writes, “I accepted years ago that I might not be made of the right stuff to be a full-on Hollywood power player.” She has been painting since she was a teenager, and her work has been shown in Tokyo and Los Angeles, and in a joint show with Sofia Coppola and Kim Gordon. She also wrote a children’s book in 2014 called My Yiddish Vacation, illustrated by Scott Menchin. She’s just as happy working on one of her paintings or recording an episode of Weirder Together, a podcast she co-hosts with Lee, as she is on a red carpet. Happier, even.
Anders, who directed Skye in Gas Food Lodging and in the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms, says she sees Skye as a woman who “made her life completely her own”.
“I think it’s something that has to do with the fact that an absent parent can force a kind of self-directed personality,” Anders says, “and that makes for a great artist, always.”
There is a 1999 Howard Stern interview in which Skye gets grilled about her father. She holds her own amid a barrage of questions, but you get the sense that given half the chance, she’d have had a lot more to say. Back then, as she says in her book, she was often thrust into the “wide-eyed ingenue” role. Writing her memoir gave her the chance to do what she couldn’t back then: it allowed her to do all the talking.
“I’d been such an internal kid, I longed for people to know me,” she writes. “I felt ready to be seen. But the real me rarely was.”
When I asked Skye about that Stern interview and those portrayals of her, she said, “When I was younger, I felt like women had to be quiet. It’s my instinct even now.”
Writing the book has helped her push back against that instinct. She recently finished filming a new twist on the Anaconda film franchise with Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Steve Zahn. Between shots one day, the three of them were telling jokes, and she found herself retreating.
“My instinct was to just let the men talk and be funny together, and I’ll just smile and listen,” she says. “And then I was like, what am I doing? I want to join in.”
Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye, published by HarperCollins, is out now.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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