If you are Gen X and like a good celebrity tell-all, you will want to add this one to your TBR. After all, Ione Skye was everywhere and everything in the late 80’s. And Diane Court and Lloyd Dobler was “where my lore started.”
Ione lists her collaborator, Genevieve Field, in her acknowledgments. Ms Field was a contributing editor at Glamour and her bio says that she does ghost writing. Based on the conversational yet insightful nature of this book, it is clear that she asks great questions and got Ione talking about what made the best material for the book. The memoir starts in her childhood and ends about 20 years ago, when her life became relatively stable. I do think that her experiences in motherhood would be worth reading about, but this book doesn’t really talk about anything past 2005, except very briefly and in summary. Is it a cop-out to write a memoir and not say anything (lol) about the people currently in your life? Maybe. But who cares. I don’t need to hear about her husband of the last 18 years, Ben Lee. I want to know all about Anthony Kiedis and Robert Downey Junior!! And did she ever hook up with John Cusack??? (view spoiler)
I also give credit to Ione’s therapist (whoever they are), because she clearly has done a lot of work around understanding herself and her life. She definitely acknowledges her part in her heartbreak and in her journey. There is a lot of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, with absent famous fathers and complicated relationships. Say Anything accounts for about 15 pages in the book. Looking back at her life, she takes a lot of responsibility for her mistakes and has a healthy knowledge of what drove her to seek validation through relationships. All without being self-pitying, there are no villains in this story.
It was so interesting to be the “it girl” before the internet. Before TMZ and before paparazzi, etc. It just seems like on any random day she would go to a friend’s house and meet Mick Jagger, River Phoenix or Matthew Perry. A nice jewish girl from the Hollywood hills, she and her brother and mother, who both were successful models, easily were able to make connections and move their careers forward. It seems like it happened almost effortlessly. There was a lot of pain, but bouncing back was easy and assumed. Ione doesn’t need you to like her, and she doesn’t want you to feel sorry for her. It seems like she is finally at a point in her life where she has made peace with her young life and can look back at it with a mature understanding. Ione doesn’t have resentment or anger towards anyone in her life, she has forgiveness both for herself and others. Still, reading with our 2025 eyes there are things that made sense in 1985 that seem creepy or weird now.
Life is long. It has to be so weird to know that most people will always and only remember you as a teenager, right?
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