‘You'll never guess who'll be offended': Ione Skye on what she learned from sharing her Hollywood stories in a tell-all book

News.com.au

24-05-2025

She led a wild-child life at the centre of Hollywood's 1990s celebrity storm, then this year published a no-holds-barred memoir, Say Everything. Now actress IONE SKYE, married to Australian musician Ben Lee, reveals what she has learned from sharing her story.
I had just moved to Sydney when I got the book deal. I retreated to my 'office' to write – my bed.
What surprised me most was how much I loved the work itself. I had time. I had space. I let myself fall in.
I'd set the mood with music, then reach into memory and write about my past, shaped by the strange comfort of this new bed, in a new room, in a new Sydney life I was slowly coming to inhabit.
Somewhere between the old and the new, I found myself again. And I found a new me.
Some of these stories I'd been writing since I was a kid, especially my early teens – when films, music, and my older brothers' fascinating friends began to seep into my consciousness.
Of course, I knew it was not the usual teen experience for my first crushes to be on actors I actually knew like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix – or that my first real relationship was with an older, drug-addicted singer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I understood that what made my life extraordinary was why people were interested in my story.
Yes, I was technically what is now called a 'nepo baby' with a house that sometimes had famous people in and out of the front door.
But despite all this I still had the big feelings of a poetic shy kid and then the desires of a hot-blooded high-schooler.
I always believed there was something universal in my story, about the experience of young women growing up everywhere.
The idea of writing my memoir thrilled me. I like to delight people and shock people. I am a needy entertainer at the end of the day. I like attention. I like being adored.
But I can never quite sit still with the idea that someone might not – which was an inconvenient contradiction when I started to write a memoir.
How to deal with my aching need to make everyone happy? Might it even hurt some people?
My editor told me: 'You'll never guess who'll be offended by your memoir – or what will set them off.'
She was right. The moment an early chapter mysteriously popped up on Page Six, I got an email from a once-beloved relative-by-marriage. I was shaken reading the rough message they sent, full of condescension and scolding.
They insisted the whole project was 'beneath' me. I was irate. I had believed they were in the small group of my closest friends and family who really knew me, knew I would write a great memoir.
I tried to explain. Didn't my old mentor know me at all? I'd counted them among the few who truly understood my sensibility – and my kindness.
I tried to reassure them, but they wouldn't budge. They were convinced I could produce nothing but something tawdry – nothing more.
Instead of letting their doubt eat at me, my anger became a kind of fuel – a steady, stubborn motivation. I kept writing.
I brought my Mom into my writing process early-ish, hoping that including her in the process would soften any blows that might come her way.
'Don't give me any creative notes,' I said, careful to protect the fragile nature of creating. 'But please let me know if anything I've included is off the table,'
Mom finished the book close to the last edit. 'I love it,' she said. She was gushing. It was good. I felt it was – and that helped digest any hard parts.
I'm not sure where I found the conviction that my way of seeing the world had value, if only to myself and the friends who really got me. We were amused by one another's stories we told over dinners, or as we sunk together on couches, or on hikes in the Hollywood Hills.
What caught me completely off guard was the wave of love and support that has followed the book's release. People loved it. Friends, strangers, even people I have always admired and lost touch with.
Winona Ryder, Evan Rachel Wood and Molly Ringwald all wrote to say they related to the book and felt seen by it. That made me genuinely happy, because they weren't just impressed. They felt more open, less alone, a little high on shared memories and experiences.
I didn't expect the memoir to be one of the most profound experiences of my life. Flea told me it would be. Griffin Dunne too. Like parents talking to someone about to become a parent: 'You can't know. Not yet. Just wait.'
They were right. It cracked me open in ways I didn't anticipate. It changed something fundamental in me.
A friend told me, 'You wrote the book of our generation.' A ridiculously overblown compliment, obviously.
What mattered wasn't whether the statement was objectively true.
What mattered was that I had done the thing. I had summoned the nerve. I had gotten to a place in my life where I could handle what writing a memoir might kick up. I could even hold the possibility that it might not be good. That it might fail.
And I did it anyway.