By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
Say Everything
Ione Skye
HarperCollins, $34.99
The company of other girls with famous fathers – Mick Jagger’s Karis and Mick Fleetwood’s Amelia – gave young Ione Skye comfort from the pain of also having a distant superstar parent.
Her father, the Scottish folk singer Donovan, abandoned Skye and her brother when they were toddlers. The flower power music figure would refer to her only as “the girl” in letters, later even insisting on a paternity test during her teen years. But reveries of a reconciliation were frequent: “I often fantasised that one day my dad would … be overcome with regret for not getting to know such a wonderful girl,” the actor writes in her new memoir Say Everything.
The Generation X icon, best known for roles in the 1980s films River’s Edge and Say Anything, insists there’s no connection between his abandonment and her adult desire for attention in the spotlight. But Donovan does cast a long shadow over Skye’s life, with the 54-year-old acknowledging that she often struggled with his absent presence.
It was Hollywood and movie-making that meant the young Skye grew up fast, with legal emancipation at 15, national fame at 16 and inappropriate relationships with older men thereafter. Skye began dating 24-year-old Anthony Kiedis, the lead vocalist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was addicted to heroin and fresh out of rehab. At 16, she fuelled her own unhealthy dependency by staying with Kiedis, vainly hoping to heal the musician of his drug abuse and persistent unfaithfulness.
Skye with co-star John Cusack in the 1989 hit film Say Anything.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Other quintessential Gen X stars, among them River Phoenix and John Cusack, orbit Skye’s youth but don’t prove as magnetising as rock’n’rollers. Phoenix became “like [a] brother” to the actor while Cusack was cerebral, even a little distant, when they befriended each other during Say Anything. (There is a brief acknowledgement from Skye that the two did, in fact, later sleep together, but the encounter proved that “we were meant to be in love only in the movies”.)
Skye with her husband, Ben Lee. The pair produce a podcast, Weirder Together.Credit: Getty Images
Another rock musician would liberate Skye from her toxic cycle of addiction and obsession with Kiedis. Beastie Boys frontman Adam Horovitz (“Ad-Rock” to fans) attracted her with his soft touch and dreamy energy, and became her great love. “With Adam, I felt so safe,” she writes.
But after marriage at 21, Skye began to feel like she had missed her salad days and started acting recklessly as Horovitz spent months away making music. Belatedly discovering her attraction to women further fuelled her indiscretions. After Horovitz caught Skye at home with a new lover, the marriage quickly crumbled. The actor turned to old friends and new film projects to give her the familiarity and structure to confront her self-destructive habits; party drugs and nightclubbing until all hours.
Skye with Keanu Reeves in the 1986 film River’s Edge.
There were some major missed acting opportunities in Skye’s career, such as losing out on Steel Magnolias by bombing the audition with a British accent. (She had somehow assumed the film was set in England, not the American South, to a horrified Sally Field.)
But other roles arrived that creatively challenged her while expanding her Hollywood network – except in the case of Madonna. The legendary singer wasn’t “warm and fuzzy”, Skye writes, apparently irked because she had learnt Skye had previously slept with one of her own former lovers.
In later years, after the birth of her daughter and marriage to Australian musician Ben Lee, Skye made peace with her harmful missteps and unhealthy relationships. Much like her decision to change an “ADAM” tattoo to “MADAME”, the pages here read clear-eyed and self-knowing. “A Madame didn’t need a man to define her, she defined herself,” she writes.
Say Everything is a sincere project in self-acceptance, after a lifetime enduring feelings of abandonment and searching for emotional fulfilment. With tenderness and humility, the memoir recounts remarkable breakthroughs in a personal history often besieged by struggle and chaos.
From adolescent ingenue to self-possessed woman, this Gen X star shows us a world formerly defined by fathers and failings now finally free.
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