Unfiltered and uncensored, actress Ione Skye’s memoir is a wild ride of Hollywood thrills, confessions, and desire, as well as a deeply meditative and lyrical reflection on a messy, sexy, unapologetically unconventional life.
In 1987, sixteen-year-old Ione Skye landed the breakout role of Diane Court, the dream girl who inspires John Cusack’s iconic boombox serenade in the hit Cameron Crowe film, Say Anything. While Skye seemed perfectly typecast as an aloof valedictorian, her reality was much messier.
The love child of a magnetic ’60s It Girl and the folk-singing legend Donovan, Skye chased her absent father’s approval throughout her life. Wounded by his rejection, she sought warmth through infatuations and affairs with the brightest lights in her path—Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, John Cusack, and Robert Downey, Jr., as well as ’90s “bad girls” like Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares, and Alice Temple. On the heels of a toxic teen relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, Skye leapt into wedded bliss with Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz. But marriage was not the magical hall pass to adulthood Skye had imagined, and the fairy tale ended in heartbreak.
A decade of sex, film, art, babies, and adventure later, Skye will reconcile with her father and connect with a fellow seeker, the Australian musician Ben Lee. But when Lee’s world of gurus and cults threatens to subsume the couple, Skye must risk losing her soulmate to define, on her own terms, what it means to be a lover, partner, and parent.
Set against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of Topanga Canyon sunsets, lesbian supermodel cliques, Indian ashrams, rock royalty compounds, and the sets of classic late-century films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, and Wayne’s World, Say Everything is a vulnerable and cinematic account of a Gen X icon’s evolution to self-acceptance, and a celebration of living and loving out loud.