Now in her mid-50s, Ione Skye has enough slashie accreditations, including actress, writer, painter and model, to make her a Gen X icon.
You would think that someone who has been in over 40 feature films and around the same number of TV shows, hangs with the kids of famous people, has written children’s books and includes world famous musicians in her major relationships would have it all, but her memoir Say Everything tells a different story.
Born in the UK, Skye’s mother was a glamorous model from the Bronx, while her father was the famous 60s folkie, Donovan Leitch.
She had all the credentials of a nepo baby, except that Leitch was a deadbeat dad, having ditched her mother Enid before Skye was born and did not contribute to her upbringing.
Raised in San Francisco and later Los Angeles, Skye saw her mother having to resort to selling weed to make ends meet, while maintaining her relationships with the famous, which meant Skye grew up with the children of Mick Jagger and Frank Zappa, and citing Moon Zappa as her closest friend at the time.
Later, as she began taking film roles, she would include River Phoenix, John Cusack, Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr into her circle.
A troubled drug using singer from rising band Red Hot Chilli Peppers named Anthony Kiedis became her first major relationship, when he was 24 and she was just 16.
Besides the drugs, Kiedis also had anger issues and an insatiable appetite for groupies; Skye details her feelings of alienation and helplessness in great detail as she tried to find stability with a male in a relationship.
After the Kiedis crash, she fell into the arms of Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, to whom she was married between 1992 and 1999.
With Horovitz increasingly absent on tour or recording, the dream imploded as a lonely and dejected Skye found solace in a string of relationships and one night stands with girls, only to fall into another dysfunctional relationship with a male furniture designer with whom she had a daughter.
Three years later and she was out of there, and in Say Everything she talks about her struggles with addiction, including relationships, alcoholism and drugs.
In 2006 Skye’s life took another change, this time for the better, as she met Sydney-born musician Ben Lee and they married in an Indian ceremony in 2008.
Five years ago, Skye, Lee and their daughter Goldie travelled to Ireland to stay with Donovan and his partner Linda, for whom he had left Skye’s mother Enid. At last Skye’s search for intimacy seemed complete.
A high-school dropout, Skye has approached this book with a clarity of thought across a life that has had as many ups as downs. She is disarmingly forthright in her dissection of her shortcomings and blames nobody except herself, while she wholeheartedly embraces her well-earned life with Lee and her two daughters.
Read: Theatre review: In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), New Theatre, Newtown
Meanwhile the film roles and painting exhibitions continue to roll in.
Say Everything rises above the usual Gen X biographies and presents us with a self-aware and contemplative view of a turbulent life and the times in which it has been lived.
Say Everything, Ione Skye
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780008766498
Pages: 304pp
RRP: $34.99
Publication date: 2 April 2025
