From dad Donovan's rejection to a toxic relationship with Anthony Kiedis, Gen X it girl Ione Skye bares all

“I often fantasized that one day my dad would stumble across my face on a magazine cover and be overcome with regret for not getting to know such a wonderful girl,” writes Ione Skye. The 54-year-old actor and Gen X it girl pieces together her turbulent life in her memoir, “Say Everything.”

Her father, the famous folk musician Donovan, didn’t acknowledge her until she was 17. In 1987, not long after Skye starred in “River’s Edge,” her father’s lawyer sent an official letter to Skye’s mother requesting that Skye undertake a DNA test to establish whether or not she was Donovan’s biological daughter.

Was that why her father had always referred to her as “the girl,” she wondered?

Skye says, “There’s so much I relate to with my father: his avoidance and fear of intimacy, his selfishness. But, for sure, it’s very different the way my brother, husband and [my daughter] Kate’s fathers are so dutiful. … My father wasn’t alone in being that kind of [absent] father, as an artist of his generation.”

But Skye’s dad is the least interesting aspect of her life, as her book reveals. Skye’s mother and her mom’s curious, eccentric boyfriends as well as Skye’s older brother Donovan Jr. provide plenty of stories. Growing up in Hollywood with aspiring actors, musicians and starstruck fans also makes for endless drama.

“I’m pretty open as a person,” she says. “Whether that’s growing up in L.A., where people have a very open culture because everyone does therapy, or whether I’m just like this. … I’m not rattled. It wasn’t a divergence from how I am naturally. When I feel that I can trust people and share, I’m good at it. With this book, I want people to get to know me, in a way.”

As for the timing, Skye says, “I’m at an age where I trusted myself. I felt really supported by my husband and the publisher and editor. And while the book definitely gets vulnerable, people seem really interested in the ’90s and what it was like to be an actor, to know those people.”

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Skye recalls her early life and the sense of desperation for love that drove her into whirlwind romances with Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares, (a heartbreakingly heroin-addicted) Anthony Kiedis and Robert Downey Jr., among others. She married Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz in the 1990s. The pair divorced in 1999 after seven years and Skye’s affairs with women. She wed another musician, Ben Lee, about a decade later. Her marriage to the Australian singer is the epilogue, intentionally removed from the former life and lovers she documents.

“I’d thought that would be one of the hardest times of my life, when Adam and I broke up. But I kind of liked all of that freedom I had when I was in New York, and I had my own apartment. It was the first time I was doing what I should have been, what was age-appropriate in your mid-20s,” Skye says.

Until that point, Skye rues that she had lived like an adult since childhood, the inevitable consequence of entering Hollywood as an adolescent and lacking conventional parental guidance. Now a parent herself, Skye says she understands her father, even if her approach to raising children is vastly different.

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The book is a wild ride — from the fantastic, messy 1990s Hollywood parties of her youth to ashrams, backstage at rock shows and on movie sets like “Wayne's World,” “River's Edge,” “Say Anything” and “Gas Food Lodging.” She recalls a soft-spoken, beautiful young Reeves on the brink of stardom in “River’s Edge,” the assuredness of director Cameron Crowe on "Say Anything" and the intense friendship she developed with John Cusack on that film, though the pair never dated. At 15, Skye sought to be legally emancipated because other child actors had done the same as a means of averting the legal requirements of minors on set. She writes: “It was a dream, going from high school to this incredible universe where I got to play make-believe all day long.”

She also had to embrace an adult life while barely out of childhood. Skye’s first serious relationship threw her right into the quagmire of trying to love, care for and leave a heroin addict. “There was me before Anthony, and me after,” she writes of her relationship with Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Kiedis. “Sometimes I’d drive all night looking for him, trawling the usual spots over and over: the corner of Sixth and Union, the market where he bought bleach for his needles, the Eat’n High Thai restaurant on Fountain. … My world-inside-of-Anthony’s-world was shrinking by the day. Little by little, I was closing myself off to anyone who cared enough to question my choice in dating a junkie eight years my senior.”

It is a relationship Skye views differently as the mother of a 16-year-old daughter.

She has no regrets in recalling the heartbreaking teenage years she spent watching her boyfriend in the hooks of addiction, since Kiedis bared his own demons in his 2004 memoir.

“I don’t want to expose someone’s life, and legally you can’t anyway. He really laid it all out in [his book] ‘Scar Tissue,’” she says. “I thought people might be interested in my side of the story.”

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Skye concedes that writing a memoir is a challenge, but not so much emotionally as narratively — contouring the flow and storytelling with an editor’s sharp eye.

“I’ve loved writing since I was young so I have a good memory. It wasn’t as if I was uncovering any of these stories that I’d mentally locked away; I’ve thought about it. So writing this was good, and hard, to do. Some of those chapters were harder to go through during editing, while some were really delicious.”

It’s easy to draw a clear parallel between her father’s early rejection and her hunger for acknowledgment, desire and attention.

Still, she counters, “I didn’t want it to be all about chasing love and romance. I don’t want to use the word ‘love addict,’ but I saw that I was really looking for security and the minute someone was out of sight, it was ‘out of sight, out of mind!’ What calmed me down was having someone with me, even my girlfriends. I needed a sidekick at all times, which I saw very clearly in writing this book.”

She adds, “More clearly than ever, I saw that if I could do over one part of my life, it would be to meet the whole [Red Hot] Chili Peppers scene when I was 10 years older, or just to have been friends with them. I wished I’d had a lighter touch with that whole group. I love a lot of people in that group, but it definitely went too deep, and that’s partially why I got married so young. I thought I was so mature.”

Having purged stories both sad and seductive, Skye wraps her memoir with an homage to the husband and adult children she adores. And — with film roles and work as a painter — this memoir is far from a full stop to her creative life.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.