Sex, drugs and a Yiddish children’s book

Long before the term nepo baby became an expression of dynastic privilege (think Dakota Johnson, Kaia Gerber, Sofia Coppola), Ione Skye was one. The child of sixties hippie balladeer Donovan and model Enid Karl moved in a charmed circle of boho creatives, beautiful people and free spirits, together with her older brother Dono.

The name dropping in her memoir Say Everything is in a league of its own: it might be quicker to say who she did not know, either socially or in the biblical sense. She grew up in an ever-expanding circle of love children, drifting in and out of the orbits of their much-remarried famous fathers - her bestie Karis Hunt, daughter of Marsha Hunt and Mick Jagger, being a prime example, but there are countless others, blessed and burdened with surnames or parentage that guarantee access all areas to the countless clubs where Skye did most of her growing up. (Unlike some nepo babies, however, she was not surrounded by wealth, her mother took odd jobs to support herself as a single mother — including drug dealing.)

Celebrity gives this book its undeniable allure of glamour, but to read it as just a kiss-and -tell confessional would be to miss the point: Ione Skye forged a successful career as an ingenue actress alongside her chums River Phoenix and Robert Downey Junior, appearing in indie films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, Say Anything and many more forgettable films.

Unfairly, one talent is not enough: Despite years of drug and alcohol-fuelled oblivion, Skye really can write. The scenes she paints are as vivid as a series of good movie trailers, full of vulnerability and desire, and including dialogue and period detail like what she wore. She also has a sense of humour (her account of a doomed weekend between her brother and Gwyneth Paltrow is mischievously funny).

Celebrity raves have flowed from Lena Dunham , Miranda July, Bret Easton Ellis, Cameron Crowe, Molly Ringwald and the book has made the New York Times bestseller list.