Out of the Corner

“What is truth? How does someone make sense of their life lived through a public lens? In Out of the Corner, Jennifer Grey peels back all the artifice, denial, obfuscation, and myriad assumptions and exposes a gorgeous, human portrait of her life, hard lived-in and fiercely fought for. Her chapter titles alone show the insights and whimsy that she brings to her memoir, along with the shattering public and private struggles and successes. It’s miles deep, sharply personal, bracingly honest—and if there’s anybody who deserves to step out of the corner into the light of her mind and indomitable spirit, it’s Jennifer Grey.”—Jamie Lee Curtis

“We all know Jennifer Grey as a talented actress, but Out of the Corner introduces us to a gifted writer. In reading her memoir, I understood the passion, love, and loss that has given shape to her life’s journey. Her narrative is nuanced, her words carefully chosen for maximum impact. She shares achingly human moments, like what it was like as a little girl to watch her father, the iconic Joel Grey, as he applied his greasepaint before taking the stage in Cabaret. Out of the Corner is a revelation, a work of emotional generosity and personal courage. It’s sneaky brilliant. Love it and love Jennifer. Baby got Book.”—Michael J. Fox

Auteur

Jennifer Grey

Texte du rabat

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply candid and refreshingly spirited memoir of identity lost and found from the star of the iconic film Dirty Dancing

“A funny, dishy, occasionally heartbreaking coming-of-age story.”—The New York Times

“Savage and engaging . . . Grey’s memoir is interesting not only for her journey out of darkness but also for what her story reveals about what women encounter in the entertainment business, and the fortitude required to make it.”—The Washington Post

In this beautiful, close-to-the bone account, Jennifer Grey takes readers on a vivid tour of the experiences that have shaped her, from her childhood as the daughter of Broadway and film legend Joel Grey, to the surprise hit with Patrick Swayze that made her America’s sweetheart, to her inspiring season eleven win on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars.

Throughout this intimate narrative, Grey richly evokes places and times that were defining for a generation—from her preteen days in 1970s Malibu and wild child nights in New York’s club scene, to her roles in quintessential movies of the 1980s, including The Cotton Club, Red Dawn, and her breakout performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. With self-deprecating humor and frankness, she looks back on her unbridled, romantic adventures in Hollywood. And with enormous bravery, she shares the devastating fallout from a plastic surgery procedure that caused the sudden and stunning loss of her professional identity and career. Grey inspires with her hard-won battle back, reclaiming her sense of self from a culture and business that can impose a narrow and unforgiving definition of female worth. She finds, at last, her own true north and starts a family of her own, just in the nick of time.

Distinctive, moving, and powerful, told with generosity and pluck, Out of the Corner is a memoir about a never-ending personal evolution, a coming-of-age story for women of every age.

Échantillon de lecture
**1

Life Is a Cabaret

When you’re born into a family you really have nothing to compare it to. There is no opinion, no preference, no judgment, no awareness of anything even existing outside of your reality. There is just the instantaneous and immutable devotion to these beings, your source for everything you need to survive, and an acute myopia rendering whatever is beyond this complete triangle, if indeed there exists anything at all, blurry and moot. Which is fine because, if you’re lucky, everything you need is right here. And it was for me.

I made an early entrance, a month before I was due, while my dad, the actor Joel Grey, was out of town, doing his nightclub act in the Catskills. My mother’s water broke while she was at a party in West Hollywood, and two of her actor pals drove her downtown to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where I was delivered via an emergency C-section.

When the doctor called my dad to tell him of my surprise arrival, it was six in the morning on the East Coast. The operator said, “I’ve got a person-to-person call for Mr. Joel Grey from Dr. Maury Lazarus,” and my dad, who picked up the phone in his sleep, promptly hung up. The doctor called back and yelled over the operator, “Tell him his daughter is born so he better accept the call!”

My dad had been acting professionally since he was a little kid, but in his late twenties, around the time I was a year old, he was hitting his stride, and his career was cookin’. He landed his first Broadway show, replacing the lead in the Neil Simon comedy Come Blow Your Horn. It was Simon’s first play, and a huge hit. So our family picked up and moved from the modest cottage in the Hollywood Hills where they’d set up house, to two floors of a brownstone on East 30th Street in New York City.

My mom, Jo Wilder, was a performer, too. Every baby’s their mother’s biggest fan, and I was no different, but my mom actually looked like a movie star. Visual timelines of my parents’ careers lined the walls of wherever we were living. Framed, black-and-white production stills of my mom as Peter Pan, with a pixie cut, flying in midair in green tights. As Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy, a femme fatale mid-striptease, her spaghetti straps suggestively hanging off her bare shoulders. As Polly Peachum, donning a man’s bowler in Threepenny Opera. With her cropped bangs, heavy brows, and winged eyeliner, she looked more than a little like Audrey Hepburn. Everything about her in these photographs exuded theatricality, her mouth impossibly wide, in full song. She looked like she was born to be on the stage.

I loved it when my mom would sing me the lullaby “Little Lamb” from Gypsy and tell me about how the real-life lamb would sometimes pee while she held it in her lap on stage, and she’d have to pretend it hadn’t. She sang around the house all the time.

She wasn’t a kid when she had me. She was closer to thirty than twenty, and had been at it, knocking around the business for some time, ready for her ship to come in when she met my dad. He was very keen to get married and start their family right away. She didn’t know what the hurry was, but got swept up in his vision for them.

My parents had lost a baby before me, and my mother had struggled to carry me to term. So when I was four and a half, my parents decided to adopt a baby boy. The three of us flew out to Los Angeles, and we left a few days later a family of four, bringing back with us to New York my newborn brother, James Rico. (Not the most Jewish of middle names, but my parents were fans of the painter Rico Lebrun.) Jimmy was one of those gorgeous babies right out of the gate. Blond, big blue eyes, white-white skin, and in addition to our genetic differences, my brother felt energetically almost like a different species from the three of us, but a breathtakingly beautiful one. He looked like an angel.

My parents referred to our gang as the four J’s: Jo, Joel, Jenny, and Jimmy. Being a close family was of paramount importance to them. There was a lot of love there.

My dad and I were tight. When I was little, I would wear his old crew neck undershirts, worn so thin and ridiculously soft the cotton was almost diaphanous. I remember the perfect stack of his white tees, folded with origami-like precision in his antique a…