Being Sharon
Hollywood star Sharon Stone gets into the highs and lows of her celebrated career in her new tell-all memoir ‘The Beauty of Living Things’
During an extended hospitalisation in 2001, when Sharon Stone was being treated for a stroke and a subarachnoid hemorrhage that had bled into her brain, head and spine, she writes that she was visited by her grandmother Lela, who had been dead for 30 years. “This is where it gets weird,” Stone writes in a new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. Lela came to convey a warning: “Whatever you do, don’t move your neck.”
It is one of several scenes from her life that Stone, the 63-year-old star of films like Basic Instinct, Casino and The Quick and the Dead, relates with candor and sardonic humor. Despite her long career in Hollywood playing femme fatales and women of mystery — even in recent television series like Mosaic and Ratched — her memoir is a more episodic account of her life and upbringing, particularly her youth in modest Meadville, Pennsylvania, and the indelible but troubled family that raised her there.
As she explained in a video interview in February, “I believe that the point of my book is that it narrates a rather regular life. I don’t think that my life is exceptional, except that I ended up being a movie star. This book could be written by a lot of other people that grew up in a small town.”
It is a story that Stone often tells in unflinching detail, beginning with the near-death experience that helped inspire her to write the book. “After all this standing on my neck, I could breathe again,” she said. “I could speak again. And I was going to breathe and speak differently.”
She spoke further about the creation of The Beauty of Living Twice, the personal experiences that it chronicles and how it encouraged her to reassess herself. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Why did you decide to write this memoir?
I had gone around trying to get my short stories published and everyone told me, nobody wants to read short stories. I think what they really meant was, we really just want to get up in your private life. I didn’t want to do that at the time. Then my friend Kael (the author J. Kael Weston), who wrote The Mirror Test, recommended that his editor Tim O’Connell, at Knopf, take a look. In the meantime, I’d written a letter to Janklow & Nesbit about getting an agent. So Knopf and another book company started offering me deals. I thought I would learn more from Sonny Mehta (the revered Knopf