-Our next guest is a talented actress you know from iconic
films like "Dirty Dancing" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
Her memoir, "Out of the Corner," is available now.
Please welcome to the show Jennifer Grey, everybody!
♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
I am far too intimidated to try to dance with you, Jennifer.
-You Know, baby. -Yes?
-It's all about just connection.
-Okay.
-And you just feel it, and then it just does you.
-Okay. -Because I didn't plan that.
-No, it just came to you.
-Just bubbled. Just bubbled out.
-So, dancing has always -- I mean, I imagine you have
a very loving relationship with dance.
-I have a very interesting relationship with dance.
I don't know, do any of you guys dance?
[ Cheers and applause ]
-It's the same people who never got COVID.
[ Laughter ] Crossover, yeah.
-Well, the thing is,
is if you love to dance, you have to dance.
-And if you're not a good dancer,
it doesn't [bleep] matter.
-Okay, interesting. [ Laughter ]
I want to ask about this. So, you write a memoir,
and obviously a lot of elements of your life.
You went back to old diaries.
Was this something -- Were you a diarist your whole life?
-It just sounds disgusting, "diarist."
-I know, I'm sorry. -Blah.
[ Laughter ]
-A journalist? That's worse, yeah.
-Okay, I don't know.
All I know is that I wrote from when I was 14 till I was 41.
And I wrote, you know, for myself.
I wrote just to dump out whatever I was feeling
because we didn't have cellphones.
We didn't have -- couldn't call anyone.
You couldn't even, like, pull up a movie.
It was just, like, you.
And so then I just felt like I needed to talk to someone.
-You're talking like you grew up in 1920.
[ Laughter ] -I'm telling you,
when I was in the horse and buggy,
clippity-clop, very hard to --
No, I mean, literally, we didn't have the option
to call someone to say, "I need to talk."
So I would just download how I was feeling,
and it was usually about a boy or feeling just so excited
about a crush or devastated about having things gone wrong.
You know, I wasn't writing about world peace or, you know,
curing cancer, but I was very consumed with my emotional life
and I felt very alone.
But then I had this listener that was just very patient.
And I just wrote, and I wrote from 14 to 41.
And it's weird because I never read them.
-Oh, wow. -Until I started the memoir.
I had them in this box and they just traveled with me
from whatever location, like New York, L.A.,
wherever I was living, this trunk.
And I pulled them up, and they just smelled musty,
as you can imagine, like, "ugh."
And then I'm seeing, and it's the same person from 14 to 41.
Like, I thought I would have matured.
[ Laughter ]
I thought I would have learned something.
But it's the same thing because it's like the essence,
like the really inner voice that is unedited,
and it's just the same.
And it's just, the only difference is it got
a little more dramatic and the, you know,
handwriting got really sloppy.
[ Laughter ] Like, towards the end.
-Yeah, that's the first thing to go, the handwriting.
-The first page is always like, "Oh, this is the new me.
I am going to be writing with this perfect calligraphy."
And at the end, you're just like, "Grrrr!"
[ Laughter ]
-So, "Out of the Corner" obviously references
a very famous line in a very famous movie.
Was there any sense that you were
taking the line back for yourself?
Because, you know, it's belonged to everybody else
ever since "Dirty Dancing" came out.
-Well, it was -- I noticed there was an irony about the fact that
if I died, it would be like,
"Okay, she's finally out of the corner."
Or, like, I don't know what they would say, but it would --
-What newspaper?
[ Laughter ]
"Jennifer Grey, out of corner in a coffin."
[ Laughter ]
-Yes, "she's out of the corner, good."
You know, there's just something -- I just, you know,
I've noticed that there's a little mean-spiritedness
in the world, and everyone's looking for just a flashy thing.
And I thought, "What if I'm known to be the girl
that nobody puts me in the corner?"
And as I was writing my stories, high points, low points,
kind of the things that made me who I am, really,
those things shape you, especially the hard things,
especially the really hard things.
They just do something. They change you.
And then I thought, "Wait a minute, there's a lot of stories
where I'm feeling put in a corner."
And then I thought, "That's so gross."
Like, "I don't want to be that girl."
And I thought, "Well, how did I get there?"
And then, once I took away all blame and all shame
and I just tried to be as honest as if I was a detective
or a scientist, you know, just laying out a forensics table,
just to get really cheerful... [ Laughter ]
...and what I noticed was that, yes, things happen to everybody.
Life is messy. It's complicated.
We mess up. Other people mess up.
We fall in love. We fall out of love.
But the truth is, I saw the ways in which I was colluding with,
like almost sleeping with the enemy.
The way I was agreeing with them.
They betrayed me. I betrayed myself.
I picked them. I stayed with them.
I did all of these things
because I couldn't do better at the time.
And then I went, "What if -- If I put myself there,
then I can take myself out."
And that is what this book did for me, is it helped me
look at all of my stories that I've been telling my whole life.
You know how we have the stories we're born with,
our families have told us?
They're just -- We accept that they're just facts.
And then I realized there's a lot of things that weren't true.
-That must've been incredibly cathartic to work through.
-It was just revelatory because
I realized that I can change my story, and so can we all.
And I just think everyone should do it just because
it's an opportunity to give yourself a better life.
-Well, that's a really nice thing
that you did for yourself, I think.
-I feel very happy about it.
I mean, I don't know, I just feel like they should teach it
in school -- how to tell your truth without blame or shame.
-I want to close with one final thing.
You had a friendship,
and I think this dates when the friendship is from,
because you have Polaroids of it.
-Correct, yeah. -But this is you and Madonna.
Now, did you reach out to Madonna before
you wrote the book and say, "Hey?"
-Well, I didn't reach out for permission or anything, no.
-Okay, gotcha. You just gave her a heads-up.
-That would be silly.
No, I reached out to her afterwards.
I said, "Hey, I wrote about you in my book,"
because we were really, really wild
and had incredible fun times.
And I remember, every time I would hear the song
"Express Yourself," I would remember her saying to me,
"Hey, get in my car. I just recorded a song. Come here."
And I said, "Why in your car?"
"'Cause my sound system is better. Get in my car."
And we sat in my driveway, and she played "Express Yourself,"
and she said, "It was inspired by what I want you to know,
what I think you should do."
-That's really lovely.
-By my breakup and by what she believed.
You know how we believe better lives for each other?
-Mm-hmm. -And I wrote to her
in the e-mail recently, I said,
"Did you just say that to everyone?"
[ Laughter ]
So, when she wrote me back, she didn't say anything,
so either she didn't read the whole e-mail...
[ Laughter ] She was just like, "Yeah."
-I think that's confirmation.
"it's only about you. It's only about you."
Hey, thank you so much for being here.
Congratulations on the book. Jennifer Grey, everybody!
"Out of the Corner" is available now.