Sharon Stone is speaking out about her decision to reveal her past sex abuse. She told The New York Times that in her forthcoming memoir The Beauty of Living Twice she recalled horrific memories where she and her sister Kelly were sexually abused by their grandfather as kids.
Stone says they “made this decision together.” She adds: "We spoke to my mother and at first she was very stoic and wrote me a letter about how disconcerting all this information was. The whole pious, horrified, I-don't-really-want-to-talk-about-it-directly kind of thing. Then my sister got loaded when my mom was staying with her and really went for it with my mom. And my mom had a major breakthrough."
She adds: "When I finished the book, I read it to my mother over a three-day period. And I had the flu at the time. I was in bed and she got in bed with me as I finished the book, and then I recorded an hour and a half of her talking. And then I rewrote a lot of the book. That's when I dedicated the book to her."
WHAT’S NEXT:
Stone is ready to open up in part, because people so openly share their opinions about her. She says: “There's been pretty much an adult lifetime of people making up my life for me. I've had quite a bit of tummy trouble waiting for this book to come. Now I'm going to go out in the most menacing, disruptive, psychologically aggressive period that our world has been in since the '60s and be vulnerable and open. I understand that I'll be met with a certain amount of that. But I don't want to gird my loins. I don't want to be defensive. I want to prepare to be open and present. Because that's the purpose of my journey."
Stone believes her life, and the abuse she suffered, is universal: “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.”
Stone says she actually wrote the book after having a stroke in 2001: “I had that whole white-light experience on the operating table. And when you literally slab out on a table, you have to ask yourself a few questions. I wanted to review my life and ask myself, why did you push yourself without listening to yourself? What part of your listening device got so fractured or broken that you didn’t see where you were headed? The book is the big questions. I’m not the person who’s like, excuse me, pass me the envelope, let’s tear open a corner. I’m the person that likes to blow up the envelope. I’m like, [explosion noise] pffffffft. Push the plunger. Stand in the debris of it and see.”
Moving forward, she says she’s ready for darkness, if there’s a purpose: If I’m going to play something dark now, I need a reason other than just, it’s funny. I find the monkey-on-the-shoulder thing [an eccentricity favored by her character Lenore Osgood on the Netflix series “Ratched”] super funny. I told Ryan [Murphy, who developed the series], we could, when the performance is over, remove the monkey digitally, and the performance would still be so interesting.
The book drops March 30th.