Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Grey has many more stories to tell.
Grey, 62, says she is fully embracing who she is these days. “That’s a new feeling,” she tells PEOPLE.
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“To take myself out of the corner — and to recognize that I have been putting myself there, through story, through narratives that weren’t giving me the best life. The story I was telling myself about how I got here was not a great story. And not entirely true. I hadn’t seen the ways in which I’d made choices.”
In Jennifer’s memoir, Out of the Corner, she talks about relationships, rhinoplasty and Hollywood.
“I spent so much energy trying to figure out what I did wrong, why I was banished from the kingdom. That’s a lie. I banished myself.”
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The actress, writer and mother says that she is the most comfortable in her own skin than ever before.
“I just wanna feel who I am now. But I think that when you ask other people who you are and you ask people to love you and you take their opinion as a definition of your worth, it’s a slippery slope, man.”
Jennifer went on to share more of the meatier subjects in her book, including rhinoplasty. After her second nose job, at a premiere, Michael Douglas reportedly turned around and didn’t recognize her.
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“That was the first time I had gone out in public. And it became the thing, the idea of being completely invisible, from one day to the next. In the world’s eyes, I was no longer me. and the weird thing was that thing that I resisted my whole life, and the thing I was so upset with my mother for always telling me I should do my nose. I really thought it was capitulating. I really thought it meant surrendering to the enemy camp. I just thought, ‘I’m good enough. I shouldn’t have to do this.’ That’s really what I felt. ‘I’m beautiful enough.’”
Elsewhere in the memoir, Grey spoke on her lack of chemistry with Patrick Swayze — which she believed helped fuel the movie.
“The same way Baby and Johnny were not supposed to be together … a natural match, right? And we weren’t a natural match. And the fact that we needed to be a natural match created a tension. Because normally when someone’s not a natural, you… both people move on, but we were forced to be together,” Grey shared.
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“And our being forced to be together created a kind of a synergy, or like a friction. I actually just had a thought about Patrick. I feel like if I could say anything to him now I would say, ‘I’m so sorry that I couldn’t just appreciate and luxuriate in who you were, instead of me wishing you were more like what I wanted you to be.’”
And when it comes to a possible sequel to Dirty Dancing, well, buckle up!
“It was lightning in a bottle, it’s like this thing happened, and it’s so beautiful, and I can’t explain it. No one can explain it. We’re working on this sequel, I’m working on it with Lionsgate and working on the script. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years. And I know in my heart, I would love to give fans or a young, new audience an experience that would never replicate that, but has the same kind of underpinnings,” the iconic actress shared.
“Today people think that their identity is limited, the world has told them what it is. But there are certain people who can see other parts of you. Dirty Dancing was a fairy tale, a successful movie and formula, using dance as a metaphor for embodying your energy and getting out of your head, and your limiting belief systems.”