'Call Me Anne' is due out Jan. 24.
Fans are getting their first look at Anne Heche's posthumous memoir. Five months after the actress died following a fiery car crash, the first excerpt from her second memoir has been released.
In Call Me Anne, the follow-up to her 2001 book, Call Me Crazy, Heche writes about her romance with Ellen DeGeneres.
"In 1997, I began a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres and was on the set of my first starring role in a big-budget movie, Six Days, Seven Nights," Heche writes in an excerpt obtained by People. "I was called into my costar Harrison Ford's trailer one lunch break within the first week of shooting. I was met with the sight of director Ivan Reitman and Harrison sitting on one of two white pleather sofas."
"I hesitantly sat on the opposite white pleather sofa. They had seen the evening news. Rumors were reported that Ellen and I were pregnant. Our 'pregnancy' was everywhere," she continues. "They showed me this as proof of why this openness about my relationship was becoming a pain in the a** for them. Why, Ivan asked me, can't I just be like Jodie Foster? (I didn't know what that meant. 'Everybody knows it,' he explained, 'it' being her sexuality. 'She just doesn't talk about it.')"
Heche writes that she "found it odd that anyone thought I could get pregnant so quickly with a woman, but even odder, that they cared so much about the perception that I was going to ruin a movie that hadn't even been shot?"
"The most devastating thing of all, through it all, from the first week with Ellen to writing my first book, Call Me Crazy in 2001, was that no one bothered to ask me about any of it," she writes. "No matter how many articles were written about me, no one asked me why I had done what I did. What was the force that would have made a human being risk everything they'd been promised, their entire career? Why? Why would I have done that?"
The answer to that question, Heche writes, is that she "had lived in a family that was built upon lies."
"My father hid his sexuality his entire life. When I met Ellen and she was open and honest about her sexuality, it was the most attractive and alluring quality in a person that I had ever seen," Heche writes. "I was mesmerized by her honesty, and that is why she was the first and only woman that I ever fell in love with."
"I was in love with a person who had chosen to leverage her very public persona in support of the cause she was standing up for, which was LGBTQ+ rights for everybody on the planet who wanted them," she continues. "Love became my destiny."
Heche and DeGeneres dated from 1997 to 2000. Afterward, Heche was married to Coleman Laffoon from 2001 to 2009. The exes share a 20-year-old son, Homer. Heche then dated James Tupper for a decade and welcomed a son, 13-year-old Atlas, with the actor.
Earlier this month, Homer, who has been appointed administrator and personal representative of his late mom's estate, announced that Call Me Anne would be released.
"My mom had a completed manuscript for a second book at the time of her passing. The book is the product of Mom's further efforts to share her story and to help others where she could," he wrote in part. "Call Me Anne is the result and I know she was excited to share with the world. So, Mom, here I am sharing it with the community you created, may it flourish and take on a life of its own, as you would have wanted."
Call Me Anne is due out Jan. 24.
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