From April to September of 2021, she had daily coaching sessions by Zoom with Barbara Jones, an editor and publishing industry veteran who helped shape the memoir. “The first thing Jennifer did was give me a massive manuscript, something she called the whole enchilada,” Jones said in a phone interview. “She’s one of the most highly verbal people I’ve ever met. I’d say, ‘You need a word here that means this’ and she’d spit out 10 synonyms, rapid fire. Then she’d pick one.”

“Out of the Corner” isn’t all about regret, survival or reinvention. It’s a funny, dishy, occasionally heartbreaking coming-of-age story, including Grey’s memories of crashing her parents’ late-night snack ritual, ditching class at Dalton and belting out show tunes at Hal Prince’s holiday party with Stephen Sondheim on the Steinway. There are escapades with Madonna, Johnny Depp and Tracy Pollan (whose vintage jeans inspired the “Dirty Dancing” cutoffs) alongside glimpses into Grey’s wild child years (think cocaine, sex and Studio 54 — “Although no one cool ever called it that,” she writes. “It was either Studio or 54”).

There’s Grey’s joy at landing a coveted role in “The Cotton Club,” followed by Francis Ford Coppola’s unexpected announcement, delivered “as offhandedly as if he were telling the waiter to make sure the calamari were extra crispy,” that she would film her first scene naked. She writes, “If I couldn’t trust Francis to take care of me as an actress, whom could I trust?”

(When asked how she would respond to this treatment now, Grey said, “If it was my daughter, I’d kill every single one of them.”)

There are also revelations about Grey’s tumultuous offscreen romance with Matthew Broderick, whose sulky sister she played in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” She recalls him saying, on the eve of her “Dirty Dancing” audition, “‘There’s no way you’re gonna get it. They’re seeing everyone for this part.’” Shortly before the movie’s premiere, Broderick and Grey were in a car accident in Ireland that left two people dead. He was behind the wheel and suffered serious injuries. Thirty years later, she would require spinal surgery as a result of the head-on collision. But in the meantime, news of the accident — and questions about it — followed her in the wake of her biggest success. Howard Stern joked about it on air; Bryant Gumbel inquired about it during a “Today Show” segment that was supposed to be about “Dirty Dancing.”

“The idea that the most traumatic tragedy, the most impactful experience of my life, was sandwiched —” Grey held up her hands, palms facing her collarbone and brought them together with a firm thump — “They are inextricably linked. The pleasure of that moment, that surprise arrival, it never felt good. It never felt like what I’d hoped my whole life it would feel like.”

She added, “We were so young. And there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about it. That I don’t think about the families. That I don’t think about Matthew. It’s just in me. It’s part of my topographical map, the landscape of my life.”

Grey’s friend Jamie Lee Curtis helped design the cover of “Out of the Corner,” using what she described in a phone interview as “D.I.Y. photoshop phone app skills.” The image she chose was a casual one with a retro vibe: “It isn’t overly fancy. It wasn’t for a magazine. There’s a confidence, an establishment of self in flow. It feels like she is at the precipice of something.”

Grey hopes readers who feel victimized or stuck will be inspired by her story: “Like Flintstone vitamins: It feels like candy but you’re getting something.”

“I’m a person who has been associated with ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner.’ If I were to die, that’s what they would write on my tombstone,” she said. “I seemed to have felt in the past that I had been put in corners. But once I started writing, I realized there were so many things I did choose.”

Grey added, “The truth is, when I had all the good stuff, I was definitely not even close to how free I feel today.”