The two things that everyone knows about Jennifer Grey is that she was in Dirty Dancing and she had a nose job.

What you'll learn from this book, though, is that she's a great writer who's had a fascinating life. She's also knowledgable and resourceful enough to know that she needs to get the two things everyone knows about her out of the way right up front.

So the title references the famous line from Dirty Dancing, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner," which both she and Patrick Swayze, who delivers it, thought was ridiculous and apparently pleaded with the filmmakers to change.

And the first chapter starts late in the chronology, walking us through why she had work on her nose done and what the disastrous results of it were.

But her life story is a lot richer and more interesting than that. The daughter of Joel Grey, she used to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself into the Master of Ceremonies for Cabaret.

The granddaughter of great Borscht Belt musician and comedian Mickey Katz, she's a third generation performing arts star.

She's also a teenager struggling with bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, with hippie mellowdom on the beach and high intensity demanding schedules back on the East Coast.

There's a horrible account of sexual assault that the people she loves and trusts most simply dismiss. And her initiation into relationships has numerous dubious characters as participants. Older, abusive philanderers, starving artist-types who are good for hot sex on a lunch break, an engagement to Johnny Depp and a very serious love affair with Matthew Broderick, whom she met when they played siblings in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Her first movie job was in Coppola's The Cotton Club, dropped into the thick of it, as it were, with legendary, intense and high-powered actors and an equally intimidating director. The movie isn't really under anyone's control so a lot of her scenes don't make the final cut.

She meets Patrick Swayze when they're both cast in Red Dawn but they didn't get along. When Dirty Dancing comes around, she wants her co-star to be anyone but him. But he pleads with her to let him make up for their previous past experience and part of what makes that movie work is this tension between them, their differences mapping onto their characters' differences. Their different skills and training in dance are also mirrored by their fictional counterparts.

An adolescent in dangerous sex and drug situations, a child of Broadway and Hollywood royalty who pursues acting as a vocation, the star of a huge international hit movie that literally nobody expected would do more than shift a few videotape rentals...

Once Grey gets married and has a daughter, the change in her reality is palpable to the reader. It's too bad that she doesn't have anything to say about the episode of House she was in, because she plays a new mother willing to sacrifice herself completely for her baby, and that's the person Grey describes herself as in real life.

I never thought I would care about Dancing With the Stars but her account of working on that show was gripping. The whole books is beautifully written, with wonderful phrases and pithy observations on every page.

The first line is "Whenever I found myself stuck in one of life's big dips, I could count on my ever-loving mother's familiar refrain, 'In case of emergency, break nose'".