Whether you consider her a champion or a curiosity, Anne Heche has a way of insinuating herself into the public consciousness. Her trip through tabloid notoriety was launched by her well-promoted affair with Ellen DeGeneres; the breakup of that relationship was carefully chronicled by reports of the couple's verbal sparring; and Heche's personal meltdown was marked by the story of her bizarre desert meanderings. Perhaps her ascension to the realm of the six-figure tell-all is a fitting end to a chapter of her life that seems light-years away from the woman she claims now to be. "I'm a clearer person now," she says. "My goal was always to get my life healthy, so I verged on these kind of very strange paths. But now I'd like to be a little more mainstream."

Married and eight months pregnant (she wed Canadian cameraman Coley Laffoon in September 2001), the accomplished actress will soon be seen in two upcoming films, John Q, with Denzel Washington (opening February 15), and Prozac Nation, with Christina Ricci (in theaters in May 2002).

But she is still dealing with the fallout of her controversial book, which chronicles a bizarre family history and a childhood of abuse. "People needed answers, I felt, to a public life that I had led that had a lot of gaps in it, so I wanted to tell the truth," Heche says about her motivation for writing Call Me Crazy (Scribner, 2001) -- she holed up for a year in a farmhouse in Italy to do it. "I needed to learn how to be a public person. And funnily enough, writing my book and exposing as much as did, in my mind earned my privacy. And now I feel like I can reclaim some of what I never knew how to claim. But I needed to learn that. My consciousness was that, well, I need to tell everything because if I'm hiding, I'm lying.