As celebrity memoirs go, Sharon Stone's is a bit of a misfit. But so too was the 63-year-old star herself, she writes, as a child in rural Pennsylvania, and then as an actor in Hollywood, where she resisted the status quo — sometimes to her detriment of her career, but always being true to herself.

The Beauty of Living Twice gets its title from a harrowing health crisis Stone suffered in 2001, when she was hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage. The doctors struggled to identify the problem, but she survived, she writes, because her grandmother Lela — who had been dead for 30 years — appeared to her in a dream and directed her not to move her neck. She did as she was told. And she was saved despite a 1 percent chance of survival.