Jay Ellis Has Stories To Tell

“I wrote what I thought was five chapters,” says actor Jay Ellis, star of Insecure and Running Point, on the tentative first draft of his memoir, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?: Adventures in Boyhood, first published in July 2024 and now available in paperback. “Now, after writing a book, I know it was at best half a chapter,” he adds, laughing.

Those early pages emerged after Ellis opened up on Instagram during the pandemic about his imaginary friend, Mikey, who had kept him company during an itinerant upbringing as the sole child of a military father and financial executive mother. The post blew up. “People started commenting about their imaginary friend,” says Ellis, 43. “I just couldn’t let it go.” He sent his notes to a friend, who sent it to an agent and helped him with a proposal, which was in turn acquired by power editor Chris Jackson’s One World imprint.

The result is an energetic account of Ellis’ adolescence that is at once both intimately specific and hearteningly relatable. There are new schools, new haircuts, and new accents, though Mikey remains a constant, only drifting away as Ellis moves into his teenage years. “I got to wear a lot of different masks because of Mikey,” he says. “Every time I moved, I got to be a different person. If I didn’t like who I was at the previous school, it was out with the old and in with the new.”

His life is now far less pliable. A married father of two children, Ellis now finds himself, coincidentally, in the position of parenting a daughter with her own imaginary friend. “There have been some incidents,” he says, smiling. “There’s been painting the floor as opposed to painting paper. I’m not sure why Jack would want to do that, but he did that and a few other things along the way. But then as our son came, Jack slowly started to disappear. Now she’s got someone to play with and love and squeeze to death.”

Have you always been a big reader?

It did not start out by choice. In the summers, my mother would make me do a book report. She chose the book and then I had to write a three-page paper, and when I would cross out too many times, I had to rewrite the whole thing clean.

Whoa. What kind of books did she choose?

A lot of biographies. I remember reading about George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I guess what she was trying to teach me is: If you can learn from these people’s failures and successes and understand how they help shape the world, maybe you can take some of that into your own life.

For One Nightstand, you chose All About Love by bell hooks as one of your favorite books. In that, she talks about men using masking as a tool to process their feelings. Has that shaped how you think about Mikey?

We all wear masks at some point in our life, whether it’s with your partner, at work, or with your parents. I went to one school in Austin, Texas, where about 85% of the student body spoke Spanish as a first language. They would group all the English-first kids together, and you sat in one classroom the entire day. The teachers would come around to you while all the kids who spoke Spanish as a first language would move around the school normally.

My middle name is Ramone, so I decided that I was going to be Ramone the Latin lover at school. So for a whole summer, I watched Univision, listened to Spanish radio, got a book from the library to try to learn Spanish. It was a disaster. It failed on my first bus ride. I didn’t even get to school before the kids were like, “Yo, you don’t speak Spanish, bro. Stop it now.” Ramone died that day. But it was a mask. I think we have them as adults and don’t realize, but at a certain point, they hopefully get chipped away or you decide to remove them.

I felt so angry when I was reading one chapter in your memoir where you talk about playing basketball and marking a player who was huge and very skilled.

Oh, the Yakima Terror is what I called that kid. He was from Yakima, Washington. It was an AAU tournament in Denver, Colorado, and this kid had to be like 6-foot-8, 6-foot-9, 250, 60, 70 pounds. He was a man. I could not guard this guy at all. And we were down a player already because one guy on our team had been hurt.

I’m the next tallest player on the team. I probably weighed easily 80 pounds less than him, and our coach just kept screaming for me to get in front of him, get in front of him, and I’m like, This dude is manhandling me. I can’t. And I did tell [the coach] to f*ck off — shoutout to Coach Sprague, who I apologize to now all these years later — but he benched me and was like, “You should transfer schools. You’ll never play for me again.” On one side, I respect the fact that he just told me straight out. On the other side, I was a kid. I was going into ninth grade.

Yeah, I thought it was cruel. But I was in awe of how much detail you had in the book, especially about Mikey. How did you remember it?

I grew up with a bunch of cousins, couple aunts, couple uncles, and then both my maternal and paternal grandparents, so I was able to call on everyone. I wrote at home and had my middle school yearbooks with me, and then I had pictures. I would tack them up on the board that’s around my desk, and as I would finish a story, I would move those to the side, and then I would tack up new pictures. The more I remembered Mikey, the more things came back to me about what he looked like and how he spoke and how he moved, and his sense of humor and his jokes. And really, at the end of the day, it was my own subconscious. So, it’s sitting in there somewhere.

I’ve had conversations with family where I’ll be like, “Do you remember that?” And they’re like, “That’s not how it happened.” Did you have instances like that?

Oh my God. So many. I remember calling my cousin and was like, “Do you remember the time where you guys locked me in a bedroom and made fun of me because I had an imaginary friend?” She’s like, “That’s not what happened.” And then she actually explained the story to me that all the cousins knew I had an imaginary friend, but one of my great-aunts would foster kids, and one of the foster kids, Damon, also had an imaginary friend, and they locked me in the room with him because they wanted me to see what he was seeing. I was like, “I can’t see his imaginary friend. That’s not how it works.”

You have an incredible chapter in your book where you talk about your school taking a bunch of students to a penal institution. Can you tell me about that experience?

I had gotten in trouble earlier that year — I had gotten detained by the police for toilet papering someone’s house in the middle of the night. We had curfew in the city for kids under 16. And so in lieu of juvenile hall, I had to do a bunch of… we call it volunteer work, but it was not volunteer. They were court-mandated sessions cleaning up debris on the side of the highway and in parks. And my school found out about it.

The security guard at the time had been planning with our principal a trip to one of the state penitentiaries in Oklahoma. It was 10 to 15 of I guess what you would call “at risk” kids — kids who were in trouble or deemed in trouble by the school. It was Scared Straight, if you’re familiar with MTV’s horrible, horrible idea of scaring young kids to be good. That’s essentially what they did to us.

We met all these guys who were in prison for completely different reasons. Not only that, they stripped us down, they put us in their things, they put us in the cuffs, they walked us through as if we were inmates, with catcalling and yelling and all this stuff. And you’re terrified. They take you in a cell and they show you, “This is what it’s going to be like when you live here with me, and I’m not the bitch, so you’re going to be up there and I’m going to be down here.”

This one young man, his name was Dino. He was a Blood, and he was doing a life sentence for murder. And he was the one who was brought into our little conference room to do the whole talk about staying out of trouble. And he kind of gets in our faces like, “Why are you here? What you doing here?” And then you tell him, and he’s like, “You want to f*cking be here with me? Is that what you want?” And you’re like, “I want to go home.”

And again, was it the right way to learn that lesson? Probably not. But did it work? Absolutely — for the kids who were never meant to have that path. There were some kids who were on a journey, and unfortunately that was not going to sway the journey in either way. It was a bad attempt at trying to get at some kids who were just curious. Yes, maybe they talked a little bit more in class or they joked a little bit more or whatever, but at the end of the day, they were just kids.

How old were you?

That was eighth grade. So I must’ve been 13, I think.

So young. But now you do work with an organization called Inside Out.

Yes, we teach creative writing inside of juvenile halls throughout Los Angeles County. The whole program is just about how writing can be healing and therapeutic. If you can’t verbalize with someone, maybe you can put it here to deal with some of those things that are happening in your life.

We’ve done a podcast with the kids where they’ve all written on a topic, and then I basically call a bunch of friends and I’m like, “Hey, will you read this?” Then we do an interview with the kids where we play back John Legend reading your words or Issa Rae reading your words — all these amazing folks who they see on TV every single day. Suddenly you watch their bodies change. They sit up a little bit taller. You see this excitement they have.

That’s incredible. How long have you been doing that?

Oh man, eight, nine years now.

Wow. So before you started writing yourself?

Yeah. A while.

Did you write before you wrote the book then?

I journal jobs while I’m working. In my day-to-day life, I don’t journal. I think I’m always kind of reflecting on whatever I’m going through in that moment. But for some reason I only do it when I work.

That’s interesting.

Growing up as a kid and moving around a bunch, it’s very easy for me to be like, “Later — never going to see you again.” So some of it might be closure. This is probably some way for me to both remember but also have closure when a show or movie ends, because you create these families and friendships that you hope will last forever. And then you do another one and you’re like, “I’m going to live with this forever.” It is a way of trying to both be grateful and remember.

Would you ever adapt the memoir into a show? I’d watch it.

I'm going to do a one-man show next year based on the book. I think the fall of 2026 at the Apollo. So that’ll be fun. And then maybe a show.

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