Anne Heche wrote in an upcoming memoir that she did not consider herself a lesbian while she was dating comedian Ellen DeGeneres in the late 1990s. The actor—who died at the age of 53 last month after being fatally injured in a car crash—was working on a book over the past year that is set to be published in January. “I was labeled outrageous because I fell in love with a woman,” Heche writes of her relationship with DeGeneres in the memoir, titled Call Me Anne. “I had never been with a woman before I dated Ellen.” The couple were together from 1997 to 2000 and were among the first openly gay relationships in Hollywood—something for which Heche said she was essentially blacklisted. “I did not, personally, identify as a lesbian,” Heche writes in the book. “I simply fell in love! It was, to be clear, as odd to me as anyone else. There were no words to describe how I felt.”