Finding Me: A Memoir
★★★★★
Author
Viola Davis
Publisher
HarperOne
Date
April 26, 2022
Genre
Memoir
Length
304 pages (print)
9 hrs 15 mins (audio)
Trigger Warnings
Domestic Abuse, Child Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Poverty, Racism, Violence, Substance Abuse, Bigotry
#Vibes
“Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise.”
”My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You don’t have to live in the past.”
Scene
A precocious third-grade girl waits for the school bell to ring, maneuvering herself as close to the door as possible. She has to be the first one out the door, and it’s good she’s fast. What follows is an elementary male pitchfork mob hurling insults and slurs about how black and ugly she is. Her haven? A rat-infested, overcrowded apartment and an abusive father.
An actress and graduate of the acclaimed art school Juilliard is overlooked and typecast into disparaging roles — even by black directors and casting agents — because she is too black. Her features are, again, deemed “ugly.” She is not a black woman with generic white woman features.
For Your Consideration
Exquisite. Since Viola Davis first landed on my radar, I have described her as “exquisite.” Far from ugly. My first memory of her is that of a criminal’s wife (that typecasting) in the film Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. It was 1998 — 16 years before the television show How to Get Away With Murder catapulted her into the mainstream after more than 20 years of her career as a working actress on both stage and screen.
This memoir is rooted in Viola’s childhood trauma and adult experiences of not feeling good enough or pretty enough because of her color and her features — and it rocked me — while simultaneously being both unsurprising and wholly educational about the black experience in America (and particularly in Hollywood). But I wasn’t raised in America. Though American, I was raised in East Africa — a translucent white, blonde-haired, green-eyed anomaly surrounded by black women of varying people groups. They were gorgeous to me, and I was envious of their rich ebony skin tones and non-stringy hair. I still see black women as exquisite. Perceptions are genuinely born of time and place.
Like a phoenix, Viola arose from adversity and then burned away to ash, only to rise again. She has done this with more grace and forgiveness than those around her may have deserved. “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given,” she writes. Her capacity to acknowledge the past for what it was and choose to live in the present is inspiring.
In the genre of celebrity memoirs, I have noticed a trend of unnecessary repetition to the point of using exact phrases or sentences a mere few chapters apart from one another. Finding Me also has this struggle. It’s the only thing that weakened the reading experience for me, but the contents are so powerful I don’t care. Like Viola, Finding Me is exquisite.
“I now understand that life, and living it, is more about being present. I’m now aware that the not-so-happy memories lie in wait, but the hope and the joy also lie in wait.”
Preview photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash