FINDING ME.

“Memories are immortal. They are deathless & precise. They have the power of giving you joy & perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that's based on other peoples tucked up perceptions than truth.”

_________________________________________________

This is not a call for affirmative action, but rather to demonstrate the power of seeing someone we identify with achieving extraordinary things. Viola Davis’ life is proof that even the most disadvantaged children can succeed. Viola has received numerous accolades and is one of the few performers to achieve the prestigious EGOT status, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. She is the only African-American to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting and the third person overall. She has won awards not only in cinema but also in theater and television. In 2012 and 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2020, The New York Times ranked her ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century.

Viola's story is harrowing, deeply traumatic, and sometimes hard to read/listen to because of the abject poverty, violence, abuse, and racism she describes in the parts about her early childhood. Her story is also inspiring, uplifting, remarkable, and educational. Her courage and determination are the threads that run through her entire story.

However, her journey was difficult. In her poignant memoir, “Finding Me,” written in 2022, which I finished reading this evening, she lays her entire story bare. It is a story of poverty, with her and her sisters rummaging through garbage dumps to find something to eat. It is a story of abuse, with her father, often intoxicated, violently beating her mother. It’s a story of discrimination. Wait, is it racism when people of your race think you are not good enough for some roles? She felt doubt when those she felt understood the struggle gossiped that she was not female enough, sexy enough, beautiful enough, black enough to take on certain roles in Hollywood.

Not a self-congratulatory showbiz rags-to-riches tale, a sparkly redemptive arc where success heals old wounds. Instead, it’s a book committed to showing how deeply poverty, racism, sexism, and violence can seep into a person’s bones, a challenge to the conventional feel-good narrative of triumphant escape. You can almost feel the cortisol and adrenaline flooding these pages ... For all its pain, there is joy in Finding Me - the adoption of her daughter, Genesis, marriage to the actor Julius Tennon- and Davis writes about her parents with clear-eyed compassion ... her desire to write more than a standard showbiz memoir is possibly clearest in the sheer physicality of this book. Not many Hollywood stars talk about bunions, but Davis is there, encouraging the reader to walk in her shoes. If there’s an occasional tinge of Hollywood therapy-speak to Finding Me, it’s an understandable part of Davis’s mission to show the whole woman, to reveal what being 'exceptional' really takes- and who it leaves behind.

You will not regret reading this amazing story of struggle, survival, and achievement beyond what most of us can ever imagine.