Shedding her guilt and discomfort

Gabourey Sidibe’s memoir weighs in on her life and body issues, writes

ON the night that director Lee Daniels offered Gabourey Sidibe the lead in the role that would earn her an Oscar nomination, Daniels asked if she had a boyfriend. Sidibe, then a 24-year-old psychology major whose training as an actor had been confined to roles in college productions of

and answered tartly. “No,” Sidibe told him, “but now that I’m going to be a movie star, I’m going to get pregnant by a basketball player and lock down that child support.”

Daniels cracked up, and the deal was sealed.

“Sarcasm is my birth defect,” Sidibe, now 33, said recently. “I was born cynical.”

Like many smart young women whose precociousness put them at odds with their peers — by fourth grade, Sidibe was an entrenched outlier — sarcasm has been both weapon and armour.

She deployed it to fine effect in her upside-down household in the BedfordStuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where she and her older brother were raised by their warm, Southern mother and stern African father, whose family traditions extended to polygamy and who called his firstborn daughter “fatso”.

Her sarcasm is on rueful display in her new memoir,

in which she writes of trying to please a father for whom she is too American, too vivid and altogether too much.

Her parents married when her father, who trained as an architect and worked as a taxi driver, offered to pay her mother to marry him so that he could apply for a green card.

A year later, she fell in love with her paper husband.

“That’s right!” Sidibe writes. “My mother is so classy that you have to marry her and then wait a year before she gives you any play.”

She writes of her panic when they divorced, and her mother gave up her teaching career to become a subway singer, at the same time that the family of three moved into a single room of her aunt’s Harlem townhouse. (They would later move to a studio apartment nearby, where all three shared a bunk bed.)

Sidibe’s aunt is Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a founder of a famous portrait from 1971, of Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem raising their fists in a Black Power salute, hung in her sitting room, where Sidibe passed it every day on her way to school, and Steinem was a regular guest.

While Sidibe averred that she is “a link on a chain of powerful women”, her own steely self-confidence, she said, wasn’t nurtured by her activist relatives so much as a survival skill she taught herself in the bruising theatre of elementary school.

“Children are horrible,” she said. “I was horrible.”

Sidibe and I were holed up in a basement reading room at the Museum of Contemporary Art after touring the Kerry James Marshall exhibit upstairs.

She wore a ruffled, daffodil-yellow dress and, for our interview, a pair of glasses. She had suggested the museum as a meeting place. Marshall’s exuberant paintings of black American life come with a manifesto she feels more strongly than ever, given the political climate.

“I’m really starting to regret voting for Trump,” she said, poker-faced, and then snorted with laughter.

Later she said, “Even though I’ve been black and proud my whole life, now I want to be draped in my culture; I want to be draped in my blackness.”

Sidibe had just started Mercy College in Manhattan, her second college stint, when a friend told her about a casting call for

She showed up almost as an afterthought, although five years earlier she had read the novel by Sapphire, from which the movie was adapted, when a casting agent had wanted to cast Sidibe’s mother as the monstrous onscreen mother who would eventually be played by Mo’Nique. INSTANT FAME

To Daniels, the harrowing role of Precious, an obese and illiterate teenager who had been sexually abused by her father and was drawn partly from the author’s reallife experience, had seemed out of reach for most Hollywood actresses.

So he created a Precious boot camp, casting young women with no training, many of whom were the victims of abuse and the foster care system. But none worked out, he said: “and the search was mad on, and the clock was ticking.

Sidibe’s audition “was exquisite”, Daniels said. “Gabby tapped her life experience in a way that was beautiful and wasn’t tragic,” he continued.

“She came in as an actor, though she was unaware of her instrument and her ability.”

Money was tight after the film wrapped; she was paid scale, about US$2,500 (RM10,700) a week but it took a month for her to receive her first cheque.

After made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Sidibe experienced fame without fortune, riding subways and buses to red carpet events. Life at home was still precarious.

On the morning of one event, her landlord tried to evict the family for what turned out to be a clerical error.

Her income that year was about US$50,000, almost double what her mother made, earning Sidibe head of household status on the family tax returns, a position that made her anxious.

Even after her Oscar nomination, and years of steady roles on shows like

and and films like money and family would continue to bedevil her.

She took to paying her parents’ rents before paying her own, in a stew of guilt and pride, and constantly fielding entreaties from more distant relatives.

Wouldn’t it be nice, Sidibe writes, “if money bought love? But it doesn’t. It buys resentment.”

As museum-goers wandered in and out of the reading room, bemused by the sight of Sidibe and I hunkered down on a sofa there, she said: “Honestly, women in