Cicely Tyson’s ‘Just as I Am’ is a gift
Michelle Burford channels the voices of prominent people into memoirs
“The art of acting is the art of exposing, an emotional unveiling before others,” writes Viola Davis, in her heartfelt introduction to Cicely Tyson’s memoir, “Just as I Am.”
It’s hard to think of a better description of this book; reading it feels as if you’re sitting in Tyson’s regal presence, hearing her tell stories about her life as a Black woman in America; an Emmyand Tony Award-winning actor; a daughter, a mother, a wife. By its end, and long before that, you’re in awe — someone truly remarkable has unveiled herself to you.
Just two days after this book’s publication, Tyson died at 96; with an actor’s impeccable timing, her work seemed finally done. But what a gift this book leaves behind. Written with Michelle Burford (named on its cover and credited as “collaborative writer”), “Just as I Am” was a long time coming. Most memoirists don’t wait until their 90s, but Tyson knew the power of a long pause before a curtain goes up. “Here in my ninth decade,” she writes, “I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.”
Her true age may be a surprise for many readers: At the beginning of her acting career, in her early 30s, an agent urged Tyson to shave a decade off her official age. Only upon receiving a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015 did she widely and proudly reveal her real age: she was 90 at the time, not 80. “For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of,” she writes in the book. “It was a journey to delight in.”
That journey began in the South Bronx and East Manhattan, where Tyson was the second of three children born to William and Fredericka Tyson, young immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. The family was poor — “a reality I see most clearly in hindsight,” Tyson writes, remembering beautiful clothes and delicious meals made by her mother, though she gradually came to realize the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage.
Though her portrait of her parents isn’t prettified — her father was a philanderer, her mother had a violent temper — it’s always loving, filtered through understanding brought by years. She reminds her reader that her parents are part of a centuries-long story: the mistreatment of Black bodies and spirits in America, scars still borne from the era of enslavement. “This is the painful history my parents were born into,” she writes. “And it is only against this backdrop that their many choices and faces can be understood.”
Growing up a skinny, quiet girl, Tyson’s talents weren’t immediately visible — though a chance to sing at church, at 7, was an early indication of a love of performance. “All I knew was that when I was up there on that chair, my Mary Janes dangling, my voice rising up from someplace deep within me, I felt a rush. The Spirit, twisting and failing and arching its back, had shuddered through me. And as it did, my shyness vanished.”
But she didn’t become an actor until much later; a teenage pregnancy, an early marriage and clerical work took precedence for many years. And then, things happened just like in the movies: One day, at a department store, a well-dressed stranger suggested she try modeling school. Though nearly 30 and only 5 feet 4, Tyson quickly became successful at her new career and was soon offered a movie role through her agent. At the time, she’d seen exactly one movie in her life: “King Kong,” which “scared the spit out of me. ... No way was I going to get involved with the film business,” she remembered thinking. Luckily for all of us, she was quite mistaken.
“Just as I Am” takes us through
Tyson’s acting training (and a horrifying assault from a prominent acting teacher) and a long career divided between stage and screen, always determined to avoid stereotypes and portray Black women with dignity and grace. We learn about her art — “Acting, like every art form, is meant to transport its beholders, and the artist is frequently the first to make the journey” — and join her on sets: “Sounder,” for which she received an Oscar nomination; “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” with the Emmy-winning performance that on some days required six hours of makeup; the phenomenon that was “Roots,” and many more. I might have wished for more about “How to Get Away With Murder,” on which an electric Tyson played Davis’ mother in occasional appearances for six seasons, but that role gets short shrift; perhaps Tyson sensed by that point that time was running out.
Though her New York Times obituary notes that Tyson was generally reticent about her personal life, she’s literally an open book here, writing about her long relationship and eventual marriage to troubled jazz genius Miles Davis (“the Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out”), her love for the daughter whose real name she does not reveal, her friendships, her exercise routine, her joys, her griefs. It’s a life lived in all its fullness, and reading it reveals to us — as great actors do — a complete person, one we miss once the book is closed. Doubly so now.
“We don’t have long here, children,” Tyson writes, on the occasion of Miles Davis’ death, in words that resonate all the more after her passing. “Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.”
NEW YORK — Michelle Burford has a fuzzy purple ski hat, and when she puts it on, she can channel voices.
It’s a magic she has manifested many times, most recently in helping actress Cicely Tyson write her memoir, “Just as I Am,” which has just been published. The New York Times Book Review praised the “firm, warm, proud, reflective voice on the page” as Burford’s creation.
Normally we would call such a person a ghostwriter, but Burford can’t stand the term.
“Historically, to be a ghostwriter was to be seen as sort of a literary hack,” she said during a video interview from her Manhattan apartment. A better way to imagine Burford is as a therapist, a cajoler, a confidant, and then as a sort of medium once the hat comes on and the writing starts. (She can’t explain it, it just works.)
But she’s never in the shadows.
Burford has been a collaborator or “story architect” — her preferred titles — on 10 books over the past eight years, and half have become New
York Times bestsellers. She has become particularly well known for the memoirs of celebrated Black women that she has helped shepherd, from her first book, by Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, to those by musicians Toni Braxton and Alicia Keys, and now Tyson.
But Burford has veered in other directions, collaborating with Michelle Knight, one of the women held captive in a Cleveland home for over a decade, and Clint Harp, a carpenter from Waco, Texas, who was a star of the HGTV reality show “Fixer Upper.”
It’s a career she fell into, but unlike so many other writers who take on the strange task of authoring a book for someone else, Burford has owned it, both her active part in these collaborations (her name appears on almost all of her books’ covers) and her insistence that it takes skill to excel at this work.
For one thing, she makes clear, the process is not just one of transcription.
“I’m not trying to just replicate what they say. I’m trying to get to a point where I can generate content in their voice,” Burford said. She spends dozens of hours (at least 40 to 50, she figures) soaking up not just the stories but also the way they are being told, the idiosyncrasies of speech, the catchphrases, the 15,000 to 20,000 words she estimates make up everybody’s private vocabulary.
“These are your words,” she said. “So if I can listen to your words and see the way that you typically put them together, really study them, then I can go from simply regurgitating what you said to imagining what you would say, if in fact you were to say the things that I’d like you to say beautifully in a book.”
It’s a process not unlike therapy, to hear her describe it. She often starts her first interview by saying, “I’m going to ask you a lot of questions that are going to make you want to hit me.” But Burford has to put her client — she hates this word, too — at ease to understand what will make them open up, become “emotionally naked.” This varies. Sometimes, she said, she’ll show up without makeup, trying to make herself as vulnerable as possible if she thinks that will work. The essential thing is that it can’t feel like an interview.
“It was just hours,” Keys, whose book was published last spring, said. “I never sat with a person and engaged with a person about my memories for that length of time. You don’t get a chance to have people who listen to you like that, who you trust. She might know more about me than many of my closest friends.” After helping her arrive at moments of clarity about her own life, Keys said, she considers the two of them “forever sisters.”
Burford grew up in Phoenix, one of nine children in a blended family. It was her first education in being a chameleon.
“I learned early how to speak various languages within my tribe, and to adjust myself to the person on the other end of the conversation,” she said.
Burford began her career in the magazine world, working at Essence in New York City for a number of years before she landed an interview in 1999 to work with Oprah Winfrey (“the only thing I had ever really wanted to do, other than be a journalist”). Winfrey was starting her magazine, O, and from Burford’s first meeting with her and Gayle King, at the Four Seasons, she learned something about putting a subject at ease.
“She had a cosmo. I had a cosmo. She and Gayle joked around,” Burford said. “It was supposed to be an interview, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt like girls catching up.”
She observed Winfrey carefully during her years at O, particularly while editing a column in which the talk-show host chatted with celebrities like Julia Roberts or the Dalai Lama. It was an opportunity to watch “a master of the craft of interviewing,” Burford said — from the way Winfrey prepared to her ability to break down the defenses of both famous and ordinary people.
By 2012, Burford was looking for a new challenge. A friend in publishing asked if she
would be interested in working with Douglas, who had just won gold at the London Olympics. The memoir was due in just four weeks, but Burford said yes.
Since then, one book project has led to another, but Burford has tried to be intentional about her choices. She doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as being able to do only Black female voices. She knows her life experience as a Black woman gives her special insight into other Black women. But writing each book is its own creative act that demands different perspectives, forcing her to stretch herself, just as working on Tyson’s book meant she had to figure out the voice of a 96-year-old woman.
She’s had to make this clear to publishers and literary agents.
“I’ve learned to not just hint at that but to say it outright, to say, you know, consider me for Adele and Taylor Swift as much as you would, say, Beyoncé,” Burford said. “I want them all. I want Beyoncé too, don’t get me wrong! But don’t consider that I can only tell one type of story.”
And then there are some clients who appreciate that Burford comes to their stories with a different perspective.
Harp, the celebrity carpenter whose book, “Handcrafted,” came out in 2018, said Burford understood aspects of his life because she was seeing them from another angle.
“Without that contrast, you are just going to get one story that you’re expecting to hear,” he said. “You’re expecting macho, wood, sweat, blood, whatever. But my story is one of sawdust and tears, happiness, emotion, struggle, and Michelle is the one who helped me pull that out.”
Regardless of the book she’s working on, what matters most to Burford — whether it means holing up in a cabin for four weeks with a client or taking 2 a.m. phone calls — is creating the conditions that will help her arrive at authenticity.
“I’m really focused on creating a safe space for the client, because to the extent that they can feel safe, they can unveil in the way that ultimately I believe most of us really want to but are afraid to,” Burford said.
“Readers just want the truth, particularly in a memoir. And they can really sense when they’re getting it. So I’m mostly hanging out, waiting for the truth to come out and reveal itself.”
Michele Rozga, who teaches English at Norfolk State, has published her first collection of poetry, “My adversary came onto the windowsill of another dream, as a bluebird,” with Finishing Line Press. Her pieces, with images not always clearly related, and odd juxtapositions and surprising ends, call on us to ponder and dwell.
In many, human relationships dominate; in one the title alone asks to be shared with a heartbroken friend: “Waiting, I become you in your absence.” In another the poet asks, “Is the body a synonym for memory, or a refutation of all it has survived?”
The Earth’s other creatures also summon the poet. “What need for that throat?” begins curiously, “Gadgets, when enticing, have elegance,” and continues, “This morning I found a birdsong identifier/ machine.” It explains, “At some point, the songs owned/ for play on the identifier will become/ second nature: to the person, to the birds/ that overhear themselves being played/ back to themselves.”
There’s a subtle play here: “second nature” is also a second form of nature, one that is actually machine, a device. But then its definition reverses: “Once the song is/ memorized, what need for the machine/ that produced it? ... that throat,/ that beak, air, and vibration... .”
How quickly this transformation can happen: “Each repetition surely has some tiny/ necessary difference from each song that came before?” A question. The poet ends with a question.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who wrote “Melania and Me,” a tell-all of her onetime friendship with Melania Trump, is off the hook with the Justice Department. Monday it dropped its lawsuit asserting that she’d violated a nondisclosure agreement and seeking all profits from the book. (Washington Post)
Josh Hawley, the U.S. senator from Missouri, has gotten a leg up on sales of his forthcoming book. A PAC called the Senate Conservatives Fund has paid $64,750 to Regnery Publishing for copies of “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” according to the Kansas City Star. “Political committees have routinely paid for books in order to boost their sale figures in recent years,” the Star noted.
Did Not See This Coming Dept.: A memoir from Hunter Biden, son of the president. “Beautiful Things,” due in early April, involves his struggles with substance abuse. (AP)
Awards: The Carnegie medals, from the American Library Association: to James McBride, fiction, for “Deacon King Kong”; to Rebecca Giggs of Australia, nonfiction, for “Fathoms: The World in the Whale.”
Obituary note: Maria Guarnaschelli, whom publisher Norton calls “the editor behind the most highly acclaimed and successful cookbooks of our time, including the monumental 1997 revision of ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and the new classic ‘The Food Lab,’ “was 79.
New and recent
Nicole Perlroth’s “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” about this government-backed market and the damage hackers can do. A cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times, Perlroth starts with the 2017 Russian cyberattack on Ukraine’s infrastructure, one that used potent, undetected “zero-day” tools poached from American intelligence, which itself had paid hackers for them. China, Iran and others, she says, have those tools and could do worse damage. Kirkus Reviews’ summary: “A powerful case for strong cybersecurity policy that reduces vulnerabilities while respecting civil rights.” (Bloomsbury, 528 pp.)
“The Paris Library” by Janet Skeslien Charles. When the Nazis march into World War II Paris, a young librarian at the American Library joins the Resistance. Betrayal eventually follows. Decades later, in small-town Montana, a lonely teenager becomes interested in her solitary elderly neighbor. A tale of romance, books, choices, consequences, and based on actual events. (Atria, 368 pp.)