‘Scandal’ star opens up in memoir ‘Thicker Than Water’
For years, Kerry Washing- ton has guarded her personal life with the same tenacity she’s breathed into char- acters like Olivia Pope on “Scandal” and Mia Warren in “Little Fires Everywhere.”
Her June 2013 wedding to Nnamdi Asomugha was a secret. She never posts pic- tures of their three children. Now, with a memoir out, the Emmy-winning actor is opening the door to her inner sanctum. “Thicker Than Water” tells the story of a Black girl from the Bronx making her way in white Hollywood while feeling as if she didn’t belong in her own family.
Shonda Rhimes advised her friend to write a book years ago. “You grow as a person just from the act of writing,” said the renowned producer and “Scandal” creator, whose memoir came out in 2015. “It’s a powerful method of reclaiming yourself.”
But Washington felt then she was too young to take stock of her life. She said: “I always had this nagging sense that there was some- thing fraudulent about it. I didn’t quite know myself well enough.”
In early 2018, after seven seasons on “Scandal,” Washington planned to write a book of lessons learned from Olivia Pope, the fictional Beltway fixer inspired by the real-life crisis manager Judy Smith, who made Washington the first Black woman to lead a network drama since 1974.
“There was a sense of com- pletion,” Washington said. There was also a sense of readiness — for new proj- ects, adventure, the unex- pected.
It seemed like the perfect time to learn about her ancestry, and on April 3, 2018, Valerie and Earl Washington finally shared the secret they’d kept from their only child for more than four decades: They had used a sperm donor to conceive her.
As she processed the news shington tried to “plow through” life, “as high-functioning people do.” But Washington’s autopilot had its limits. The book she’d signed up to write suddenly seemed as if it belonged in a different library.
Given the origin story of “Thicker Than Water,” the actor’s origin story is a fairly small part of the book. It’s exciting watching Washington figure out for herself that the sperm donor doesn’t even rank in the top 10 most interesting things about her life.