Washington details abuse and learning to protect herself
Washington’s memoir brings family secrets to light. She talks about her grandparents and her parents, for whom she is an only child.
Her family was one that “colored inside the lines,” she writes. “We were innovators, entrepreneurs, but we were not rule breakers.” They were also great pretenders, to each other and to the world. They acted like the family wasn’t suffering, that everything was fine.
She talks about the fraught relationship between her parents, Earl and Valerie Washington, and what they dreamed about, fought about and carried as burdens.
At a young age, Washington began to feel anxiety around her parents’ expectations. She wanted to be perfect because she thought perfection was what would make her parents happy.
While she didn’t lack for much, she writes, Washington longed for “an authentic connection with my parents.”
But, “one of the consequences of growing up in a household with half-truths is that there is no space for trust to thrive.”
She learned her father was the subject of an IRS investigation involving real estate, drug dealers and tax evasion for which he planned to plead guilty – all because they wanted her to write a letter to the judge hoping it would help with the case. She wrote the letter, despite feeling her parents’ attorney knew more about them than she did.
In April 2018, Washington’s parents called her and said they had to talk.
As she began that year to record an episode of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr., her father began having panic attacks.
With the appearance looming and unable to avoid the truth any longer, her parents sat her down and told her the truth about her conception: They had struggled to conceive so they opted for artificial insemination and they didn’t know – and didn’t want to know – anything about the man except that he was healthy and
Black.
But her parents’ clear pain in the revelation made Washington feel something else, she writes: “Excited, elated, alive, electric.” She liked the truth about it, she liked that this secret would force them to push aside false pretenses.
It would make room for unconditional love, she told her parents.
When Washington was a child, she knew something had happened to her at a sleepover, but she wasn’t sure.
She pieced clues together over a series of other sleepovers
Even with the success of “Scandal,” Washington says she was feeling lost.
She felt like she had become “an avatar for progress and inclusion and fashion and fame.” Her circle of trust, she writes, became smaller.
But while she struggled to settle herself, to be more open and honest with herself and her colleagues, she turned to her character to become a better leader, to believe in herself, to put aside any imposter syndrome or fear of vulnerability.
One role at a time, Kerry has been finding her truth.