With memoir, Sidibe sheds guilt, discomfort

LOS ANGELES — On the night that director Lee Daniels offered Gabourey Sidibe the lead in “Precious,” 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 her work as a phone-sex operator, as well as roles in college productions of “Peter Pan” and “The Wiz,” 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 said, she was an entrenched outlier — sarcasm has been both weapon and armor. She deployed it to fine effect in her upside-down household in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood 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 — “I know!” Sidibe said — and who called his firstborn daughter “fatso,” as did her relatives, while outlining her future as a good Muslim wife.

Her sarcasm is on rueful display in her new memoir, “This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 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.

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.

Sidibe’s aunt is Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a founder of Ms. Magazine; 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 theater of elementary school.

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

Sidibe was working at the phone-sex company and had just started Mercy College in Manhattan, her second college stint, when a friend told her about a casting call for “Precious.” She showed up almost as an afterthought. 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 real-life 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.”

Phone work paid well, but she quit to play Precious. Money was tight after the film wrapped; she was paid scale, about $2,500 a week, but it took a month for her to receive her first check. After “Precious” made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Sidibe experienced fame without fortune, riding subways and buses to red carpet events.

Even after her Oscar nomination, and years of steady roles on shows like “American Horror Story” and “Empire,” and films like “Tower Heist,” 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.”

In 2014, Sidibe found herself courted by literary agents, after she spoke, along with Chelsea Handler and Amy Schumer, at a Ms. Foundation awards gala that was also a party for Steinem’s 80th birthday. Activist, actress and comedian Kathy Najimy said she was in charge of “curating the right voices, and Gabby seemed to be that perfect voice.” She recalled that after Sidibe spoke, it was like church.

The speech involved a childhood memory and a crisis of confidence, a story about how Sidibe had baked cookies for a fourth-grade party and was shunned by her classmates.

“People are always asking me why or how I’m so confident,” Sidibe added, describing the essence of the talk. “But what they really mean is why are you so confident. They are not asking Rihanna. They are asking me, because they don’t think I should be. That’s what the cookie story was about, and that’s what started the book.”

In her book, Sidibe says, “My body sometimes feels like a tragedy, but I’m trying very hard to change my mind about that.”

But she also acknowledges the power of her unconventional beauty, which makes this memoir a book you will want to give your daughter.

Daniels remembered that after “Precious,” people said Sidibe would never work again. People would make the mistake — as he almost did — that no actor could nail the role, and they would continue to confuse Sidibe with the character of “Precious.” In those early years of her career, interviewers were surprised that she was not, in fact, a beaten-down illiterate teenager.

The internet was predictably vicious. “Whale, gorilla, elephant” were typical epithets for Precious, she said, along with more insidious commentary. “A lot of people were concerned that I was ‘promoting unhealthy eating habits,’” she writes. “Funny. I could’ve sworn I was promoting a movie.”

Gabourey Sidibe