Finding Me: A Memoir
by Viola Davis (HarperOne, $29)
“From the first page,” it’s clear that Viola Davis hasn’t written a typical celebrity memoir, said Barbara VanDenburgh in USA Today. The Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning actress opens with a double profanity, putting readers inside the mind of the 8-year-old she was: poor, angry, hungry, and abused, chased home from school every day by a gang of white boys who hurled rocks, bricks, and racist insults. She lived among rats. She wet her bed regularly and smelled like it. For this grade-school outsider living in Central Falls, R.I., “the humiliations were unending,” said Douglass Daniel in the Associated Press. Yet Davis not only survived.
She has written a memoir that shows how she eventually found pride in overcoming those tests. “Finding Me is raw in its anger, shocking in its frankness—and wonderfully alive with Davis’ passion.”
The early pages can be tough on a reader, said Thomas Floyd in The Washington Post. Davis was sexually abused by her brother, and she saw enough violence at home that she feared her alcoholic father would kill her mother one day. Acting, she admits, helped her cope with childhood trauma, because each role required constructing a person who had had a completely different life experience. But after winning a seat at the prestigious Juilliard School and beginning her career in acting, Davis discovered that there were few roles for a woman of her body type and dark skin tone besides drug-addicted mother. “It’s infuriating, and sadly unsurprising.”
“To read Davis’ memoir is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career she has today,” Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Even after she began delivering great screen performances, “it took a while for the world to notice,” and though she has faced recent health challenges, “she seems to prefer to talk about joy,” particularly the happiness she found after meeting her future husband, fellow actor Julius Tennon. But whether she’s describing past struggles or the joys of motherhood, Davis’ prose is “supple and often delightful.” She “weaves threads of undeniable truth into everything she does.”