Finding Me by Viola Davis
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever.
This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.
As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be . . . you.
Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.
I have always loved ingesting memoirs and autobiographies in audiobook form…and a memoir like this reminds me EXACTLY why that is.
Hearing someone’s story in THEIR voice is beyond incredible. It feels so much more personal, impactful, honest, deep and even at times conversational.
The book starts at the beginning of her life story….Viola grew up extremely poor and with endless amounts of hardships and struggles. She shares many of her heart wrenching moments such as abuse, deprivation and hatred.
While there were many hard moments, she also shares many that were also heartwarming ones too, ESPECIALLY times with her family members…and most of the time it was her sisters in particular.
This book is her personal life story, but it is also an in depth look at what it is like to be a poor, dark skinned Black female living in America.
All the obstacles and barriers put into place by racism, gender and economic status that her and her family members had to continually battle and fight….she bravely and vulnerably shared her memories and experiences.
Even once Viola grew up and made it out of her house and into college, then Juliard, then the theatre world and then Hollywood, she STILL dealt with all these things.
Viola shares her SOUL in these pages, yall.
Absolutely ALL of it.
All the pain.
All the hurt.
All the joy.
All the wonder.
All the tragedy.
All the triumphs.
And all the people who have touched her spirit—either by lifting it up or dragging it down–along the way.
What a storyteller she is…which shouldn’t be surprising in the least considering what an ASTOUNDING and INCREDIBLE actress she is.
Because a GOOD actor–especially one that has done live theatre–is an EXPERT at their craft…which is in fact, telling stories.
Speaking of acting, I enjoyed the chapters so much where she reminisced about her live theater days…her acting methods, her fellow actors, her various productions…it was all so fascinating and interesting to a theater loving geek (and fellow actor!) like me.
This book shows that Viola Davis is not just a PHENOMENAL actress and human being, but also a FANTASTIC writer and AMAZING narrator as well.
This was a BEAUTIFUL book, yall.
Just BEAUTIFUL.
“The constantly being beaten down so much makes you begin to feel that you’re wrong. Not that you did wrong, but you were wrong. It makes you so angry at your abuser, the one that you’re too afraid to confront, so you confront the easiest target. Those you can. Until your heart gets tired. No one ever, up until that point, talked to us, asked us what our dreams were, asked us how we were feeling. It was on us to figure it out. There is an emotional abandonment that comes with poverty and being Black. The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anything else. You just believe you’re the leftovers.”
“I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people—the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silence—in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.”
“For a whole generation of Black people we were the dream. We were their hope. We were the baton they were passing as they were sinking into the quicksand of racism, poverty, Jim Crow, segregation, injustice, family trauma, and dysfunction.”
“The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year-old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness.”
“My biggest discovery was that you can literally re-create your life. You can redefine it. You don’t have to live in the past. I found that not only did I have fight in me, I had love.”
“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.”
“Success is absolutely wonderful, but it’s not who you are. Who you are is measured by something way more abstract and emotional, ethereal, than outward success.”
“Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.”