Finding Me: A Memoirby Viola Davis
HarperOne, 2022. 304 pages. Biography/Memoir
You probably know Viola Davis’s face, voice, and commanding screen presence from her roles in How to Get Away with Murder, The Help, Doubt, Fences, and more. But you probably don’t know Viola.
In Finding Me, the Academy Award, Tony, and Emmy winning actress shares her life story with breathtaking honesty. Growing up in severe poverty, surrounded by abuse, racism, and addiction, she internalized negative messages about herself. Through raw talent, unshakeable determination, and luck, Davis fought her way into a different life, becoming a first-generation college student and eventually studying acting at Juilliard. She describes the slow ascent of her acting career and her even longer journey to self-love in beautiful detail.
This is a gorgeously written memoir, and I especially recommend listening to Davis’s audiobook narration for its added emotional impact. This is no ghost-written celebrity memoir. Instead, it’s an unflinching look at the experiences of a poor black child in 1960s and 1970s America, at the struggles of a young, dark-skinned black actress on Broadway and in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s, and the triumphs of a modern acting icon.
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by Trevor Noah
One World, 2016. 304 pages. Biography/Memoir
Trevor Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents' indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa's tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. The eighteen personal essays collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting, and weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother's unconventional, unconditional love.
by Tara Westover
Randomhouse, 2018. 352 pages. Biography/Memoir
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.
by Michelle Obama
Crown, 2018. 448 pages. Biography/Memoir
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.
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