Hollywood royalty and Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis will be releasing a new memoir titled “Finding Me,” next April.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, HarperOne will release Davis’ memoir on April 19, 2022.
In the memoir, Davis takes us on a journey from her childhood — growing up in poverty and family violence in Rhode Island through to becoming one of Hollywood’s elite actors.
“I believe that our stories, and the courage to share them, is the most powerful empathetic tool we have,” she said in a statement. “This is my story … straight no chaser.”
Of course, HarperOne is ecstatic to have Davis on board.
“Viola Davis is a powerful truth teller — through her work on stage and screen, as well as in her life,” HarperOne president and publisher Judith Curr said in a statement. “I’m looking forward to working with her on a book that powerfully reveals the risk and danger for a Black woman living in the fullness of her talents and gifts — and the reward and freedom that comes with it.”
We already know it’s going to be a bestseller.
Davis has long been an advocate for diversity in Hollywood.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, she revealed what she thought was missing from the Hollywood experience.
“I always say that one thing missing in cinema is that regular black woman,” she says. “Not anyone didactic, or whose sole purpose in the narrative is to illustrate some social abnormality. There’s no meaning behind it, other than she is just there.”
Davis added that she desired the kind of roles Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep have had. “I would love to have a Black female Klute, or Kramer, or Unmarried Woman, or Annie Hall. But who’s gonna write it, who’s gonna produce it, who’s gonna see it, again and again and again?”
