Viola Davis

Viola Davis is an American actress and author whose memoir Finding Me recounts her childhood in extreme poverty and her long path to becoming one of Hollywood's most celebrated performers.

Viola Davis is one of the most decorated performers in American entertainment history — the first Black woman to win an Academy Award, Emmy, and Tony — and Finding Me, published in 2022, is the story of how she got there from circumstances that were as dire as any memoir written in recent years. She grew up in poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, one of seven children in a family that frequently had no food, no heat, and no shelter. Her childhood included hunger, violence, and the kind of deprivation that tends to be euphemized in celebrity memoirs but which Davis describes with unflinching directness.

The book is remarkable for its honesty about the psychological damage that poverty and instability caused, and for Davis’s willingness to describe her own self-doubt, self-sabotage, and the years of therapy required to understand herself as someone worthy of love and success. She writes about race in the entertainment industry with the authority of someone who has been underestimated and overlooked for years before achieving recognition, and her analysis of what it costs Black women in particular to achieve in predominantly white institutions is both personal and structural.

Finding Me does what the best celebrity memoirs rarely manage: it is not primarily a story of triumph but of excavation and growth. Davis writes with the same presence and intensity she brings to performance, and the result is one of the more emotionally demanding and rewarding memoirs of its decade.