Where to Start with Viola Davis: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Viola Davis — how to approach Finding Me, her essential memoir of poverty, trauma, shame, and extraordinary achievement. A complete reading guide.
Viola Davis (born 1965) is an American actress who became the first Black woman to achieve EGOT status — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards — through roles in How to Get Away with Murder, Fences, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, among others. Finding Me (2022) is her memoir, and it is significantly more honest and more harrowing than the genre typically produces.
Where to Start: Finding Me (2022)
The essential Davis — and one of the most emotionally courageous memoirs of recent years. Finding Me opens with an image that functions as the memoir’s thesis: a child running from an outhouse on a dirt road in Central Falls, Rhode Island, being chased by rats. This is not metaphor. Davis grew up in conditions of material deprivation — hunger, rodent infestation, broken heat, a father who was addicted and sometimes violent, a house that embarrassed her so thoroughly that she would walk miles out of her way to avoid classmates seeing where she lived — that most celebrity memoirs treat with aesthetic distance, if they acknowledge them at all.
Davis does not distance herself. She renders the childhood in the specific language of what it felt like: hunger as a physical constant, the shame of dirty clothes at school, the social exclusion that poverty produces in children long before they have words for class. The specificity is both the memoir’s greatest strength and its most challenging quality — these sections are almost unbearable to read, not because they are performed but because they are not.
The memoir’s most important contribution to the literature of poverty and survival is its sustained examination of shame. Davis argues that the material conditions of her childhood were damaging but survivable; the shame those conditions produced — the internalised belief that she was less than, that she did not deserve, that her existence was evidence of inadequacy — lasted decades longer than the poverty itself. She is honest that the EGOT achievement — the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony that made her the first Black woman to achieve the distinction — did not cure the shame. The achievement happened; the shame was still there. The healing, to the extent it has come, came from different work.
Acting was the first thing that gave Davis an experience of being seen as a full human being rather than a charity case. She discovered it as a child and trained at Juilliard, and the memoir is also a love letter to the craft — to what it means to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances when the truth of your actual circumstances was something you spent years trying to hide. Her passion for the work is rendered with genuine understanding, not as career strategy but as necessity.
Reading Viola Davis
Finding Me is Davis’s only book. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full Viola Davis bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Viola Davis author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Viola Davis?
Finding Me (2022) is Davis's only book — a memoir of extraordinary emotional courage that recounts a childhood of severe poverty, hunger, abuse, and shame in rural Rhode Island with a specificity that most celebrity memoir avoids, and then traces the decades it took to build a self that could hold that history without being destroyed by it. One of the most honest accounts of what poverty actually feels like, and of what it costs to survive it.
What is Finding Me about?
Finding Me traces Davis's life from a childhood of crushing poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island — hunger, rodent infestation, a home she was ashamed of, a father who was addicted and sometimes violent — through her discovery of acting as a survival tool, her training at Juilliard, her rise through New York theater and Hollywood, and her EGOT achievement. The memoir's central subject is not success but shame: the internalized belief, formed in poverty, that she was less than, which lasted long after the poverty itself had ended.
Is Finding Me only for fans of Viola Davis?
Finding Me is for anyone interested in honest memoir, in the psychology of poverty and shame, or in what it actually costs to build a career and a self from a starting point of profound deprivation. Davis is a better writer than most celebrity memoirists, and the honesty of the childhood chapters — which are more specific and more harrowing than celebrity memoir typically attempts — makes the book valuable independently of any prior knowledge of or interest in her career.
What should I read after Finding Me?
After Finding Me, Tara Westover's Educated covers the parallel experience of building a self through education in the face of a chaotic and damaging origin. Trevor Noah's Born a Crime provides a different angle on childhood poverty and the role of intelligence in escaping it. Chanel Miller's Know My Name is a similarly courageous memoir of trauma and the process of reclaiming oneself in its aftermath.
