Where to Start with Will Smith: A Reading Guide

Will Smith (born 1968) is an American actor, producer, and rapper who rose from West Philadelphia to global celebrity through The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a Grammy-winning music career, and a film career including Men in Black, Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, and I Am Legend. Will (2021), written with Mark Manson, is his memoir — an attempt to examine the psychological architecture behind that career with more candor than the genre usually allows.

Where to Start: Will (2021)

The essential Smith — and a more psychologically honest memoir than most celebrity autobiography. Will opens with Smith’s wedding toast at his wife Jada’s fiftieth birthday party and then moves backward, building context for the psychological portrait at the book’s centre. The engagement of Mark Manson — author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — as collaborator introduced a therapeutic interrogation quality that the memoir might otherwise have lacked.

The West Philadelphia childhood is the book’s most powerful section. Smith renders the specific streets, the specific sounds of a neighbourhood where gunshots at night were not extraordinary, the specific figure of his father — Will Smith Sr. — who was simultaneously a successful businessman and a man who beat his wife. Smith observed his father hit his mother when he was a child and did not intervene. That memory, he argues, structured his subsequent understanding of what it means to be a man, to be a protector, to be powerful — and the complicated admiration and revulsion he felt toward his father shaped patterns he carried into adult relationships.

The memoir’s most interesting claim about its subject is that fear was the primary engine of his career. Not confidence, not ambition in any positive sense, but a terror of irrelevance, of failure, of becoming someone who did not matter. The global pursuit of fame — the obsession with box office numbers, with chart positions, with critical acclaim — was, Smith argues, less aspiration than flight: the achievement was the ongoing project of running from what he believed he would be without it. This is a more interesting origin story than most celebrity memoir provides, and Smith pursues it with enough specificity to make it credible.

The sections on his marriage and Hollywood career are more cautious, and readers approaching the book after 2022 will need to hold them with awareness of what came later. The memoir’s value is substantially in its first two-thirds — the psychological portrait of a frightened, brilliant kid from Philadelphia who built a career on the energy of that fear — before the complexity of fame and marriage overcrowds the more intimate account.

Why Will Is the Ideal First Book

For a reader new to Will Smith as an author, Will is the ideal and essential first book because it is his singular work, a memoir of remarkable candor that recounts his extraordinary journey from West Philadelphia to global stardom. Will tells the story of Smith’s life and career, from his childhood and his rise as a rapper and television star to his journey to becoming one of the biggest movie stars in the world, told with unusual honesty and reflection. As an entry point, it is the natural and only place to begin, for it is Smith’s defining and sole book, the candid memoir that recounts his remarkable story. It welcomes the newcomer with its compelling life story, its candor, and its reflective honesty, drawing the reader into an extraordinary journey told with unusual openness. It is his singular work and the fullest expression of his story, so that the new reader encounters Smith directly. For the newcomer, then, Will is the natural and ideal starting point, the candid memoir that recounts his extraordinary journey from West Philadelphia to global stardom.

What to Expect as a New Reader

As a new reader, you can expect Will to be a candid and reflective memoir, recounting an extraordinary journey from a Philadelphia childhood to global stardom. You can expect a compelling life story, for the memoir traces Smith’s remarkable journey, his childhood and family, his rise as a rapper and television star, and his ascent to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world. You can expect unusual candor, for Smith reflects with honesty on his fears, failures, and struggles as well as his triumphs, examining the forces that drove his extraordinary success and the costs that accompanied it. You can expect reflection and self-examination, for the memoir is thoughtful about Smith’s psychology, his relationships, and the lessons of his journey. You can expect an engaging and readable account of a remarkable life, shaped with the help of a skilled collaborator. Expect, in short, a candid and reflective memoir of an extraordinary journey from West Philadelphia to global stardom, an honest and engaging introduction to Smith’s story.

Going Deeper After Your First Book

Once Will has told you Smith’s story, there is, within his published work, no further book to turn to, for it is his singular memoir, the candid account on which his reputation as an author rests, and it stands complete and self-sufficient. The reader who has been engaged by Will and wishes to go deeper might turn to the wider literature of celebrity and entertainment memoir, to which Will belongs as a notably candid example, reading other accounts of remarkable lives and careers in the light of the honesty and reflection that Smith’s memoir offers. Such reading can complement the experience of Will and broaden your sense of the form. Within Smith’s own work, however, Will is the whole, the single candid memoir that recounts his extraordinary journey. Building your reading journey from Will is a matter of carrying its candor and reflection into the wider literature of memoir. The reader who begins and ends with Will will have encountered a notably candid and reflective celebrity memoir, complete in itself.

Reading Will Smith

Will is Smith’s only book. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.

For the full Will Smith bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Will Smith author page on Editors Reads.

Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.