In Finding Me, Viola Davis intentionally tells the story of a person first and an actress second. She immerses the reader in the childhood struggles that etched themselves on her mind and soul. The book shows the brutality of the poverty that Davis experienced, how it got in the way of everything she did, how it created trauma that she would deal with throughout her life. Reading this work, one cannot look away from the suffering of young Viola’s life. Davis makes it clear how much responsibility she took for the struggles she went through and particularly for trying to get in between her mother and her abusive father. Growing up in abject poverty with an abusive family situation was not just something that made it hard for Davis to become a successful actress; it was something that continued to affect her long after she began to find success—and, she implies, it is something that will always shape her life.

By contrast with some offerings in the celebrity memoir genre, Finding Me invests intensively in showing the actress’s background before she entered the world of Hollywood. Most of the book takes place before Davis got a single film role, and the entire first half takes place during her childhood. A reader who comes to the book to hear about Hollywood may be disappointed, even horrified as the narration takes them through an unsparing view of a deeply traumatizing childhood experience. Yet Davis’s point is that the person she became through that experience is the person she brings to all her acting, the person responsible for her success. She makes no claim that any of her painful experiences were good things, but she wants to give her child self credit for the success that her adult self has ultimately achieved.

Davis also gives the reader a clear perspective on how her racial experience has influenced her life. As a child, she was bullied and excluded—by children and adults—on the basis of being a dark-skinned Black girl. Others regarded her Blackness as a flaw that merited criticism. In college and graduate school, she experienced an academic world designed by white people for white people, without consideration for the potential needs or differing experiences that people of color would bring to these programs. The effect was that her training was, in some ways, re-traumatizing. She needed to find places of healing from it, such as her trip to Africa provided. These healing moments also helped her see her trauma more clearly and understand what she had achieved in fighting through it.

Once her training was complete, Davis looked for work as an actress with the understanding that the roles she could be cast in were limited because of her race. For much of her early career, she was cast either as a drug-addicted mother or as the white lead’s best friend. Only in Black-led, Black-focused productions was she able to use the full range of her talents and grow as an actress. Even after she became famous in Hollywood movies, nominated for multiple Oscars, she did not feel fully actualized as an actor until she worked with Black producer Shonda Rhimes, who gave her a lead role that was not typical for a dark-skinned Black actress. Davis was highly successful in the role and became a household name. But she continued to work on growing her art. One of the main points Davis makes in Finding Me is that human beings in general, and Davis in particular, can never stop growing and working on themselves. The central role of therapy in the memoir foregrounds this knowledge. Davis quotes her therapist’s commentary on key moments in her life, and this commentary often plays a formative role in the healthy choices Davis makes. It is clear from the book that Davis believes working on one’s mental health is crucial for success and happiness.