The debut debut memoir from award-winning actor and Viola Davis about her journey from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond.
Davis is more interested in framing her decorated career within the racism, generational abuse and sexual assault she overcame ... Pet lovers may have a tough time enduring detailed descriptions of cruelty to animals that Davis recalls witnessing ... With brutal candidness, she channels the unrelenting terror of living in a household of domestic abuse ... With fine brushstrokes, she paints a complicated portrait of a complicated man ... Although Davis isn’t shy about indicting the industry at large for its systemic biases, she’s more selective in sharing her thoughts about particular projects. When she does pull back the curtain, she digs deeper than behind-the-scenes dish or cute stories on set ... By the time Davis gets to her stay at George Clooney’s Italian villa, the cartoonishly lavish experience reads not as an out-of-touch fantasy but a well-earned respite for someone whose road to prosperity was paved with pitfalls ... While Finding Me can be docked for some loose ends, stilted prose and superfluous anecdotes, Davis’s journey overpowers those nitpicks.
To read Davis’ elegantly written but sometimes harrowing memoir, Finding Me, is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career and life she has today—and to acknowledge that even for a performer as outrageously gifted and dedicated as Davis is, the ingredient X known as luck can never be underestimated ... If Finding Me is largely a chronicle of the hard work required to overcome adversity, it’s also a wealth of meat-and-potatoes advice for all aspiring actors ... Her prose is forthright and supple and often delightful.
Brutally honest and honestly brutal ... a blistering memoir, not a rueful remembrance told in the kind of polished prose that suggests, well, it wasn't all that bad. Finding Me is raw in its anger, shocking in its frankness, often downright vulgar — and wonderfully alive with Davis' passion poured into every page.
