MEMOIR
Victoria Segal
Finding Me
by Viola Davis
Coronet £20 pp304
Only 24 performers have ever
won the “Triple Crown” of
American acting — an Oscar,
an Emmy and a Tony. And the
first African-American star to
do so is Viola Davis, the star of
Fences, How to Get Away with
Murder and Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom. By any standards
Davis has a brilliant career;
after reading her memoir,
however, it feels like a
positively miraculous one.
“Trauma, shit, piss, and
mortar,” is how Davis
describes her past in her
admirably unpasteurised
prose. Finding Me is no
self-congratulatory showbiz
rags-to-riches tale, a sparkly
redemptive arc where success
heals old wounds. Instead it’s
a book committed to showing
how deeply poverty, racism,
sexism and violence can seep
into a person’s bones, a
challenge to the conventional
feelgood narrative of
triumphant escape.
Davis was born in her
grandparents’ house on a
South Carolina plantation in
1965, the second youngest of
six children. Her parents
moved to the tough little
Rhode Island city of Central
Falls shortly after, chasing her
father Dan’s work as a horse
groom. The brutal violence he
inflicted on her mother, Mae
Alice, is spattered unsparingly
across the page: once, Davis
and her sister came homefrom school to find a trail of
blood leading from their front
door, her father rounding
up his daughters to track
down his fleeing wife so he
could “kill her”.
You can almost feel the
cortisol and adrenaline
flooding these pages. At
school Davis was chased home
every day by racist bullies
who pelted her with rocks;
her mother gave her a crochet
needle to “jug ’em” and told
her never to run again. At
home violence came paired
with extreme poverty, Davis’s
hunger forcing her to shoplift
and scavenge. She is excellent
on poverty’s humiliating traps
and double binds: a high-
achieving student, she was in
fourth grade when her
teacher backed away, saying,
“The odor is horrible!” Yet
she had no soap, no hot water
and “having the quarters for
laundry was a luxury” — a
situation exacerbated
by a household of
traumatised
children who wet
their beds.
“When you’re
poor,” she writes,
“you live in an
alternate reality,”
and Davis’sA journey
from rats
to riches
Film star Viola Davis’s searing memoir
— poverty, bunions and George Clooney
account takes on a florid,
nightmarish momentum of its
own. Fires broke out regularly
in the family’s condemned
apartment building; a flood in
the basement drowned their
dog’s puppies, the corpses
later found half-eaten by the
same rats who would gnaw the
faces off her dolls and — if they
hadn’t wrapped bedsheets
around their necks at night
— would try the same on the
humans. The “family”
downstairs were in fact
children who had effectively
been kidnapped for thePaperbacks
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A first-class
biography
John Walsh hails a
superb life of the
crazily adventurous
Jean Rhys24
Miracle Viola
Davis, right,
with her best
supporting
actress Oscar
for Fences,
aboveThe family
had no
soap and
no hot
water
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ALAMY20 1 May 2022