“I lost my mind during the pandemic,” she tells me from her bedroom, dressed before the photo shoot in a gray sweatshirt and a wide woolen hat. “I just wandered into this house like Mary Tyrone on Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” She laughs about it (she has a deep laugh and a deep, loud voice that she inherited from her grandmother), but the memoirs that emerged from the time she spent writing are anything but light. It has a story to tell, a fascinating, moving, sometimes tangled story, with passion and pain, triumph and redemption, setting a new benchmark for the celebrity confessor. Finding Me is a page turner, written with narrative know-how and stylistic ability. In a matter of months – interrupted by the filming of the First Lady, played by Michelle Obama, and the Woman King, a historical drama set in the Kingdom of Dahomey (now southern Benin) in West Africa, and both company works by JuVee Productions – faced the page with the spectrum of childhood poverty and its consequent thorny rise to the top, a place that proved less comfortable than she had imagined. Viola Davis as Michelle Obama and OT Fagbenle as Barack Obama in her new series, The First Lady. Photo: Jackson Lee Davis / Showtime “Whenever you are motionless, whenever you are quiet, whenever you put everything down, then everything in your life comes into focus. “It feels like a jackpot,” he says of the long pause caused by Covid. But it was not just the pandemic that led her to the blank screen. The crisis was already underway. “I think it has been happening since my condition started to improve,” he says. “When you go up for the first time, it is nothing but enthusiasm, nothing more than understanding that this is the culmination of your hard work, your talent. You just feel like God has blessed you – I still feel that. “And then it goes: what no one tells you is ‘over there’ are the details, the cost, the pressure, the responsibility and finally the frustration. You feel like you found something you love to do and you achieved it, your life is sewn – and then you hit it, and it’s just a level of emptiness, you wonder what your life means, and then you crash and burn. I had to go back to the source and revisit my life, revisit my stories, decapitate myself into something so I could find the home – find me. I was lost in all this. “ Subscribe to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a comprehensive list of our weekly snapshots In 2016, with the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Fences, based on a play by August Wilson, Viola Davis became the first African-American to win a triple Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Tony and Emmy). Broadway in Wilson’s King Hedley II; the Emmy for the TV legal thriller How to Get Away With Murder). She is the most nominated black woman in the history of the Oscars (she was nominated for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, another adaptation of Wilson, as well as The Help and Doubt) and has been ranked in the top 10 of the New York Times list of the most important 21st century actors. The performance of her roles is at the same time demanding and generous, always perceptive, with a haunted integrity that makes each character seem deeply known, tangible and self-controlled. The perfect humble artist, considers fame and glory secondary to the work. She is modest about her trophies and rejects the efforts of her almost 19-year-old actor husband, Julius Tenon, and their adopted daughter, Genesis, to devour them at home. “If it were up to me all the prizes would be in the garage,” he says. “I mean, it’s just not my style – it’s a bit exaggerated. Listen, it’s not that I didn’t look at the Oscars or anything and I thought: wow, that’s awesome. I’m very grateful, but, you know, you can not live there. Once you get it, you leave the stage, you win an Oscar, but then it’s like, and now what? “And then you have to move on to the next job and start over with this rogue syndrome.” Davis is wearing a coat, Heiny. Earrings, Soko. Styling: Elizabeth Stewart. Hair: Jamika Wilson. Makeup: Autumn Moultrie. Set design: Natalie Shriver. Photo: Mary Rozzi / The Guardian The memoirs begin with a formidable eight-year-old Viola, a “messy mess” with torn socks and very large shoes who is chased home from school every day by a group of racist boys who throw stones, bricks, tree branches and pine cones. . To help her defend herself, her mother, Mae Alice Davis, who worked as a waitress and factory worker and was active in the civil rights movement, gives her a shiny blue crochet needle to stab them. and tells her to walk, not run. She is the only African-American family in the densely populated, drug-stricken city of Central Falls, Rhode Island, to have moved there from South Carolina. They live in a doomed building, often without hot water, gas or electricity, and the rats are so vicious and daring that they eat the faces of Viola dolls and fly to her bed at night looking for food. He never enters the kitchen because of them. It rains the bed until she is 14. limited to wiping without soap with cold water, she and her four sisters regularly go to school with the smell. I understand the poverty that many people do not understand. I know what deprivation is and the most important thing it has given me is compassion In addition, there are fires – they become “experienced fire escape climbers”, and there is a case where Viola’s mother performs a superhuman jump to save her when she is too scared to jump – however this trap remains their home for another two years. “No one cares about the conditions in which the unwanted live,” writes Davis. “You are invisible, a factor of responsibility that allows the most privileged to escape your misery.” Part of the legacy of that time is that Davis refuses to satisfy her daughter’s desire for a pet rat. She laughs again with her characteristic humor and kindness, while at the same time she is seriously serious about the impact on her identity if she is raised, not just poor, but “po”, an extreme beyond. “I have an understanding of poverty that many people probably do not understand, so I do not romanticize it,” he says. “I know what deprivation is and the most important thing it has given me is compassion. There is something about knowing the road, making it difficult, and being baptized in the fire, that you are beginning to have a true awareness of what it means for people living in poverty and how difficult or impossible it is to get out. It made me see the other side of life, as opposed to sitting at a cocktail party and talking about poverty the same way – I mean, I do not know, the same way you would talk about a Picasso painting. “I have a seat in the front row.” In addition to “garbage diving”, food stamps and persistent hunger, there was alcoholism and violence her father had to deal with, making the family home a “war zone”. Dan Davis was a horse racer and was “pretty good” at guitar and accordion. Davis writes lovingly about going with him to the stables, about the tough protection of his family, and his enthusiasm for the holidays. he was big on valentines day and every year he planted a christmas tree. But she is honest in her memoirs about the frequent beatings of his children and, in particular, his wife. Viola and Delors’s older sister would escape the trauma of “hitting our mom and screaming in pain” by playing role-playing roles as “rich, white Beverly Hills hosts, with big jewelry and small chihuahuas.” Davis on stage at Intimate Apparel in 2001. Photo: Los Angeles Times / Getty Images Her mother still bears the marks of abuse, which may include a knife to her leg or neck with a pencil or a bloody chase in the neighborhood and fleeing to be saved, leaving a trail of blood leading to the front door. Davis writes: “Sometimes her head or arm was opened. He would have a swollen face, a torn lip. I was always scared when he picked up anything like a stick because he hit her as hard as he could and kept hitting. “Sometimes all night.” Dan Davis died of pancreatic cancer in 2006, having softened later in life into an adorable, apologetic husband and refuge of struggling relatives, including addicts. It is the long story of redemption of memoirs, depicted lying in bed in his kitchen near the end of his life, weighing 86 pounds and calling on Mae Alice, repeatedly asking for forgiveness, a state of sleep and submission that Davis believes not everyone is capable of. “I give him a lot of support for that,” he says. She is forgiving, exposing her father as a criminal and perpetrator, while acknowledging his imprisonment in a system of historical racial and economic oppression that crippled him. “I think at some point I had to make a choice – to see my father as a demon or a monster, or to see him as a man, as a struggling man who knows what kind of secrets, what kind of abuse, what kind …
