Viola Davis’s Memoir Finding Me is full of rawness and honesty, like Jeannette Wall’s Glass Castle and Tara Westover’s Educated. Unapologetically, she takes the reader with her on the trail of truth. She makes you laugh, cry, and scream from sheer emotional exhaustion. Her story compels us to walk outside the shame and guilt that surface from physical and emotional negligence.

You would say she is making it up unless exposed to some of Davis’s stories during your childhood. To say that she survived childhood trauma would be a gross understatement. She survives the brutality of poverty, the immorality of racism, and the mortifying effects of domestic abuse. What emerges out of the refuse of suffering is a superstar. She says, “I lived it! I was there! And that has been my biggest gift in understanding the act of serving and my biggest gift in embodying other human beings.”

Davis has a fortitude about her and an earnestness that explores tolerance and forgiveness. It felt pure. Her mom and dad, poised at the epicenter of her grief and pain, secure devotion and reverie from Viola instead of the blame and resentment society would declare were theirs to carry. Her love for her parents becomes an elixir for her readers. In those dark moments that are her life, she takes the hand of the reader and reassures us that she is, in the end, a survivor.

In addition to her childhood, Davis shows the reader the sordid parts of the acting industry. It is not all glitz and glam. According to Davis, there are a lot of closed doors and taking lame roles just to be able to eat and pay bills. Yet, her talent as a trained Julliard graduate emerges despite the impediments of an industry steeped in the “white good-ole-boy” tradition. Role by role, script by script, she forges her way to success, where she finds herself a beautiful “warrior princess” who has “… that Cinderella moment when I strode to the podium to accept the Oscar. It was perfect.”

I give it five Oscars.