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Davis spent decades being asked, gently and not so gently, to make her early life sound more palatable in interviews. Finding Me is what happens when she stops doing that. It opens in the poverty and violence of her childhood in Central Falls, Rhode Island — the rats, the hunger, the fires her father set — and tracks the exact, unglamorous mechanics of how a girl from that house became one of the most decorated actors of her generation. She wrote it herself, not with a ghostwriter, and it shows.
By Lisanne Swart · 1 book · Memoir · Non-Fiction · Updated August 2026
MemoirOn my shelf
Finding Me
Davis narrates her own audiobook, which won a Grammy, and the printed book carries that same unfiltered directness. She writes about childhood poverty and hunger so severe she stole food, about sexual abuse she experienced as a child, about the specific moment she understood that the industry wanted her to shrink her Blackness and her body to be palatable — and the slower, harder work of refusing. The Hollywood chapters are honest about the cost of the roles she took and the ones she turned down.
What makes this more than a celebrity memoir is the refusal to smooth anything over for the reader’s comfort — she is as unsparing about her own choices, including moments of shame and complicity, as she is about what was done to her. It’s a study in the distance between how a person is public and who they actually are, which is precisely the kind of book I’m always looking for.
Where to start with Viola Davis
Only one book to start with
→ Finding Me. Consider the audiobook alongside the print — Davis narrates it herself and it won the Grammy for Best Audiobook.
If it’s the theme that pulls you — a public persona built over a much harder private truth
→ My best non-fiction books list has more of exactly this.
