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Tyson finished this book at 96, weeks before she died, and the timing gives it a weight most memoirs don’t carry — this really was the last word. Just as I Am covers nearly a century: a strict Harlem childhood, a modeling career she stumbled into, and then six decades of choosing roles carefully in an industry that mostly offered Black actresses parts she refused to play. She wrote it with Michelle Burford, over years of recorded conversation, and insisted on total honesty about the parts of her life — including her marriage to Miles Davis — that she’d kept private her entire career.
By Lisanne Swart · 1 book · Memoir · Non-Fiction · Updated August 2026
MemoirOn my shelf
Just as I Am
Tyson’s account of a life that ran from a devoutly religious Harlem childhood through the fashion world, television, and a film and stage career built almost entirely around a rule she set for herself early and never broke: she would not play a role that demeaned Black womanhood. The book covers her defining performances — Sounder, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, How to Get Away with Murder — alongside a turbulent marriage to Miles Davis that she writes about with unexpected candor. She died two days after its publication.
Tyson turned down more work than she accepted, on principle, for most of a fifty-year career, and the book is really an argument for that kind of discipline — what it costs and what it protects. Read as a last testimony, deliberately completed and delivered, it has a gravity that few memoirs earn honestly.
Where to start with Cicely Tyson
Only one book, and it’s the right one
→ Just as I Am, published days before she died at 96 — a life examined with full intention, on her own terms.
If the theme is what draws you — a career built on saying no
→ My best non-fiction books list has more lives shaped by principle under pressure.
