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Finding Me Book Summary

Book Summary

By Viola Davis




15 min
Audio available

Brief Summary

Finding Me (2022) is rich with Viola Davis’s experience not just in the acting industry, but also in trauma, abuse, poverty, and struggle. She obviously did not make it to the top without having earned it through grit.

Viola remains resolved that she is not her success. As she said in her book, “Success is absolutely wonderful, but it’s not who you are. Who you are is measured by something way more abstract and emotional, ethereal, than outward success.” This is a reminder that anyone entering chasing after success needs to have a firm foundation and understanding of who they are as persons.

For Viola, this meant addressing her inner battles and detaching from family drama. As she grew older, she learned to establish boundaries and how to say “no” to family members. For example, when she started earning from her acting career, her family members accepted portions of her generosity until it became a habit and then an obligation on Viola’s part. Eventually, as Viola became more successful, her family members also started asking for more such as a house or a car. When it became too toxic for her, Viola cut them off and said “no.”

Setting boundaries is important not only in cutting off toxic family members but as well as in her acting career as it helped her set quality work ethics to be respected and followed by others. As an actress, she held the same standard of addressing inner battles and having a strong foundation. She believes that being an actor means being an observer of life. This meant a truly great actor observes real people, not other actors. This way, they understand a character to understand themselves better. It’s these techniques and more that made Viola Davis the multi-award-winning actress that she is now.

What readers will greatly learn from Viola’s memoir is that a person’s success is just the tip of the iceberg. The memoir is not just about the success of an award-winning actress; it includes her past, present, and future as an individual who has come a long way to be herself and to become another person through acting. It contains stories of pain, trauma, healing, and fighting for a career and a future she wasn’t even sure existed for her and her race. As if the acting industry was not difficult enough to perpetrate, Viola Davis had to deal with problems with her race, feminity, and past. Indeed, Viola’s vulnerability in her younger years made her a strong and independent Black woman now who is dominating the film industry.

About the Author

Viola Davis is a prominent American actress and producer. Exclusively, she is the only Black actor to have achieved the “triple crown” of acting by winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony for her work in film, television, and theater, respectively. She has also won a Grammy Award in 2023 for the best audiobook, narration, and storytelling recording for Finding Me (2022). In 2020, she was ranked ninth on the New York Times’ list of greatest actors of the 21st century. Although she started acting since 1992, her film breakthrough happened in when she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a troubled mother in Doubt (2008). Since then, she played more famously known and challenging roles such as, among many others, a 1960s housemaid in The Help (2011), lawyer Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2020), and more recently, a general in The Woman King (2022).

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Finding Me Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

In Finding Me (2022), multi-award-winning American actress Viola Davis shares and recounts her journey from poverty in Rhode Island during her childhood to Hollywood fame. She bares stories of her childhood trauma, family drama, struggles, determination, and eventual triumph. In a world where there is a 95 percent unemployment rate in acting and media only focuses on 0.04 percent who are famous, people who want to get into acting need to strive, thrive, and learn from the best actors and actresses, such as Viola Davis, who has gone through such experiences herself and more. Among the insightful lessons we learn from Finding Me (2022) are about making peace with your past and shaping your future. These are essential tools not just for being successful in the acting industry, but also for becoming better a better version of yourself in a world that constantly pressures you to be the best.

Make peace with your past.

Viola openly grew up poor, hungry and bullied in Central Falls, Rhode Island. At that time, they were the only black family in Central Falls, living in a broken house with barely any water and heat and with abusive parents. She and her sisters grew up sexually abused by their neighbors who would “babysit” them. To cope, Viola and her sisters excelled in school by being active in academic as well as extracurricular affairs. These activities helped Viola stay longer away from the house and focus on improving the knowledge and skills she needed to survive. Viola and her sisters were greatly motivated by the idea that they didn’t want to end up in the same situations as their parents – low-wage earners with endless physical toil and labor and coping through gambling and alcohol, all while also risking the lives of their partners and children through abuse.

Growing up, Viola did not have anything to defend herself with except grit, attitude, anger, and competitiveness. However, she shared that memories have two kinds of effect on people: they can either give you joy and perspective during hard times, or they can strangle you and prevent you from living your best life. When Viola Davis was able to seek professional help at the age of twenty-eight, she realized that her journey had been all about healing her childhood self in Central Falls. It wasn’t until she told her therapist this that she realized her inner child didn’t need healing. She was a fighter and a survivor; what she needed was comfort in a new home where it would not envelop her present version. As Davis said, “What you haven’t resolved in your life can absolutely become an obstacle in the work that you do.” To become the best version of herself in the present, she needed to comfort her inner child instead of focusing on being angry at the circumstances she was under when she was young.

By making peace with her past, Viola Davis felt liberated. As she became more successful, she realized “All I’ve got is me. And...

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book summary - Finding Me by Viola Davis

Finding Me

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