Finding Me by Viola Davis Review: A Raw, Honest Memoir Worth Listening To

🎧 Listened in audio | 📢 Narrated by Viola Davis
⏱ Duration: 9 hours | Genre: Memoir | 🏷️ Publisher name: HarperOne
Read as a part of Goodreads Challenge: 120 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of Oprah’s Book Club

Book Blurb:

In Finding Me, Viola Davis traces her life from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stages of New York City and beyond. She looks back at the little girl who ran from her past until she decided to stop running. Along the way she examines how our stories get reshaped to fit a competitive, judgmental world, and how radical honesty and creative expression can lead back to self-love. Part reflection, part promise, the memoir is written for anyone feeling untethered and hoping to rediscover who they were before the world handed them a label.

Let’s talk about the book:

This is not a polished celebrity memoir. It’s a raw, unguarded account of how a girl who grew up in poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, became one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation.

Davis doesn’t soften her childhood. She writes about hunger, shame, rat-infested housing, and a violent, volatile father, and she does it with an immediacy that makes you feel the weight of those years rather than just learn about them. What stands out is that she doesn’t present the pain as a neat origin story for success. She shows how it lingered into adulthood, shaping her self-worth, her relationships, and her long struggle to believe she deserved to take up space.

The book is at its strongest when it traces how she built herself: the teachers and mentors who saw something in her, her path through Rhode Island College and Juilliard, and her years of scrapping for work in an industry that rarely knew what to do with a dark-skinned Black woman who didn’t fit its narrow molds. Her reflections on colorism, representation, and the quiet cost of being “the only one in the room” are sharp and never preachy. The Hollywood chapters are less about glamour than about the grind and the doubt that came with each hard-won role.

Her voice is a real strength. It’s earnest, funny in unexpected moments, and fiercely honest, and it reads exactly as you’d imagine her speaking. The audiobook, which she narrates herself, is especially powerful. The structure can meander a bit, and some readers may wish for more behind-the-scenes detail on her famous projects, but that isn’t what this book is about.

At its core, Finding Me is about the work of reclaiming your own story, forgiving without forgetting, and learning to see yourself as worthy. It’s moving and often hard to read, but I finished it feeling inspired rather than weighed down.

Would I recommend it?

Yes, and if you can, listen to it. Finding Me is a memoir about growing up poor in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and the long road to believing you deserve to take up space. Some of it is hard to get through, and the structure wanders now and then. But Viola Davis is so honest that I finished it feeling inspired, and hearing her narrate her own story made every chapter land harder. If you like memoirs that skip the shine and go straight at the truth, put this one on your list.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

5 book recommendations

Becoming by Michelle Obama
If Viola’s story of building herself from the ground up grabbed you, Michelle Obama’s memoir traces another extraordinary rise, with the same honest look at identity and belonging.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Poverty, a volatile father and a long road to making peace with your childhood. This one pairs beautifully with the early chapters of Finding Me.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
You get the same mix of humor and hard truths about growing up poor and out of place, and it is another memoir that shines in audio with the author narrating.

Educated by Tara Westover
A girl rebuilds herself from a painful, chaotic childhood through sheer determination. Pick it up if the “reclaiming your own story” thread in Finding Me stayed with you.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
A classic about trauma, race and finding your voice, and a natural next step if Viola’s reflections on being seen and unseen resonated with you.

Your turn: which memoir made you feel seen?

Have you read Finding Me, or listened to Viola Davis tell it herself? I’d love to know whether the audiobook hit you the way it hit me. And if there’s a memoir that made you feel seen, drop it in the comments, because my list could always use another. Are you working through the Oprah’s Book Club challenge too? Tell me where you are.

Book links

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Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
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