Ok I slept on it after finishing this book and I’m back to write the review. I love Kerry Washington. I love Scandal. I am honored to have sat and listened to her story. Her vulnerability in sharing her relationship with food and the journey she embarked upon to desensitize the stigma’s around mental health, OCD and Anxiety, and body image are powerful things. Things that I find myself taking moments to think more clearly and specifically about as I discover my own relationship with myself, compulsions, food, and my body. Her self discovery and wondering of her familial history and reclaiming her relationship with her parents, all of it is well written and spoken and I appreciated listening to her story told my her.

I think I struggled with Kerry’s lack of acknowledgement around her socioeconomic privilege. To have not one but two parents who hold post secondary degrees, to have been afforded attendance to exceptional private schools and acting guilds that essentially set up her career and to have had the opportunity to go to college and choice to pursue a career path that was not specific to providing heavily for her family upon return is loud. I struggled with how little she called back to skin tone and colorism in the field of acting and Hollywood politics, because it is an important thing to acknowledge as someone in her steed and with her wealth of knowledge. I just was disappointed maybe?  As someone who is an active advocate for Black women, this felt…I don’t have the word but like less. More could have been given to the narrative of what it is like and how it is hard when you factor in colorism and educational privilege and even familial relationships…parental support, confidence, connections…and while I don’t think that she should have to carry that image nor tell that story for all Black creatives in the field, I think by proxy and nature of her roles and her activism, there is a level of wondering why it does show up more loudly in her words? 

Overall, a solid memoir that I think was well written and told and maybe the organization of the book as a whole could’ve been better, but Kerry is fun and full of life and it shined in this book as it does on the screen in her roles.