Three celebrity memoirs that capture lives well led

2022 has brought celebrity memoirs that go beyond standard self-praise and regular validation of their personal stories. As the year comes to a close here is a pick of the best 3 that bring definitive journeys of three famous lives and the times that they lived in. This is nostalgia packed with realism that is worth reading.

Viola Davis- Finding Me

Viola Davis is amongst Hollywood’s most celebrated Black actors before studios, producers or the media woke up to under-representation of people of color. She has been instrumental in calling out the limited opportunities that Black actors get in American showbiz. Besides stellar performances in films like Doubt, Widows, Suicide Squad and Fences, she is most recognizable as Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder (2014), a role that won her an Emmy and is one of TV’s strongest female leads in recent years.

She has written a quintessential memoir with Finding Me, an inspiring story bearing emotional depth of her incredible rags to riches journey. Her life embodies almost every negative experience of being born Black and poor in America. She has faced abuse, violence at home and poverty throughout her childhood. Davis grew up amongst 6 kids in a poor family where often there wasn’t enough to eat. Her early memories include those of her father beating her mother regularly before the kids. Anxiety of the home environment coupled with racist bullying at school (her classmates were mostly White boys) led to bed-wetting, which meant that she would go to school smelling bad. She grew up in a rat-infested home and had to deal with humiliation from teachers for poor hygiene.

Yet she was competitive and ambitious, beating the White boys that would scare her at their own games. Viola went to Juilliard, a celebrated performance arts school in New York. Here, she upended preset bias against Black actors that prevailed in classics and literature. Davis went on to become a celebrated and award-winning stage actor (with two Tonys) before transitioning into TV and film. Davis won an Oscar for Fences (2017) for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She has been nominated thrice, including a best actress nod for The Help (2012). She had surprised when she had criticized r=this film and her applauded part later for pandering to cliches around Black women in film. Davis wrote this book as an introspection of her evolution. She writes, “Culturally, there is a spoken and unspoken narrative rooted in Jim Crow. It tells us that dark-skinned women are simply not desirable…” She has built a body of work that hasn’t required sexualization, instead it has created strong screen female characters that set a benchmark.

Bono- Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

Bono is an icon to an entire generation of music lovers across the world. Beyond being the front man of U2 and a legendary singer he has been an activist in the fight against AIDS and various causes. He has worked on ground in Africa regularly with global charities. His autobiography, Surrender, 40 Songs, One Story is verbose, long but an engaging reflection of the making of this man. Each chapter bears a U2 song as title even as it doesn’t follow a linear, chronological structure to telling his story.

Bono was born in Dublin, raised with strict religious values and had lost his mother at a young age. He married the first girl that he dated, Ali (Alison Stewart). The band U2 came together when they were in high school, performing locally and flourishing into a global favorite. That U2 have stayed together and that he remains married to the same person is in itself a testament to stability.

The book deals with his multiple segues into music, AIDS awareness, socially relevant causes and his conversations with fellow celebrities. For instance, Bono and INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence were talking about Kurt Cobain, the lead vocalist of Nirvana taking his own life. A few days later Bono was stunned to hear of Hutchence’s suicide. Besides his association with supermodels and celebrities he makes observations about his interactions with leading political figures like Angela Markell, Hillary Clinton and others. Interestingly Bono uses self-deprecating humor to explain his relationship with wife Ali, with whom he is still discovering what it means to fall in love; and his impulsive decision to drove an entire album ‘Songs of Innocence’ for free on Itunes. Bono recently made an appearance in Ukraine along with the lead guitarist of U2, the Edge. He remains an icon of the golden era of original rock music and a celebrity for whom goodwill is a way of life. His story is fascinating for the band’s legions of fans.

Geena Davis- Dying of Politeness: A Memoir

Geena Davis is one of the most endearing actors of her generation. She is Thelma in the cult Nineties hit Thelma and Louise (1991), Mrs Little from Stuart Little (1999) and Muriel Pritchett from The Accidental Tourist (1988). Like Bono Davis comes from a religious family with conservative values and a working class background. She is also an activist focused on gender in cinema, having founded the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media.

Her autobiography is a revelation of the unconscious bias and downright male chauvinism that a woman lives with in mainstream films and TV. Davis debuted in lingerie, but carved a career by surprising audiences with her roles. She talks about her struggle to be taken seriously and to find roles that give her room to act. Her book is funny even if at times it makes one sad that she has had to ‘adjust’ and ‘compromise’ so often for work. She recounts casual sexual harassment by a celebrated director, that she didn’t speak about. She mentions Bill Murray compelling her to try a massage device just to make her submissive after her Oscar win for The Accidental Tourist. Davis found her voice when she saw Susan Sarandon hold her own before directors or co-stars on Thelma and Louise. The book is peppered with anecdotes like when she recommended ‘the blond one’ for the role of a drifter in Thelma and Louise. This short part but a strong character role had Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Mark Ruffalo audition. And the role went to Brad Pitt. The book also features the mixed responses of men that she has worked with. Dustin Hoffman’s advice on how to get away when a co-actor sexually propositions her served her well in refusing Jack Nicholson. As she turned 40 worthwhile roles began to dry up. She took up archery and gradually built towards her continuous work on raising awareness against the inherent gender bias in cinema. At 66 Davis plays characters parts in mainstream films today as women begin to make impact in film narrative. Her book brings an honest account of what it has taken for this change to slowly happen from women like her.

Geena Davis
; she was well into her 20s before her mother explained: “I didn’t want anyone to think it was pronounced ‘gina’. As in va-gina.” “It turned out my entire identity was based on the fear of vaginas,” Davis notes drily.

There’s the director who asked her to audition by sitting on his lap while he rubbed his face in her breasts.

The representation of women and girls in the industry, on screen and behind the camera, is a drum she beats unapologetically throughout and the book is peppered with anecdotes that paint a depressingly familiar picture of the way female actors were treated. There’s the director who asked her to audition by sitting on his lap while he rubbed his face in her breasts (she complied) or the time Bill Murray, during a meeting, insisted on trying out a massage machine on her, despite her repeated refusals. (The other men in the room did nothing to make it stop.) Murray later screamed at her on the set of Quick Change for being late (she wasn’t) in front of their colleagues. “I tell this story because some time later we appeared together on The Arsenio Hall Show to publicise the movie,” she writes. “You can look it up on YouTube. Watch how Bill flirts with me and paws at me and even pulls down the strap of my dress… For that matter, notice how I giggle and go along with it, as if we’re great pals; as if the raging hadn’t happened, as if the way they’re both objectifying me is really fun. Like so many women in a situation like that, I didn’t know how to avoid being treated that way; I shut up and played along.”

Until she met Susan Sarandon. “Susan has changed my life more than anyone I’ve ever known.” (Some of that self-belief evidently rubbed off; when the film roles dried up in her 40s, Davis took up archery and within a couple of years was ranked 29th in the US Olympic trials.)

She has erred on the side of jaunty and conversational rather than soul-baring in the book and her combination of humour and self-deprecation is immediately appealing (she includes a section of verbatim encounters with the public that would puncture any Hollywood ego). Some readers may feel cheated that there is more detail here about her pets than her children, or that she is so reticent about the end of her three marriages, but she has clearly had to establish boundaries around her family’s privacy in the face of press intrusion. She writes movingly about the deaths of her beloved parents and saves her fiercest passion for the work she now does with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and the Bentonville film festival, established to promote female film-makers and ‘“diverse voices”. As a direct result of her research gathering data on representation in children’s film and television, inspired by the dearth of role models when her daughter was young, the industry has made conscious changes and female leads and co-leads in family films and TV.

In this hilarious memoir, Geena regales us with tales of a career playing everything from an amnesiac assassin to the parent of a rodent in Stuart Little; a soap star in her underwear to a housewife turned road warrior in Thelma & Louise; a baseball phenomenon in A League of Their Own to the first female President of the United States in Commander in Chief, and more. She is frank about her eccentric childhood; her many relationships, including her spontaneous Las Vegas wedding to Jeff Goldblum; her archery exploits which led her to the Olympic trials; and how she became a tireless advocate for women and girls, founding her own institute which engages film and TV creators to better represent women and actors from diverse backgrounds.

Dying of Politeness is a touching account of one woman’s journey to fight for herself, and ultimately fighting for women all around the globe.

Archita Kashyap is an experienced journalist and writer on film, music, and pop culture. She has handled entertainment content for broadcast news and digital platforms over 15 years. 

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