I’m most definitely in my memoir era. I’m in a season where drawing from other people’s lives and experiences is a sure fire way to inspire me out of some rut that seems to have just engulfed me.

That said, I don’t know how ready I was for Finding Me. In her memoir, Viola takes us on her life journey before she collided with her destiny. Her early childhood is not something I could have imagined for anyone, more so her. The poverty, the racism, the abuse and the hopelessness, I’ll admit are not what I saw on screen watching her ballsy character as Annelise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder.

It just goes to show how little we know about the people we talk the most about. This, to an extent, is the reason I enjoy SOME celebrity memoirs. The ability to be given a front row seat to the viewing of the good, the bad and the ugly of the joys and horrors that helped shape them. The other reason I enjoy these is that deeply entrenched in each story is the undeniable pull of destiny. That feeling that, try as they may have, this individual had no other option but to be exactly who they turned out to be.

Finding Me will break your heart. I can’t state that enough. Little Viola, her horrors, her sorrows, the nightmare she lived and witnessed, will probably haunt your heart for a long time to come. Finding Me will also lift your spirit, reignite your hope, help you understand that most of life is not in your control and yet, by some miracle, it continues to work out for your good.

I commend Viola for the candid retelling of her life. This is unlike any celebrity memoir I’ve read and what makes it most memorable for me is the lack of shame when telling her most vulnerable and ‘unbecoming’ truths. This is who she is, this is her life, and it is a brave retelling. 

My most favourite thing about her story, besides destiny hunting her down and ushering her into the rest of her life, is the prayer she prayed just before meeting her husband, and how precisely God sometimes answers prayers, and how those answered prayers become unwavering blessings in our lives.

I also loved how she knew that to live an honest life, she did not need to run from her past, to reinvent her story or to hide from it, but rather to carry it with her as she outgrows it, as she sometimes falls back into its traumas and as she becomes present day Viola and an inspiration to those like her. It truly was a wonder to behold.