A thoughtful review of Kerry Washington’s Memoir: Submitted by a reader
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Your Questions as a Lens Into Thicker Than Water
Katrinapavela, because you set up really excellent questions about Kerry Washington’s book, I’m taking the liberty of writing to you in a non-public way (at least I hope it’s non-public; I am not much of a Tumblr maker) since I’m especially interested in the questions that you posed about “Scandal” and what might be explored in the book, and about her “comfort” with Tony Goldwyn. But these are not things that I want to have a “public” conversation about. And I will, of course, understand if you don’t have time to read this and/or don’t want to respond. I think that I just need to get this off my chest, and your questions were an invitation to me to think deeply about the book.
I’ve read the book now and see that your questions are a great doorway into the reasons why I’m so disappointed with the book. In many ways, your questions are so much more interesting than much of the book.
The parts of the book where she talks about her younger self and the trauma she endured, the problems with her body dysmorphia, the complicated family dynamics including the difficulties of her parents’ relationship and the revelation of the sperm donation that made her existence possible—all of those things are fascinating, compellingly written about, and even revelatory.
But so much of the book is superficial to the point that there are parts that read as though written by a not especially interesting ghost writer for a politician’s narrative of the self.
I found troubling the lack of attention to any of her relationships outside of cursory mentions and some details about her acting—in movies with Jamie Foxx (for example), the almost non-existent adult friendships that have been so much a part of her life, and the short shrift given to her “Scandal” time—the things your question about the show sets out, and especially her inattention to what everyone knew and endlessly wrote and talked about: the romantic core of the show, Olitz. And amidst the superficialities to which I just alluded, the lack of depth in her descriptions of her time with Nnamdi—including their wedding and their parenting of Isabelle and Caleb—jumped off the page. Well, if such enormous omissions can be said to jump off a page (but then I’m a poststructuralist so lacunae are endlessly fascinating to me).
In other words, I did not expect a tell-all given how guarded KW is, but I’m actually shocked by how little—again, apart from her attention to her very young and her college aged self and her parents—this book offers as a doorway into KW’s thinking and feeling. She has been more open in some interviews and even in “Scandal” cast panels at PaleyFest, for example. She has been a more interesting commentator on her life and personality in some magazine articles when she has talked about her journey to understanding her arrival at a sense of possibilities. I’ve read a lot about her, and much of this book lacks the depth that her articulate summations of herself have hinted at in those places.
Finally, and I know that I’ve gone on much too long to be writing to someone I only know from Tumblr, it was the one-two-three punch of seeing her skip over David Moscow entirely, of her offering renditions of her conversations with Nnamdi that could have come from a fanzine (especially their dating and their wedding), and her choosing to mention Tony Goldwyn only twice in 305 pages when he, more than anyone else associated with “Scandal”—including Rhimes herself—was instrumental in “making” the Kerry Washing/Olivia Pope narrative that built her into the star that a vast audience came to know.
Your question about their comfort, the “physics” at play in their observable connections, was a beautifully worded way for me to think about the conundrum represented by the book: there are vast mysteries of work, of character, of connections with people who were and are central to the public and private Kerry Washington, yet they are curiously missing from a memoir that she and interviewers in the past weeks have touted as open, as revealing a great deal of vulnerability.
I teach literary and cultural studies, and I know just how much a “memoir” plays fast and loose with memory, with reconstructions of the details of a life, with walking a careful path between what one can bear to say and what one chooses to hold close. And perhaps my disappointment would be less had I not had my expectations raised by how smart she has been over the years in managing the interstices between how she responded to often unreasonable public demands of her and how she wanted to craft her image.
This book, again with the exceptions of her attention to her younger self’s traumas and her parents’ difficulties, was a real let down for me.
Anyway, thank you, for your work on this blog.
