Jada Pinkett-Smith has a lot of things that she wants to clear up. In her new memoir, Worthy, the actress, musician and wife of megastar Will Smith addresses the now-infamous public assault heard around the world: when Smith struck comedian Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars after Rock cracked a joke about Pinkett-Smith’s alopecia-induced bald head. The smack also captured Pinkett-Smith in the same miniature diorama of pop culture drama–but things are even more complicated than we’d previously thought.
According to Pinkett-Smith, when Smith screamed, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth,” at Rock, he was speaking out of turn, in a sense. One of the several genuinely surprising revelations in the book is that the power couple has been secretly un-coupled, and living totally separate lives, since 2016.
“Will and I had pictures in our mind of what a happily married couple was,” Pinkett-Smith writes. “And our pictures didn’t match. Inevitably, we came to the proverbial stage of irreconcilable differences. That realization became starkly apparent by 2016. We had been here before. There had been several on-again and off-again attempts at salvaging the marriage. We were tired from not finding a middle ground. We’d been on a seesaw for too long.”
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“I [was] really shocked [by the Oscars incident] because, mind you, I’m not there,” Pinkett told Hoda Kotb in an interview last week. “We haven’t called each other husband and wife in a long time. I’m like, ‘What is going on right now?’”
What else does Pinkett-Smith have to say about the slap?
Pinkett-Smith writes of the strangeness of her husband-in-name-only “defending her honor” in such a shocking and public way. She writes that it was “disturbing” to witness “conflict of that nature displayed between two Black men on a ‘white’ stage ... as was watching a Black man insult a Black woman on a ‘white’ stage. Once again.”
She writes of her distress, and describes how she was eventually able to come to a place of having compassion for Smith over what he did, but frankly skates around the heart of her emotions in favor of repeating platitudes about forgiveness.
“One of the Holy Lessons of this night was how to practice loving unconditionally,” she writes. “All that thorny history of our complicated life together became a nonissue. Will was going to need my support. I knew that people who once proclaimed love for Will would turn their back. I knew how that felt, and I knew he didn’t. My heart broke for him, but I couldn’t prepare him for the onslaught. The only thing I could guarantee was that I wasn’t going to leave his side.”
She also writes of harrowing incidents in her personal life (dealing drugs; suicidal ideation) with puzzling detachment.
Pinkett-Smith’s mother and father were both drug addicts, and her father was abusive, she writes. This upbringing informed her eventual decision to seek independence by dealing drugs herself.
“The idea that I could gain some financial freedom by selling drugs just seemed practical to me—to make a way for myself in a landscape where so many awful things were happening,” she writes. “With the distorted reality that I had, selling drugs was the norm and didn’t seem as extreme as the horrors taking place every day—like the time one of my homeboys was shot multiple times and left dead in the middle of the street from one a.m. to seven a.m. the next morning.”
She also often falls into the celebrity memoir trap of recounting her own experiences using the kind of high-octane Spiritual Guru language that flattens unique experiences into tropes.
While struggling with suicidal depression as an adult, she recounts offering up fruit and flowers to Mother Earth and Mother Aya and to any other Divine energies out there willing to look over me.” Guess how she eventually managed to work through her trauma? If you had “ayahuasca shaman” on your celebrity memoir bingo card, congrats, you win a prize.
The notorious “entanglement” is skimmed over.
Pinkett-Smith is clearly an interesting and complicated person, but she hamstrings herself by declining to go into detail at critical points in her own story. She says almost nothing about August Alsina, the young singer with whom she had a romantic relationship; Pinkett-Smith infamously described their bond as an “entanglement” on her show Red Table Talk, but in Worthy, she skims over Alsina entirely.
Instead, she compares their relationship to the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Red Shoes,” writing, “I could not know that I was about to be trapped in my own Red Shoes. Like the girl in the story who is gratified by her Red Shoes, unaware of their destructive power until the rapture turns to pain, I got preoccupied with making up for lost time and reclaiming the days of my youth. The warning of the story is that once her dance begins, the orphan girl can’t remove the Red Shoes no matter how hard she tries. The only way to stop the dance is for her feet to be cut off.”
That’s a disappointment, because the dynamics of that entanglement were odd to say the least: Pinkett-Smith got to know Alsina via his friendship with her son Jaden, and before their relationship became romantic, “it all started with Alsina being sick and needing care,” Pinkett-Smith said previously. Is it morally permissable to sleep with your son’s sickly friend who’s 21 years younger than you? Only Pinkett-Smith can speak to that, but she doesn’t in Worthy.
Tupac Shakur may well have been the true love of her life.
She goes into far more detail about her relationship with the legendary rapper Tupac Shakur, alongside whom she grew up in Baltimore and who clearly is one of the great loves of her life. The two attempted to kiss as teenagers but found that there simply wasn’t chemistry, she writes; instead, they mutually supported one another through their respective artistic projects and corresponded all the way up until his tragic shooting death.
“We were kindred spirits in so many ways, and although Pac may have had an attraction to me in the beginning, the more time we spent together, the more we could both see that there was no romantic chemistry between us... at all,” Pinkett-Smith writes, somewhat unconvincingly, given how much ink she spills over him.
Later: “Pac had a way with words that could paint the most idyllic picture of his heart. I knew we had deep love for each other, but not in the husband-and-wife sense.”
Pinkett-Smith writes lovingly of many complicated figures in her life, including her abusive addict father, who told his daughter when she was 7 that he could not be a parent to her because he was an addict and a criminal.
And what about Will Smith, her husband? She initially found him too “cheerful” and not as “funny” as everyone else seemed to.
Of Will Smith, her husband of many years (in public, if not in private), Pinkett-Smith writes much while saying little.
“Even after meeting him a couple of times in the Hollywood whirl, I concluded that Will Smith would never have been on my radar—only because he was so... cheerful,” she writes. “That was a sticking point. Cheerful didn’t represent itself as deep, and my young mind believed a troubled person was a deep person. To my surprise, Will proved to be one of the most complex individuals I’d ever meet. We had more in common than I could have imagined, but it was his irresistible charm that stole my heart—and, in time, that of the world.”
Throughout Worthy, she’s so careful to be solemnly, universally respectful of her friends and family that when she does break from this pattern, even briefly, it’s very revealing.
“He could sometimes, only sometimes, be hilariously silly,” Pinkett-Smith writes of first falling in love with Smith. But? “I did not find him as consistently funny as others.” The book could have used way more moments like that: tell us how you really feel, Jada!
