Jada Pinkett Smith is kissed by Will Smith as they arrive at the premiere of Aladdin at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on May 21, 2019.The Canadian Press
When I heard that Jada Pinkett Smith wrote a memoir, Worthy, I was desperate to see how she’d address the eye roll. You know the moment I mean: her reaction at the 2022 Oscars to a lame joke from presenter Chris Rock. If you believe the cultural commentary, Pinkett Smith’s mere gesture drove one of the most beloved actors in Hollywood history – her husband, Will Smith – to do her bidding and slap Rock, because she was such a scary Lady Macbeth and Smith was that far under her thumb.
But until I read her beautifully, searchingly and generously written book, which arrives Oct. 17, I had no idea how layered that moment was. “I could write a whole book on that particular night,” Pinkett Smith told me in a phone interview this month. “From the standpoint of just being a woman – no matter what your ethnic background or economic status – the implication is if a man does anything unsavoury, it’s her fault. We can thank the patriarchy for putting everything on Eve. Then you add the dynamic of being Black in America and all that comes with that experience. And being a Black woman, and having these two Black men on stage, on a white stage. It’s so deep.”
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And don’t forget the backstory that Pinkett Smith breaks down in another chapter: that infamous episode of her web series Red Table Talk where she and Smith discuss her entanglement with another man. What she didn’t say then – but is making clear now – is that she and Smith have long had an untraditional marriage that allows space for entanglements; that he’s had his own; and that, since 2016, the spouses have been “separated in every way except legally” yet intend to remain wed.
Pinkett Smith could have saved herself a cascade of vilification if she’d made all that public in 2022, but “I didn’t, because Will wasn’t ready,” she tells me. “I was ready. I’d made myself a gilded cage, and I wanted out of it. But when we’re trying to learn how to love ourselves, yet at the same time be in partnership with people we love, very rarely are we on the same aspect of the journey at the same time.”
As strange as it might sound, she says, she also felt that particular entanglement “was my mess, so it was my hit to take. My co-dependency kicked in: ‘I’m going to make sure Will is okay before I’m okay.’ It showed me a woundedness within myself that still needed healing.”
Watching that Red Table Talk before reading Worthy, when it appears that Smith has been one-sidedly cuckolded, is a very different experience from watching it again afterward. You may find yourself, as I did, hollering, “Jada! Speak up!” at your screen.
Pinkett Smith laughs. “Then people took that narrative – that I helped create, unfortunately – and decided, ‘If she could force Will to sit at that table and take that level of humiliation, then she bewitched him to go up on that Oscar stage.’ So yeah, a lot of factors, on top of the trope that women just happen to be evil temptresses that defile humanity.”
Reading Worthy, you might itch to skip ahead to these late chapters, but don’t. Pinkett Smith’s is a story that benefits from the careful, frank context she provides, beginning with her unstable upbringing in Baltimore as the child of two drug addicts; continuing through her teenage years, when she was both a rising star at the Baltimore School for the Arts (her best friend was Tupac Shakur) and a low-level drug dealer who twice had a gun pointed at her head; and into her Hollywood success and marriage, where getting everything she ever dreamed of wasn’t enough to assuage her PTSD and depression.
It didn’t feel risky to be this honest, Pinkett Smith says – it felt necessary. When she began writing in 2021, “I had been on this years-long journey from a lack of self-worth to worth. A woman’s journey is still very taboo, but I’d been through the gauntlet. My skin was Teflon. So I could go into depth about my experience, and perhaps help other women who come across challenging aspects of their journeys. Give them some breadcrumbs, some oxygen, that can give them hope in hopeless places, and inspiration in places where they have lost inspiration.”
She ends every chapter with a kind of self-help worksheet for readers, because “when I read memoirs that’s what I’d like,” she says. “I don’t want to have to dig for the jewels. Can you sprinkle them out there for me?” It makes the book feel intimate, as if she and her readers are doing this together.
The hardest chapters to write delve into her depression, and the shame and guilt she felt about it. “Returning to those dark places was not fun at all,” Pinkett Smith says. “I hadn’t just made it, I’d made it out – out of Baltimore and my circumstances – and so many hadn’t. How dare I have access to so much, and be miserable? People I was still very connected to were dying on the streets or suffering from addiction, and here I was whining because Hollywood hadn’t satisfied me. I was younger than my daughter is now, really confused, and I didn’t have a support system.”
“And specifically, in the African-American community at that time, depression was a white people thing,” she continues. “Black people were busy surviving. We couldn’t think about depression. That’s still something I’m working through. I still have a really difficult time allowing myself certain emotions, specifically grief. But I keep learning.”
Throughout the book, Pinkett Smith seeks help “from all angles: my trauma therapist, plant medicine, the universal source, which is what I call my higher power. There’s so much help around us if we’re open to seeing it, and willing to surrender.” Her voice is funny, wry, tough and personal, but mainly forgiving and empathetic.
I ask Pinkett Smith about the status of her family now – son Jaden, 25, a singer/songwriter/actor; daughter Willow, 22, an actor/singer; and Trey, 30, Will’s son from his first marriage. “The status of my family is that it’s perfect,” she replies. “We are a happy crew. The status of my relationship with Will, we’re doing a lot of work together and enjoying that work. We’re in a beautiful partnership and we’re figuring it out.”
“Once we forgive ourselves, we really forgive everyone else,” she sums up. “I’ve come to learn that the moments where I behaved badly, my lashing out was about my own inner anger. So my only wish is for others to find their own peace and internal reconciliation. I’m well-wishing everywhere. I’m hoping to give courage to others to embrace their journey and love every piece of it. All the dirty parts, the parts in the mud, as well as basking in the sun.”