Actor and talk show host Jada Pinkett Smith comes to the table with her new memoir Worthy. The world has crafted a narrative about her life, marriage to Will Smith, unconventional parenting, and yes, that epic relationship with rapper Tupac Shakur to whom the book is dedicated. Now, Pinkett Smith is telling us her own story, ready or not.
In the 1990s, there wasn’t a Black Gen X woman who didn’t want to be Jada Pinkett, or at least be her best friend. After she and Will Smith married, people loved her for being a supportive wife through Will’s career and raising their children, including a son from Will’s previous marriage. Everything came to a screeching halt when she decided to sit around a red table and talk. Before the entanglement, before she was blamed for Will slapping Chris Rock on the Academy Award stage, she was talking. Once she began to include all of us on the group chat about her life, feelings, and private experiences, things started to go left.
Jada Koren Pinkett was born in Baltimore to parents who were both drug addicts. She divided her time between her maternal grandmother, Marion Martin Banfield, and her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris growing up. Her father, who died in 2010, was not a stable part of her life; she also says he was violent. “Not having a healthy foundation, as I would come to find out way into my adulthood, had some really strong effects in regard to how I saw myself,” she writes in the book.
Due to an unstable home life growing up, she began selling crack cocaine as a teenager, deciding this was the way to financial freedom. “Growing up, the drug dealers were the ones that had affluence,” she recalls. She says the rough streets of Baltimore taught her how to be fearless, which served her well after arriving in Hollywood in 1990.
After many guest roles on television shows such as 21 Jump Street and Doogie Howser, M.D., she earned a role on A Different World in 1991 as college freshman Lena James. This led to her first feature film, Menace II Society, in which she played single mother Ronnie. The role was a recommendation from the late Tupac Shakur, who was set to star in the movie but ultimately was fired. Even so, he convinced her to stay on the project, and we thank Tupac for that.
Pinkett Smith and Tupac attended Baltimore School for the Arts at the same time and became very close. She says they shared a “friendship love chemistry” yet their relationship was purely platonic, saying that there was “no physical chemistry between us at all,” and the one time they attempted a kiss, it was “disgusting.” Regardless, Tupac still has Jada in an emotional chokehold.
Will Smith spoke about this in his 2021 memoir, Will. He said that when he and Jada were first together, his mind was tortured by her connection with Tupac. “He triggered the perception of myself as a coward,” Smith wrote. “I hated that I wasn’t what he was in the world, and I suffered a raging jealousy: I wanted Jada to look at me like that.”
That’s deep and sad at the same time. I don’t doubt that Jada loves Will. I just don’t believe she’s ever known how to love properly, especially after the example she had growing up. The fact that she’s never really believed in marriage while also not believing in divorce shows no accountability, in my opinion. Furthermore, it’s an excuse. It’s not about honoring a commitment; it’s twisting that emotional chokehold tighter because someone is allowing you to do it. It’s as if she has been living in a fantasy world in order to protect herself.
Pinkett Smith says that she was just as shocked as we were about the infamous slap heard around the world. She shared that her initial thought was that the slap was fake. “I thought, ‘This is a skit,'” she recalls. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him.’ It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.”
The truth is, so many have held her solely responsible for Will slapping Chris Rock. Not her fault, by the way. What we didn’t know was that at the time of the slap, she and Will had been separated since 2016. I do believe that in the midst of handling her emotional demons, she has caused damage as well. That is something she justifies more than owning up to.
Pinkett Smith admitted that even though she seems like she has a “perfect life,” she has struggled with depression and feelings of hopelessness. She opened up about a period where she fell into a deep despair. Despite having everything she could ever want, she still struggled with depression. She tried her best to make it seem like everything was okay, while dealing with her hardships privately.
“For two decades, I had been putting on a good face, going with the flow, telling everyone I was okay. Yet underneath, bouts of depression and overwhelming hopelessness had smoldered until they turned into raging hellfire in my broken heart,” she writes. “Unwelcome feelings — of not deserving love — made it harder to understand the disconnect between the so-called perfect life I had achieved and the well of loss I carried with me.”
That loss, by the way, was Tupac.
We can’t forget that celebrities are real people, too, and are not immune to issues and unfortunate situations of life that everyone else faces. Reading that she wanted to end her life was heartbreaking. “When I turned 40, I was in so much pain. I couldn’t figure a way out besides death. So, I made a plan. I started looking for places, cliffs where I could have an accident, because I didn’t want my kids to think that their mother had committed suicide.”
In the middle of this, she ended up having an encounter where she tried ayahuasca, a psychedelic drug, which made her suicidal thoughts go away completely. “It helped me, it gave me a new intimate relationship with myself that I had never had before.”
I give this book a 4/5 stars. For me, Jada Pinkett Smith is one of the best to ever do it. Although this memoir was forthcoming, there was so much that we already knew. Because of that, my initial reaction was to judge and bark that she’s not being totally sincere. I did. But I also decided to extend her some grace and honor the fact that she was so open about her personal battles. It’s clear that she’s still haunted, tormented, in fact, over the past and what might have been. That carries over into how she sees herself and how she handles life.
I can certainly relate to the feelings of being overwhelmed faced by trying to live up to impossible standards. Worthy is a Black woman’s journey to feeling empowered enough to reveal her imperfect, flawed, messy self and not flinching. Imagine if we all had the courage to do that.
Worthy is available October 17, 2023, wherever books are sold.
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