Jada Pinkett Smith’s new autobiography Worthy includes a few juicy revelations, but buries them under self-help jargon and psychobabble
by TheTelegraph
Jada Pinkett Smith’s new autobiography Worthy includes a few juicy revelations, but buries them under self-help jargon and psychobabble
by TheTelegraph
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***The Telegraph’s Tim Robey writes:***
What was Jada Pinkett Smith’s state of mind, when her husband mounted the Oscars stage and slapped Chris Rock in March 2022? We wade through 95 per cent of her memoir, Worthy, to get to that moment, and it isn’t really worth the wait. Not when she starts calling it “the Holy Slap” – a springboard to personal growth.
At first, like many viewers, she assumed it was a skit; then she realised it wasn’t, but didn’t understand. Only when she heard the word “wife” yelled by Will did something click. “This is when sixteen-year-old Jada appeared,” she writes. “I’m back in a club back in Baltimore, a fight has broken out, and s— could start popp’n.”
Smith, as she recounts, grew up closely acquainted with violence and rage. Soon after she was born, “an argument got out of hand”, and her father, Robsol, punched her mother, Adrienne, in the stomach, an assault that swiftly led to them divorcing.
As a teen, she was a mid-level drug dealer on Baltimore’s streets, repeatedly mugged at gunpoint for whatever she held on her. Surviving such ordeals, and her more recent battles with alopecia, have given her a steely armour, a not-to-be-messed-with quality you can spot a mile off.
But vulnerability has still blighted her adulthood. The book begins with her battling suicidal depression in 2011. She hatched a plan to swerve her car off a steep cliff on Mulholland Drive: “a fatal accident that wouldn’t look intentional – for the sake of my kids.”
Those children – Willow, Jaden, and Jada’s stepson Trey, from Will’s first marriage – come off the page like her guardian angels. But without the psychoactive drug ayahuasca, which she imbibed, starting in 2012, in night-long ceremonies orchestrated by an unnamed Medicine Woman, Smith is certain she wouldn’t have made it.
As this genre dictates, everything gets framed within a healing journey – admittedly, an ongoing one – towards a state of higher being, in which Smith finds a happy accord with “the Great Supreme”. But the book’s juice (and there is some), is diluted by a torrent of psychobabble and pick ‘n’ mix coping strategies.
**Read in full: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/worthy-jada-pinkett-smith-review-will-smith-slap-tupac/**