Review: "Thicker Than Water" by Kerry Washington

Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington
Published September 2023 via Little, Brown Spark
★★★

Picked this up because Washington was a guest on a podcast that I sometimes listen to, and at the beginning of the podcast they said, more or less, 'We'll be talking about the family secret discussed in Washington's new book, but without identifying that secret', and I figured I might as well read the book first. (Note: I'll stay vague about the family secret here, but it's all over recent articles about the book, so you can either Google for details or steer clear if you'd rather learn it from the book.)

There's a fair amount of family story here, but the main story is less about family and more about Washington's trajectory as an actress. That's fine, of course, but it's generally not what interests me in a memoir; my favorite actor-memoirs are usually the ones that keep the thing they're famous for on the periphery and instead delve into things happening behind the scenes. And that's not to say that those things aren't here—Washington talks about family strife, and struggling with an eating disorder, and childhood abuse, and it's clear that she's being very intentional with her word choices and interpretations. But...there's a reason that the family secret nearly bookends the rest of the story with a teaser and a reveal: it provides the hook, but there simply isn't enough material there to carry through the entire rest of the book. I can see why it would have been complicated for the family, but at the same time, many things that people treated with great secrecy in the 70s are markedly more common now, and this feels like one of them—something that if a friend told me was in their family story, I'd go 'Oh, okay,' and not give it any more thought than they felt necessary.

Recommend this one for fans of Kerry Washington, but as someone who has never owned a television and is very happy to have seen Barbie this year because it means that I don't have to watch another movie for at least another two years, this wasn't really for me.