Kerry Washington talked with her friend Reese Witherspoon about her memoir Thicker Than Water, published in 2023. The book she first sold was meant to be light; it became an account of the family secret she discovered as an adult, and of everything that secret had shaped in her life.
The book she did not plan to write
As her years playing Olivia Pope in Scandal ended, Washington sold the idea of a light book about what she had learned from the role. At that moment her parents told her that her father was not her biological father: she had been conceived with the help of a sperm donor. Every time she sat down to write, the page stayed blank. She offered to give the advance back, and only a year and a half later did she tell her publisher what was going on. Keeping her parents’ secret made her feel complicit in a story they had told for four decades, so she started writing, first for herself and her children.
A family that hid its pain
As a child she sensed something was being kept from her, despite being deeply loved. When the truth came out, the opposite of her parents’ fears happened: “I felt the veil lift.” In those days donor conception was experimental and secret, and her parents only asked that the donor be healthy and Black. She also writes about her father’s drinking and her mother’s coded warnings, which taught her to wear a mask and to value herself through her performance of perfection. Acting gave that hypervigilance a healthy place, but she had to fight for her authenticity. That fight began in college, with an eating disorder for which she first asked for help.
“Love is thicker than blood”
The book also covers infertility, a miscarriage and an abortion. She first thought the abortion story did not belong, then realised it was about privacy: the current attack on reproductive rights is an attack on everyone’s privacy. When she told her father she now knew, she saw how afraid he was of losing her, and told him she loved him even more. Readers now share their own family secrets with her, even in 30-second meet-and-greets.
The cover is a hyperrealist painting of a photo taken underwater in her parents’ pool. The title plays on “blood is thicker than water”: in the book, love is thicker than blood. She is searching for the donor out of curiosity, not to find a father: “I have a dad.” Her advice to people carrying a hard truth: find a safe person, and use “bookending”, calling a friend before and after a difficult conversation. Everyone, she says, deserves to be loved for exactly who they are.