Around The Way Girl
Pages: 256
Edition: Hardcover
List Price: $26
Publisher: Atria / 37 INK
ISBN: 9781501125997
First entered: 22nd, Oct 2016
Number of weeks: 1
Book Summary
From Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner, Taraji P. Henson, comes an inspiring and funny book about family, friends, the hustle required to make it from DC to Hollywood, and the joy of living in your own truth.
With a sensibility that recalls her beloved screen characters, including Yvette, Queenie, Shug, and the iconic Cookie from Empire, yet is all Taraji, the screen actress writes of her family, the one she was born into and the one she created. She shares stories of her father, a Vietnam vet who was bowed but never broken by life's challenges, and of her mother who survived violence both in the home and on DC's volatile streets. Here too she opens up about her experiences as a single mother, a journey some saw as a burden but which she saw as a gift.
Around the Way Girl is also a classic actor’s memoir in which Taraji reflects on the world-class instruction she received at Howard University and the pitfalls that come with being a black actress. With laugh-out-loud humor and candor, she shares the challenges and disappointments of the actor’s journey and shows us that behind the red carpet moments, she is ever authentic. She is at heart just a girl in pursuit of her dreams.
Authors
Name: Taraji P. Henson
Hometown: Washington, DC
Born: Sep, 1970
About the author:
Taraji Henson is an American film and television actress. She is best known as Cookie Lyon on the Fox drama series Empire for which she won a Critics' Choice Award, a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Emmy Award. In 2008 she received an Academy Award nomination for her role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Henson is also a singer and provided the vocals for the Three 6 Mafia track "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp". The song won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2006.
Henson is a graduate of Howard University where she studied drama, a supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and is the single mother of a grown son.