Jenifer Lewis flips open her newest memoir, the cheerily titled Walking in My Joy: In These Streets, and appraises the first photo inside: a distressing black-and-white selfie of her swollen face. It’s a jarring first image—puffy cheeks, a miserable expression—and is starkly at odds with the book’s glamorous cover portrait, featuring Lewis in a floor-length pink gown, kicking up a foot ensconced in a bedazzled heel.
It’s meant to be outrageous. “How about this shit?” she exclaims over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, holding the photo next to her face. “I put it in black and white, just to shock the fuck outta everybody. To go from this pretty, happy bitch to that! This is what stress looks like, bitches!”
This is the one-two punch of Lewis, the diva who loves to get real. Affectionately nicknamed the mother of Black Hollywood, she’s appeared in 400 episodic TV shows, 68 movies, and four Broadway shows. Among her hits? Playing Grandma Ruby in Black-ish, demanding matriarchs in Poetic Justice and What’s Love Got to Do With It and starring alongside Meryl Streep in Mother Courage and Her Children. In July, Lewis, currently starring in the Showtime series I Love That for You, cemented her achievements with a hard-earned star on the Walk of Fame. “Everybody [sent] flowers,” Lewis recalled. “My house looked like a funeral home at one point!”
Lewis chronicled her early successes in her first memoir, The Mother of Black Hollywood—a tart but sage tome about her career, her journey with bipolar disorder, and her sex addiction. Now she’s back with Walking in My Joy, which picks up where The Mother left off, chronicling her life during the Trump years and the pandemic. Walking has the same campy, conversational tone as Lewis’s first book. It’s decidedly funnier and louder, but also grounded by deeply personal stories, including a detailed examination of her relationship with an ex-boyfriend who scammed her out of $50,000. (He pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge in 2020.) There’s also a devastating story about Lewis’s friend Kathy Griffin, who called Lewis one night during the height of quarantine, afraid she had overdosed on sleeping pills.
“‘I need help’ [are] three of the most powerful words on the planet,” Lewis says. “And certainly the most difficult to say.” The book reflects that message, with Lewis writing about her own mental health struggles and how she herself has continued to push through. “Show business is easy,” she says. “Show business is brushing my teeth now. But mental, spiritual, and physical self-care is the most important thing. To put these thoughts and feelings into a book is one of the best things I’ve done because I have so much in me. So much gratitude. And so many crazy stories.”
Vanity Fair: The book is very political. There’s a very strong anti-Trump stance. There’s political spoken-word lyrics between each chapter. When did you decide to make politics a theme?
Jenifer Lewis: It’s a theme throughout because it is what I was living. When the Trump era came, a fire was lit under me politically. I knew it was a dangerous situation. I knew before he was elected he was mentally ill. I know what it looks like. He went on to display every symptom of a sociopath. It was just wrong. I had to do everything I could to let people know during a very difficult time that we’re going to be all right.
Those songs [in the book] were written after major events in this country. “Take Your Knee off My Neck” was after George Floyd. “We’re Going to Be All Right” was after the shooting in Florida [at Pulse nightclub]. One came from Parkland. There was an overhead camera shot of the kids coming out of the school with their hands above their heads, and I could see one little boy’s arms were extended forward. I knew he was in shock, because I know what shock looks like. God gave a snail a shell; shock is our shell when things can’t be processed. When the guy came into my apartment in New York with a knife. When I nearly drowned in the Pacific. When my girlfriend revealed to me my boyfriend was a con artist—these were times I went into shock. When I’m out in the world on tour with my books, I’m not selling books. I don’t need that money. Writing these books was giving these kids the knowledge that no matter how big the fire is, they can come through.