Every celebrity memoir is an attempt at creating, packaging, and selling a personal myth. Interestingly, on the first page of his memoir published the year before the notorious slap at the Oscars, Will Smith had all but predicted the incident as resulting from his lifelong fear of “being seen as weak.” As a nine-year-old, he had failed to stand up for his mother when his father struck her. “Will Smith is largely a construction,” he wrote, “a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect himself. To hide myself from the world. To hide the coward.”
He continues, “It’s amazing how skewed your vision can become when you see the present through the lens of your past,” referring to his constant awareness and expectation of violence as a result of his upbringing. While this particular trauma was external, Smith also writes of the internal challenges he faced. At one point, he writes, “I was worse than broke—I was in the hole. The walls were tumbling down. I had enjoyed Sodom and Gomorrah way more than I was enjoying Jericho.”
He demonstrates a recognition of his situation and takes responsibility, saying, “I didn’t pay my taxes,” rather than blaming his situation on anyone else. Like Couric, his book goes challenge by challenge until it leads to a hopeful embrace of love and bravery, which Smith describes as “learning to continue forward even when you’re terrified.”
What all three memoirs have in common, besides their challenge/reward structure, is the construction of a personal myth. Smith puts this most explicitly:
We tend to think of our personalities as fixed and solid. We think of our likes and dislikes, our beliefs, our nationalities, our political affiliations and religious convictions, our mannerisms, our sexual predilections, et cetera, as set, as us. But the reality is, most of the things that we think of as us are learned habits and patterns, and entirely malleable, and the danger when actors venture out to the far ends of our consciousness is that sometimes we lose the bread crumbs mark- ing out way home. We realize that the characters we play in a film are no different than the characters we play in life. Will Smith is no more “real” than Paul [the dissembling character he plays in the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation]— they’re both characters that were invented, practiced, and performed, reinforced, and refined by friends, loved ones, and the external world. What you think of as your “self ” is a fragile construct.