Finding Home: A Memoir

Room 222 actor Nicholas highlights her familial turmoil and early career successes in this poignant autobiography. Born in 1944 Detroit, Nicholas writes of growing up bookish, intelligent, and insecure, learning early on that, as a young Black woman, she lived “in a country that will neither celebrate your looks or your brains unless you work hard all the time.” Her childhood was also marked by tensions around her paternity: her mother’s husband was not her biological father, a secret she suspected based on her parents’ marital troubles, but didn’t confirm until she was a young adult. Nicholas spills plenty of ink about her career in film and TV (including her roles in In the Heat of the Night and Ghost Dad) and pulls back the curtain on her sometimes turbulent romantic life. What sets her account apart from other showbiz memoirs is its rigorous introspection (“I trusted either too much or not at all”) and the piercing manner in which she writes about entrenched American racism, “a hatred that ebbs and flows like a river that has no end.” Such clear-eyed wisdom lends the proceedings an uncommon emotional weight. Even readers unfamiliar with Nicholas’s acting work will be moved. (Nov.)