One Nightstand With Viola Davis

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

For Viola Davis, acting legend, author, and philanthropist, reading was a habit she cultivated as a teenager. “My sister Dolores tops me because she was reading Wuthering Heights when she was probably 11,” she says. “[But] when I was young, [my favorites] totally were mysteries, The Bobbsey Twins. Actually, I'm not going to lie, anything I could get my hands on. Any escape I could find.”

Davis parlayed her love of reading into her extraordinary 2022 memoir, Finding Me, which became a New York Times bestseller. Finding Me gave a breathtakingly honest account of a childhood beset with extreme poverty and racial abuse, before Davis discovers the once-in-a-generation talent that propelled her to Broadway and Hollywood stardom.

“I always say that the book is only 30% of who I am because it really, what it does is it challenges memory and the power of memory,” she says. “What I've remembered and what I've processed is maybe 30% of it. And then there are certain things that, I'm not going to lie, I'm too ashamed of. It's too much for me. There's certain things that I think would be too much of an indictment for other people and I don't think it's mine to share. And then there's a lot of things that I remember wrong.”

Davis was awarded the Grammy for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording in 2023, cementing her EGOT status. (She previously won two Tony Awards — for King Hedley II and Fences — as well as an Emmy for How to Get Away with Murder and an Oscar for the film adaptation of Fences in 2017.) Her newest release, Judge Stone, is a novel co-authored with James Patterson. It tells the story of Mary, a Black judge in Alabama who is tasked with ruling over the prosecution of a doctor who performed an illegal abortion on a 13-year-old rape victim, and subsequently becomes the victim of racism and harassment. It’s a prescient, pacy story which the pair developed in a true collaboration.

“I would call [Patterson] while I was driving to soccer practice or pick up my daughter,” she says. “It's like, ‘Let me pass this by you, James. OK, just keep an open mind.’ And he always had an open mind. I was shocked. Sometimes I said, ‘OK, I'm going to have to really explain this to him because he's a dude. I'm a woman.’ But I never had to work that hard. He was always open.”

In Finding Me, Davis’ sisters are constant forces of support and love, and Davis was keen to arm Judge Stone with a sisterly force of her own. “My sisters were my tribe,” she says. “It takes a village. You can't go it alone. My sister, Anita, she was a fighter. She grew her nails to be a better fighter, and she was a good fighter, by the way. She took down a girl who knew jujitsu. Every day I was like, ‘Really, Anita?’ And then my sister, Diane, who was incredibly intelligent, and my sister Dolores, who was incredibly intelligent, but very mischievous. I like mischievous people. I like people who buck the system and people who dare to go out there and use their voice. I mean, all of us were that person and I needed all of them to get me out.”

Her own reading habits are rather diverse — she loves Margaret George’s historical novels and has read each Harry Potter installment twice — although she’s not immune to picking up books, including those within Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight series, to connect more with her daughter and nieces. “I'm not going to lie because I love young people,” she says of delving into Bella and Edward’s vampiric love affair. “[My niece] is a PhD student, but she's like, ‘Auntie, these books!’ And I say, ‘OK, I'm going to read them’ because I want to connect with her. I couldn't believe it. I think I finished them in like a week and a half.”

How Davis finds time to read with her upcoming slate of projects is a feat in and of itself. She’s in pre-production for Ally Clark, an Amazon MGM thriller in which Davis investigates a mysterious international conglomerate following the death of a friend, and I Almost Forgot About You, an adaptation of Terry McMillan's novel. In January 2027 she will also appear in Children of Blood and Bone, an adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s novel directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. She also hopes to adapt Judge Stone into a series of its own. “That's what I'm going to put in the universe, because I'm a powerful manifester,” she says, smiling.

Keep reading to discover Davis’s four favorite books.

Her first choice is Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, which she describes as “the first book that really just blew my mind.” The autobiographical novel tells the story of Brown’s childhood in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s amidst poverty, racism, violence, and a nascent drug epidemic.

“I always say it brought me into consciousness,” says Davis of the book. “I remember every single time I just turned a page, I was catapulted to another time. And it was a world that no one had taught me about, although it was my world. And you know what? The thing about the book is, you meet him as a young boy. By the end of the book, it is a completely transformed community and a completely transformed life. And I was with him every step of the way.”

Within the book, Brown reckons with those who support his vision of himself living in another world, and those who try to pull him back down, a circumstance Davis relates to. “I always say they both invite you into your fate and your destiny,” she says. “I've certainly held both hands of people who said, ‘You're ugly, you're never going to amount to anything. You're always going to be poor.’ And the other hands I held that said, ‘Anything you want.’ And they both can be an inspiration in the way if you put them in the right place. And I think that my desperate need to get out probably made me migrate toward the people who were rooting for me.”

Her second choice is Black Boy by Richard Wright, a memoir which covers the novelist’s childhood growing up in the South during Jim Crow. “It's sort of this portrait of America that is renegade, that is the different side that we don't see… but is very much a part of our truth, but rears its ugly head in someone's personal biography,” she says. “So it doesn't just become a story about his life. It becomes an indictment on us, like Manchild in the Promised Land.”

The book reminds her of Joseph Campbell’s writing about the hero’s journey. “I feel that sometimes the weight of being Black in America, the stigma of it, you could stigmatize yourself so much that that stigma has a heavy, heavy weight,” she says. “It permeates everything, right? It permeates your intelligence. It permeates your beauty. It permeates your sense of self. It squelches your voice. And so to be able to sort of bust out of that and swim through it and develop your own consciousness about who you are is a hero's journey.”

Her third choice is The Color Purple by Alice Walker, a book she read as a teenager when it was first published. “That book was everything,” she says. “I think that book is one of the most important books out there for ... I mean, I'm sure for women in general, for people in general, for me as a dark-skinned Black woman, it was everything.”

It has a special professional resonance for Davis, who felt an immediate connection with Celie. “That was my monologue that I would use to get into everything,” she says of Celie’s first two entries. “Circle in the Square Theater [and] Juilliard.”

The adaptation, which starred Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, was released in 1985 while Davis was in college. “I was in the movie theater,” she says of going to see it. “First of all, I'm a Whoopi Goldberg connoisseur. Everything she did, I was there. And by the way, I have not told her that yet. Every time ... I think I held her hand the other day when I was at The View and I was like, ‘Viola, you could actually say this to Whoopi.’ But I didn't. I loved everything that she was in because I see myself in her.”

Her final selection is a newer release, All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert. “I could not put that book down,” she says of Gilbert’s memoir, which she read during a long-haul flight to Paris. “I had to DM her. I said, ‘Let me tell you something, Elizabeth…’ You know what I feel that she has that’s extremely rare? First of all, well, a few things. She has an immense curiosity about herself, but an immense bravery to embrace the parts of herself that would be considered extremely ugly.

“It's interesting that she named it All the Way to the River because her friend, of course, is saying there's those friends that are ‘all the way to the river’ friends,” she says. “I think I have ‘all the way to the river’ friends, but also you have to be ‘all the way to a river’ friend to yourself, all the way complete until you get to the river. That's what I got from there. I got a complete healing journey and I thought that I got it with Eat, Pray, Love, and now it's like this part of the journey and it stimulated something in me. It really did.”

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