jenifer lewis the mother of black hollywood

Later on, she came out with bipolar disorder, and I called her and we talked about it then. She came backstage and we sat and talked.

Who runs around screaming at 10,000 people ‘I love myself, and so do you!’ ‘You love me!’ I think I made a mistake or something, flubbed a word on stage, and I just threw my head back and went ‘Oh my god, I love myself!’ Well, she just thought that was the funniest thing, because it was so brave. I had done something that she just loved. Oh, yes, we talked about it! We met when she saw me on stage at A.P.L.A.-AIDS Project Los Angeles-and she came backstage. I was very, very sad when she passed away.ĭid you two actually talk about your shared experience? she was very brave, and just a beautiful actress. She used her artistry to help, to get the word out about mental illness. You mention being excited to meet Carrie Fisher, who was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and became a mental-health advocate. What the medication did for me is it put me in the middle so that I could focus, because before that I would self-sabotage, absolutely.

It put me at a level-I wasn’t high up in the polars, so high in the mania and so low in the depression. So I took note because, you know, how can you focus on your own journey if you can’t still your mind? And that is what the medication did for me. There was not a pause, and we were just all kinda sitting around, so I saw myself. When I saw Robin backstage, I saw something that I had never seen, which was the mania. The memoir is pure Lewis: thousands of exclamation points! Lots of cursing! Juicy anecdotes! Lewis isn’t afraid to get deeply personal, happily recounting her sexscapades and revealing that her girlfriends once nicknamed her the “dick diva.” “People come up, ‘Oh, you remind me of my aunt, you remind me of my mom.’ I always appreciate it.” “It speaks to everything that I am,” Lewis tells Vanity Fair.

It’s slated for a November 14 release, and it has a perfect title: The Mother of Black Hollywood. For the last two and a half years, the actress-currently starring in Black-ish-has been channeling those stories into a scintillating, yet heartfelt memoir. She can regale you for days with stories about her magnificent career and off-screen adventures: doing readings with Oprah Winfrey, having heart-to-hearts with Carrie Fisher, hooking up with theater star Gregory Hines. Everyone is “darling!” and “honey!” She’s as easily given to singing as she is to speaking. Jenifer Lewis speaks like someone who was raised on Broadway.

Jenifer lewis the mother of black hollywood