Whoopi Goldberg knows that life is short and she doesn’t want to wait. The New York actress, who has lived long and fast, will turn 69 on November 13 and does not intend to wait for any round number to review. For this reason, this May 7 she has launched her autobiography in the United States, a memoir of just over 200 pages that she has titled Bits and Pieces: My Mother, my Brother, and Me (Blackstone publishing house), still untitled in Spanish, and which could be translated as “Bits and pieces: my mother, my brother and me.” The title, together with the dedication (“This book is for all those who knew my mother and my brother”), well condenses the essence of his work: remembering his mother, Emma, ​​who died suddenly in August 2010, and his brother, Clyde, who died even more unexpectedly in May 2015, aged 65. But the review of the lives of the people she has loved the most and who will love her the most, as she herself says, also includes the personal and professional career of the popular performer and presenter. They were, she claims, her memory, and without them she is lost. She doesn’t want more time to pass to capture her memories.

Through the pages of the biography parade some of the names that have helped Goldberg (born Caryn Johnson) throughout her career, from directors like Mike Nichols to Steven Spielberg, from actors like Maggie Smith (who accompanied her for five hours in the dressing room of the London theater where he learned of his mother’s death, until he was able to leave for the United States) to Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he maintained a loving friendship based on philanthropy (and who taught him to asking each studio with which she made a film for a gift) and Marlon Brando, who after a telephone conversation appeared by surprise at her house and she found out because she heard someone playing the piano. The interpreter was born in a humble environment and grew up the daughter of a very peculiar single mother (who never revealed her age) in public housing in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. The interpreter’s journey is portrayed as that of a girl with a simple life to whom her mother, a woman ahead of her time, modern in her thinking and her way of living, taught her everything about life and whose death left her completely dislocated A journey in which mistakes, successes, divorces, scenes of racism, flirtations with drugs and family intimacies are told. And in which, despite everything, she defines herself as “the luckiest woman in the world.”

Among these intimate episodes, one especially stands out in which Goldberg says that, at one point in his childhood, his mother disappears. She comes home from school and finds it gone, lost, in a state that she is unable to describe. Her mother is taken to a hospital and she disappears from her and her brother’s lives for no less than two years. They don’t know anything about her, if she will come back, if not. She doesn’t remember much about what happened in the meantime, but she does remember that her father (homosexual, who never raised her or had much of a relationship with her) and her paternal grandfather (who also didn’t raise Emma) were the ones who put her in a hospital. a medical center. When Emma returns she goes through a cold period, somewhat disoriented, according to her memories, until everything returns to normal. The most revealing conversation won’t come until years later. As adults, Emma reveals to her two children that she went through therapy. electroshock during those years, a time that left her weakened and with hardly any memories. When she returns, she recognizes them, she did not remember who those children were. She never visited a doctor again, not even a dentist, and she changed her profession from nursing to teaching. Goldberg consoles herself for both of their early deaths by stating that, that way, she never had to make medical decisions for them.

The relationship with her mother has been the pillar of the actress’s life. Emma Johnson was a support for the artist from the very beginning, educating her, with few resources, to give her culture, education and a taste for the arts and books. In fact, not without a good helping of racism, Goldberg is often asked why she doesn’t have a thick accent (“Why do you sound so white?”), something that she continues to be surprised about and that her mother blamed on to the ignorance of others. She always supported her, even when she wanted to be an actress since she was a child. And also when she became pregnant and wanted to move on, when she was barely 18 years old. A year earlier, Ella Whoopi had married Alvin Martin, her counselor who was helping her quit the drugs she got into at 16. They separated shortly after; In fact, he has been married three times and has realized that being in a relationship is not for her. “Say to the next person: ‘No, thank you,’” her mother recommended.

It’s not for her to be a mother either. In the book, Goldberg acknowledges that she never forgot the physical pain of childbirth, nor her inability to breastfeed little Alex. When she had her she was very young, she had barely started her career. “I just wanted to act, but I didn’t know how to build a career or how to get a job,” she says in her bio. She wanted to be a film actress in Hollywood, but she started with theater in New York and then in Texas and then, yes, she arrived in California. She was dragging Alex with her until she got a good opportunity in New York and thanks to director Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) made the jump to Broadway. There Spielberg signed her for The color purplehis first big opportunity on screen and his first Oscar nomination, although he didn’t win it until the second, with Ghost and the role of Oda Mae (for which the writers did not want her; she achieved it thanks to the insistence and chemistry with Patrick Swayze).

Her early motherhood, at the height of her career, first made her have to ask for social benefits, which she later wanted to return to the State of California. And then, for long periods of time he did not see his daughter; It was her mother who took care of her. Emma left her New York apartment and flew to California (with just two paper bags as luggage, leaving everything behind, even her signed Beatles records and her children’s birth certificates) to care for the little girl, granddaughter at the time. that he cared for for years. In her pages, the performer, author and presenter acknowledges that she was not the perfect mother and that her relationship with her daughter is good now, but not excessively maternal. “She would never win an award for best mother,” she assumes.

“You can have it all. But get away from the idea that it’s going to be like in the movies. Having it all is the most complicated thing you can imagine,” she writes. She acknowledges that she knew about her daughter’s lack of affection from very early on. At just 15 years old, the young woman became pregnant; On the day she turned 34, she Whoopi Goldberg was a grandmother. She knows it was “his revenge” on her for being away from her for so long. Years later, her daughter confessed to her that she “believes she got pregnant as a teenager because she wanted to have a person in her life who didn’t know who Whoopi Goldberg was.” Alex Martin today has three children and a granddaughter; Since 2014, at 58 years old, Goldberg has been a great-grandmother.

In the eighties, at the peak of his fame, Goldberg fell into drugs again. For a year she was “a highly functional adult,” until the hallucinations, the clumsiness, and staying in bed for 24 hours came. In a New York hotel, alone on her birthday, she was discovered by one of the cleaners, sitting on the floor with a face full of cocaine. They were both scared of each other and she was so ashamed that she stopped using hard drugs, but she continues to take marijuana and even had cannabis marketing companies. She managed to get out of her addiction very quickly: “Again, I am the luckiest woman in the world.”

When Emma died in 2010, the performer and her brother decided to scatter her ashes in a place that made her happy: Disneyland park, in south Los Angeles. It is a common practice, although prohibited, but she recognizes that she knew that she would make her mother happy. Losing her brother just five years later – who also moved to California with them to work as Whoopi’s driver or simply be by her side – to an aneurysm left her “shocked, but not surprised,” because she says part of Clyde’s essence left with his mother. She was her pillar, theirs. “Because of her I was able to go from being Caryn Johnson, the little weirdo from whom no one expected much, to being me, Whoopi Goldberg.” The luckiest woman in the world.