That Kerry Washington comes from a seemingly perfect family is something to which I thought I could attest. Four years ago, on an icily grey day in New York City, I met the actor after watching her gut-wrenching performance on Broadway in the play American Son. I sat on a sofa on the vacated stage, in deep conversation with Washington’s parents, Earl and Valerie: she a professor, he a businessman, who had raised their daughter in a hard-working, predominantly black neighbourhood in the Bronx. I remember thinking how good-looking, charming and erudite they seemed. And Washington – gracious and gorgeous in real life – made so much sense as their offspring.
If there is a single goal behind Washington’s new memoir, Thicker Than Water, it is exploding the fiction of that perfect image.
