Finding Me: A Memoir

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-17

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

128 Washington Street

An important symbol in the book is Viola and her family’s first apartment in Central Falls, 128 Washington Street. Nicknamed simply “128,” the apartment comes to serve as a codeword for “hell” among her and her sisters. As a symbol, it represents the challenges and adversities of Viola’s childhood. The apartment is located in a condemned building; it is extremely unsafe because faulty wiring causes fires to break out frequently; there is rarely any electricity, heat, gas, or running water; the place is rat-infested, with rodents coming out in droves at night and destroying everything in the apartment; and it is a place where Viola’s family experiences harassment from their neighbors. The conditions of the apartment highlight specific aspects of Viola’s childhood: the abject poverty, food insecurity, lack of physical safety, and consistent trauma. All of these contribute to the extreme shame that Viola feels about her circumstances, contributing to her desire to exorcise or “detox” this part of her life; it is what stands in the way of her reconciling her childhood self with her identity as an adult. Just as she begins to climb out of her family’s cycle of poverty, she is faced with a reminder of the past when she first opens the door to the apartment she is subletting during her first year at Juilliard. That the conditions of this place trigger a flashback to her traumatic past indicates the strong negative associations Viola has formed about 128. Her family’s former apartment stands as a physical symbol of everything she works hard to overcome as an adult.

The Baseball Bat

The baseball bat is another important symbol in the book. It is part of the prize that Viola and her sisters receive when their skit wins the local contest in the park. The bat symbolizes several things. The feeling of victory is a heady one for Viola, inspiring her to work hard to recreate the experience as an adult; thus, the bat symbolizes her very first success. The success of the skit was possible only because of Dianne’s leadership and focus: She bands her sisters together, planning and directing the skit and ensuring that practices are held with seriousness and dedication. The bat is thus a testament to the leadership and inspiration Dianne provides to her sisters. Dianne is the first person to plant the seed in Viola’s mind that she can transcend her circumstances through hard work and success. The bat is also a reminder of the strength of sisterhood. Together, the sisters lend each other the strength and direction to succeed. Furthermore, the fact that it is acting that brings Viola her first taste of success is significant; it reaffirms the craft as her calling, foreshadowing the success she will experience later in life. Fittingly, the baseball bat becomes a “weapon” in the sisters’ “arsenal”; they use it to kill the rats that plague their apartment. Reminiscent of yet another symbol, “128,” which represents the adversity in Viola’s early life, it is significant that a prize won by the sisters for drama is what they use to defend themselves against one of the many challenges of their circumstances. It symbolizes and foreshadows the potential that hard work and joint effort have in lifting Viola’s family out of their cycle of poverty.

Eight-Year-Old Viola

The book opens with the image of an eight-year-old Viola, and this image becomes an important point of reference throughout the book. Readers are presented with the anecdote of an eight-year-old Viola running for her life to escape racist harassment from her classmates. The anecdote details how Mae encourages Viola to fight back and how she eventually does so by threatening to stab her bullies with a crochet needle. Viola later tells Will Smith that this memory defines her identity even as an adult: Deep down, she still feels like a scared eight-year-old running from people who seek to harm her because she is Black. This recollection presents a number of things to the reader: that eight-year-old Viola was scrappy; that an adult Viola remembers the fear of the encounter rather than her surprising toughness; that race continues to be an overwhelmingly important part of Viola’s life experiences; and that she finds it difficult to reconcile as an adult with certain aspects of her past. In that sense, eight-year-old Viola symbolizes the main, underlying theme of Viola’s entire journey, detailed over the course of her memoir and hinted at in its title. The journey is one of finding herself, and what the search yields is that every past experience and version of her has contributed significantly and meaningfully to the adult she eventually becomes. Despite what 53-year-old Viola believed, her eight-year-old self displayed inner strength and resilience even in that moment, foreshadowing how she would eventually fight her way out of her family’s cycle of adversity. The book ends with an adult Viola reconciling with this eight-year-old self, acknowledging and accepting the strength she displayed all along.