It’s almost a new year and I wanted to post at least one more book review before this year ends. It was an exhausting read. I’ll jump right into it.

Quite frankly, I can sum up my thoughts about this memoir in just a few short words: She annoyed me.

I mean, Jada made some good points throughout the book about some life lessons. Jada’s a hot topic nowadays, so I don’t think she needs an introduction at this time in history. However, there are a lot of anecdotes written in this book, one in particular about a very public love affair that she had outside of her marriage, that you might not fully be able to grasp because she wrote the book as if everyone reading it knows who her and her controversies.

I consider myself to be fairly open-minded, so some of her thoughts on life were interesting and gave me something new to think about. I don’t agree with everything she said, but nobody said that I had to. She spoke so much about life lessons that I feel that the lessons drowned out her actual life story, which I would have loved to have heard more about, especially her acting career. I loved what she shared about her stint in music. However, she wanted to provide what she considered insight, and she did.

Her memoir was very preachy in a new-age kind of way. At some point, she said she went through a period, which happened to be around the time of her affair, where she thought she knew just about everything there was to know about being spiritual and was just shy of being considered a guru. (Those are my words, but I think I summed it up pretty well.) She essentially said that she understands now that she knew nothing at all and that she’s come a long way since then.

This is the part that annoyed me: she’s self-aware enough to know now that she knew nothing back then, but with the way she speaks, she still talks as if she knows everything now.

I have a tendency to overthink and philosophize. I may come across to some as being self-righteous or a know-it-all. However, if it isn’t abundantly obvious by the outward appearance of my life or by the fact that I try to verbally make it known, I know nothing. I just make observations and try to make sense of what I see.

One of my favorite memoirs I have read so far was Diahann Carroll’s The Legs are the Last to Go. In that memoir, Ms. Carroll spoke about what she learned throughout her life without making it seem as though she was preaching or trying to tell anyone else how to live their lives. I loved that. Jada, on the other hand, has journal prompts and reflection questions at the end of each chapter of her book, which I’m sure helped someone who read it. However, they did nothing for me. If anything, I skipped over them because almost everything that has come from the Smith family over the past couple of years that may have been well-intentioned in trying to heal the masses has turned out to display them in the worst lights.

None of us is perfect. But for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith to constantly preach healing to us, the general public, yet continue to reveal way more information than any of us asked for and display behavior that is often the opposite of what they preach, is quite pretentious. I heard someone use the term “self-aggrandizing” when they described their thoughts on Jada’s book, and I must agree. Even if I didn’t know who she was, I think I still would have the same thoughts. She said herself that at the beginning of her relationship with her husband she thought that the only people who had something to say were the people who had struggled and constantly showed pain. It seems she still thinks that everything has to be super deep, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s what made it a struggle for me.

Ironically, she made a song with her band Wicked Wisdom years ago called Bleed All Over Me, and I love it. When I first heard it, I liked it. Since I’ve read her book, I hear the song differently now. I still like the song, but the lyrics explain everything she said about the way she thinks in her book. I feel like you can listen to the song and save yourself the time you put into reading the book. The song is about how she loves the way her lover is vulnerable with her. She compares it to bleeding. I think there’s a way to show pain and vulnerability without losing blood, but I get what she’s saying. I’ve linked it below for your listening pleasure. Checkout your local library for a copy of this book.