In Finding Home: A Memoir, screen and style icon Denise Nicholas is saying the quiet parts out loud.
Denise Nicholas completely lets go in her memoir Finding Home (Agate/Bolden, 2025). Most known as a star of classic films like 1975’s Let’s Do It Again with Sidney Poitier and TV shows such as the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” Nicholas’s writer side can now add memoirist to screenwriter and novelist. This book speaks to aspiring actors, working creatives and anyone girded for both ongoing and acute challenges of life.
In what Publisher’s Weekly praises as “clear-eyed wisdom,” Nicholas grabs the little girl she was by the hand and heart for the only reason this world should suffer more celebrity biographies: her life is worthwhile, teachable and towering sans its known public accolades and fame.
A Life in School, Film and TV
Finding Home dances and sways throughout Nicholas’s biography more than merely recounts it. By the time the book reaches her 1970’s classic work in film and three Golden Globe nominations in TV, she has tricked her audience to think we’re just following an average American dreaming.
Likely due to her novelist practice, she eschews an entirely linear telling of her life up to now. As the author of the award-winning hit novel Freshwater Road (Agate/Bolden, 2005), her mastery of pacing and mood may explain how she can switch to moments throughout her adult years and later career as needed or relevant to other periods each chapter focuses on. Far from jarring, these leaps forward and back load up heavy messages about self-belief, putting in the work and coming back stronger.
However, her first order of business is to ground us in the history of her native Detroit upbringing and family. Denise Nicholas was born in 1944, pushed to be bright from nearly birth and already on the cover of Black America’s Jet Magazine by age 16. She begins with copious and honest discussion of her mother, who passed last fall amidst the book’s release at the great age of 104. Nicholas acknowledges a thick emotional dome around this probably genius but distant woman she idolized- and its lasting effects on her. Yet and still, she elevates her mother for instilling advantages and characteristics which made her tough and successful.
Her life was no crystal stair.
Many readers will be shocked (I was) when Nicholas unburies the past still-unsolved murder of her writer/editor sister under mysterious circumstances in 1980, for reverberations unto now. A journalist friend who interviewed her for the book just told me of it recently. Nicholas’s look back on that harrowing episode may be the only unequivocally sad part of the book, as her eventual perspective redeems most struggle to triumph everywhere else. But the only lesson Nicholas seems capable to impart for this part is how to mourn for the rest of your life without appearing to.
I was also shocked to be reminded that the late 1960’s and 70’s times in which she first rose to fame still forced Black performers to confront segregated facilities and treatments. Once she arrives at lucking up on steady television work, she does not change tack or coast off mass interest in the entertainment industry to veer into gossip and tell-all sensationalism. Rather her behind-the-scenes show biz content is only liminal space between her relatable, if not mundane, working woman example and universal quest for self-actualization.
The kitchen table talk
She calls out the Black American “family secret” of painful colorism, even sharing how young people she tried to inspire with high school visits yelled “She ain’t even black” due to her fair skin and fine features. She broadcasts another: the cultish denial of bad behavior from Black public figures and collective praise for stereotypical roles because the scarcity of Black media, particularly in her times, had us willing to celebrate any portrayals of ourselves we could get. This observation bolted her principles to be picky about her roles and insist on impeccable tailoring for her professional characters.
She joins the likes of Alice Walker and Tina Turner in writing books that risk backlash for portraying Black male misogynists and abusers in both everyday life and the public eye, revoking their passes on the basis of scarcity mentioned above. Marriage was not kind to Nicholas and her father was a confusion. Yet she still gives grace and respect to past loves, ranging from a white artist she earned a scarlet letter for dating in her twenties to her problematic ex-husband and singer Bill Withers.
Yet for all this fire, she sculpts a textbook coming-of-age story from her hardscrabble climb from segregation and inequity in her native Detroit, to cutting her teeth in academically gifted programs and theater in Chicago, to meeting her own idols and speaking or marching for civil rights. These are elements qualifying this autobiography, like her novel, to be enduring and favorited well past its time.
This. Audiobook. Is. Fire.
I treated myself to the audiobook Nicholas narrates herself. Do the same.
Nicholas’s fit for that role joins Sally Field’s and Viola Davis’s for their memoirs In Pieces (Grand Central Publishing, 2018) and Finding Me (Amistad, 2022) respectively. Like these peers, Nicholas bridles the reflex to overdramatize as theater trained her or to crumble without the facial and body expressions film allows on top of the words.
She knows when to break her reading’s soothing simplicity to startle us with the sublimes of what she can do with a voice, reminding me of Kathy Bates’s still unmatched novel reading performance for The Silence of the Lambs back in the day. I am happy for her getting a divine intersection of her gifts-acting and writing-in this similar achievement. As her voice hovered over the kitchen while I cooked a Sunday dinner, it was easy to imagine that a church mother or old family friend just came by to tell me some really good stories. I was chuckling, nodding, Amening, and more.
To know Nicholas was recording this in season of losing her mother is to understand the depth, soul and shifts her familiar husky voice accomplishes here.
Finding Home: A Memoir is a must-have for all her fans, any creative artist in competitive industries where talent is no guarantee to work and all women surviving life one day or year at a time. Visit the author at her website and order the memoir at Agate Publishing, Amazon or wherever books are sold.
