Taraji P. Henson brings the same instrument she used to build Cookie Lyon and Katherine Johnson to the telling of her own life, and that control is what makes this audiobook memoir land as hard as it does. Around the Way Girl, a 2017 Audie Award finalist for Autobiography/Memoir, runs seven hours and twenty-seven minutes, and Henson narrates every one of them herself.
Perform a Role or Simply Speak It
The craft question with any actor narrating their own memoir is whether they perform their life like a role or simply speak it, and Henson threads that needle carefully. She writes about her father, a Vietnam veteran bowed but not broken by what he survived, and her mother, who endured violence both at home and on Washington D.C.'s harder streets, alongside her own experience of single motherhood, which she frames not as a burden but as a gift. None of that material invites a performed, theatrical delivery, and Henson largely resists the temptation, letting her own natural voice carry scenes that a lesser narrator might oversell.
Reviewer Honey Love makes the connective tissue explicit: the same raw, authentic quality that has always stood out on screen carries directly into the audiobook, sealing the deal for a longtime fan. Reviewer JustMe goes further, praising Henson's honesty, love, strength, self-confidence, and pride as qualities that come through specifically in how she delivers the material aloud, and recommends it in particular for mothers raising Black sons, a specific, well-earned audience note straight from a listener rather than marketing copy.
The memoir's title itself nods to a specific piece of hip-hop culture, echoing LL Cool J's well-known song of the same phrase, and that reference signals early on how deliberately Henson roots her story in a particular Washington D.C. identity rather than a generic Hollywood-arrival narrative. Her time at Howard University, one of the country's most historically significant Black universities, gets treated in the synopsis as genuine formative training rather than a brief resume line, and that specificity, a real place with a real cultural weight of its own, gives the early chapters of this audiobook a grounding that a vaguer origin story would not have.
A Rise Story With Real Cultural Weight
Reviewer smklaw frames the memoir within a broader genre of rise-to-the-top stories, but argues that when the person telling it is a Black woman who started with less than ideal circumstances, the story moves past merely interesting into something with real cultural weight. Around the Way Girl covers real ground for that argument: her training at Howard University, one small role after another chipping away at an industry resistant to giving women of color meaningful parts, and the eventual arrival of Hidden Figures, Empire, and The Color Purple.
The synopsis promises laugh-out-loud humor alongside the harder material, and Henson's narration genuinely delivers both registers without whiplash between them. Her comic timing, honed across years of a personality-driven acting career, gives the funnier stretches real snap, while the heavier passages about family hardship and industry resistance benefit from that same directness. Few memoirists can move between the two as smoothly in audio as an actor with this much control over vocal texture and pacing.
From Small Parts to Hidden Figures
Henson's Hidden Figures role, playing NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, gets real space in the memoir's account of her career turning point, arriving only after years of smaller parts most audiences never noticed. The synopsis frames that slow climb as the actual substance of her Hollywood story rather than a footnote before the fame, worth knowing for listeners expecting the memoir to jump straight to her biggest roles.
Self-narrated celebrity memoirs have become their own small genre, with Michelle Obama's Becoming and Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights both showing how much a performer's own voice can add to material this personal. Around the Way Girl earns its place in that company, and its 2017 Audie Award finalist nod for Autobiography/Memoir signals recognition from within the audiobook industry itself, not just general critical praise, for how well the format serves this specific story.
Seven and a Half Hours That Rarely Linger
Seven and a half hours is a relatively compact runtime for a memoir covering childhood, single motherhood, an acting education, and a major Hollywood career, which means the pacing moves briskly. Listeners expecting extended dwelling on any single chapter of her life, particularly the industry-resistance material the synopsis foregrounds, should know this audiobook favors momentum over exhaustive detail.
The synopsis is candid that this book addresses violence experienced by her mother and the general hustle and disappointment of an actor's journey, and the audiobook does not soften that content for easier listening. Henson's narration treats the harder material with the same directness as the funnier stretches, which some listeners will find bracing and others will find exactly right for a memoir explicitly built around living your own truth rather than a polished public image.
The seven-hour-twenty-seven-minute runtime also means Henson's narration rarely lingers on any single emotional beat for long, which keeps the memoir feeling propulsive even during its heaviest chapters, though listeners who want a slower, more meditative memoir experience may notice the pace moving them along before they feel entirely ready to sit with a given moment.
Recommended for the Mothers Raising Black Sons
This audiobook is an easy recommendation for fans of Hidden Figures and Empire who want Henson's own voice on her own story, for memoir listeners who specifically value performer authenticity in self-narration, and for the mothers of Black sons that reviewer JustMe calls out directly as an ideal audience.
Listeners who prefer a slower, more exhaustive memoir format, dwelling deeply on each career milestone, may find the seven-and-a-half-hour runtime moves faster than expected. For everyone else, hearing this material in Henson's own voice, rather than a hired narrator's interpretation of it, is close to the entire point of choosing the audiobook over the print edition.
- Narration: Taraji P. Henson narrates her own memoir with the same control and authenticity that defines her screen work, moving smoothly between humor and hardship.
- Themes: Resilience, single motherhood, breaking into Hollywood
- Mood: Candid and warmly funny, with real weight underneath
- Verdict: A briskly paced, deeply personal memoir that benefits enormously from Henson narrating her own story.
Does Taraji P. Henson narrate her own audiobook for Around the Way Girl?
Yes, she narrates the entire memoir herself.
Does this audiobook cover Taraji P. Henson's Hidden Figures and Empire success, or mostly her early life?
Both. It spans her upbringing and single motherhood through her training at Howard University and eventual Hollywood breakthrough.
Is this audiobook worth listening to if I'm not already a Taraji P. Henson fan?
Yes. Reviewers describe it as a compelling rise-to-the-top story on its own terms, independent of prior fandom.
Does the audiobook address difficult topics like domestic violence?
Yes, directly and honestly, alongside the humor the synopsis also promises.
