Viola Davis reads this audiobook aloud herself, and the description opens with two trophies for the recording rather than for the writing. A 2023 Grammy for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording occupies the first line. An Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year occupies the second. Then, plainly, narrated by Viola Davis. Nine hours and fifteen minutes, published by Amistad in April 2022. Before you reach a single word about the childhood or the career, the page has told you that the argument for this edition is the performance of it, which is an unusual thing for a memoir listing to lead on.
A Grammy for the Recording, Not the Page
Amistad's copy is written in the first person, which is worth noticing, because it means the marketing was drafted in the same voice that reads the book. In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past, it begins, and it holds that pronoun through to the last line. Most publisher descriptions describe a book from outside it. This one speaks from inside, so by the time you press play the handoff from sales copy to memoir is nearly seamless, the same person having been talking to you the entire time.
Grammy categories are specific in a way that matters a great deal here. Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording is not an award for a book. It is an award for a reading of one, judged against other readings, and it went to this recording rather than to a hardcover sitting on somebody's shelf. That is the rarest kind of evidence a listing can carry, because it assesses the exact thing you would be buying, decided by people whose work is comparing recordings against each other. Very few memoirs on any shelf can point to a jury that has already listened.
From a Crumbling Apartment to a Stage
Central Falls, Rhode Island, is where the book starts, in what the copy calls a crumbling apartment, and the distance from there to a New York stage is the spine of the whole thing. The earliest appraisal in the column, five stars from June 2023, reports that the first sentence takes hold immediately and credits eloquent, raw storytelling that refuses to loosen its grip. That appraisal is describing prose rather than performance, and the compliment survives the translation intact: a sentence built to catch a reader on page one is a sentence built to catch a listener inside the first minute, which is exactly where memoirs usually lose people.
Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year is the second trophy, and one appraisal here confirms from the listening side what those juries concluded. Filed in June 2025 at five stars, it recommends the recording emphatically, says that hearing Davis narrate her own story adds depth and emotion, and describes the effect as a personal conversation rather than a reading. That entry is the only one of the five to mention the recording at all. Three of the others reach for reading language, and one uses no format word anywhere in it, which is the ordinary shape of a memoir column.
The Doubling of an Eight-Year-Old and a Woman
Memoir structure is where a five-star appraisal from December 2024 does the most useful work, identifying the doubling the book runs on: an eight-year-old who survived poverty and discrimination, and a woman decades later who has arrived and still feels she has unfinished business. Those two figures are present simultaneously throughout. That is difficult to sustain in print and unusually natural to sustain aloud, because one voice can hold both ages at once without having to announce the switch. The appraisal breaks off on a single letter, mid-name, before it can finish the thought.
Facades is the word the copy builds its promise around: a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades. Set that claim beside the fact that the person making it is also the person performing it, and the stakes of the reading change. An actor reading somebody else's confession performs sincerity. An actor reading her own has to manage something harder, which is to sound like herself rather than like an actor sounding like herself. The awards suggest that problem got solved. The page does not explain how, and it does not need to.
Nine hours and fifteen minutes is short for a life, and the compression is clearly deliberate. This is not a chronology of a career, and the copy never promises one. It promises a reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self, which is a shape rather than a timeline. The material about craft and about the industry arrives as consequence rather than as subject. Anyone expecting a role-by-role account of the work will find the roles are not the point. The book is about what had to become true before any of them were possible at all.
Reflective Prose That Will Test Skimmers
Actors and people who follow film will find a specific pleasure that a four-star appraisal from September 2025 puts well, saying the book will change how that reader watches Davis on screen from now on. That is a fair description of what a good performer's memoir does to its audience. Readers who arrived from the personal development shelf rather than the celebrity one are served just as well, since the listing files it under both, and the copy addresses itself explicitly to anyone clawing toward some form of self-love rather than to fans of the filmography.
Skimmers will struggle. The book is reflective rather than anecdotal, it circles rather than advances, and the passages on childhood poverty and discrimination are unsparing enough that anyone shopping for a light celebrity read should be looking elsewhere. Readers who prefer memoir with a pen in hand should know the material is highly quotable and that catching those lines in audio takes deliberate effort. If the film-set stories are what you came for, they exist here in service of something else entirely rather than as the reason the book was written.
What awards did Finding Me win?
The description names two: the 2023 Grammy for Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording, and an Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year. Both grade the recording rather than the text, which is rare for a memoir and directly relevant to which edition you choose.
Who reads the Finding Me audiobook?
Viola Davis reads it herself, and the description states so outright in its third line. The recording runs nine hours and fifteen minutes and was published by Amistad on April 26, 2022. The listing names no other performer at all.
Is this a Hollywood memoir?
Not primarily. The copy describes a reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self, and the listing files it under personal development as well as biography. Career material appears as a consequence of the story rather than as its subject, so the roles are not the organizing principle.
Is the audiobook the better way to take this in?
The evidence points that way. Both awards on the listing grade the recording specifically, and the publisher's description is itself written in the first person, so the voice you meet in the copy is the one that continues into the book. The transition is seamless.
