Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s decades-long marriage was thrust into the spotlight after the infamous “Oscars slap,” and while Pinkett Smith has addressed the incident before, she goes into much more detail in her upcoming memoir.
In “Worthy,” Pinkett Smith breaks down both her marriage and the repercussions of the stunning moment when, minutes before winning the best actor Oscar for his role in “King Richard,” Smith marched onstage at the 2022 Academy Awards and slapped Chris Rock after the comedian made an unscripted joke about Pinkett Smith’s short hair.
Pinkett Smith expounded further on the moment and its impact on her marriage, including her surprise at his reaction, in part because they “hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time.”
In the moment she “didn’t judge Chris, I didn’t judge Will. I was like ‘oh, this is a spiritual clash,’” due to the ire between Smith and Rock that began in the late 1980s, she told The New York Times. She also told the outlet that her private reaction to the altercation was “I’m his wife now. We in this.”
Smith told The New York Times in an email that the memoir woke him up because “when you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
He continued, sharing that Pinkett Smith has lived a life more on the edge than he realized, and that her memoir showed him that she is more resilient, clever, and compassionate than he had previously understood her to be.
The book also dives into Pinkett Smith’s relationship with her parents, growing up in Baltimore, and the impact that her childhood friend, Tupac Shakur, had on her both before their professional success and beyond his death in 1996.
“My biggest hope for the book is that it’ll just be oxygen for people who need it. I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in, because it’s intense stuff,” she shared.