Finding Home: A Memoir

Summary

FROM ACCLAIMED NOVELIST AND ACTOR DENISE NICHOLAS, A POWERFUL MEMOIR OF FAMILY SECRETS, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM, HOLLYWOOD STARDOM, WRENCHING GRIEF, AND PERSONAL AND ARTISTIC TRANSFORMATION.

Growing up as a middle-class Black girl in 1950s Detroit, Denise Nicholas experienced the vibrant culture and harsh realities of a racially segregated city. Barely twenty, she dropped out of the University of Michigan to tour the Deep South with the Free Southern Theater at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. A few short years later she would gain national fame as one of the very first Black TV series leads on the groundbreaking show Room 222.

Through her powerful, stylish, and profoundly evocative storytelling, Nicholas not only chronicles her own remarkable life but also provides a resonant narrative of what it means to live, work, and succeed as a Black woman in America over the past half-century.

With rare eloquence, vulnerability, and resolve, Nicholas mines her six-decade journey through TV and film stardom, three marriages, and a remarkable second-act artistic transformation, reflecting on the personal, professional, and societal pressures that influenced both her work and her closest relationships. Nicholas explores the ways her experiences in Hollywood shaped her understanding of success, intimacy, and commitment. Her narrative is rich with anecdotes from her career as an actor and writer, providing a backdrop to the struggles, losses, and achievements that marked her path. She candidly discusses the challenges she faced as a trailblazing actress of color, shedding welcome light on the systemic barriers and biases within the entertainment industry.

At its deepest level, this memoir is a heartfelt exploration of grief, as Nicholas recounts the profound losses—including the unsolved targeted slaying of her sister, the telling of which occupies the center of her story—that have shaped her. Her reflections on mourning and resilience paint a vivid, moving portrait of how to journey through healing to new dimensions of self-discovery.

“Few celebrities offer up such incisive honesty as [Nicholas] does in this compelling memoir. Her prose is both vivid and searing, and her self-awareness as refreshing as it is revealing. … A page-turner, Finding Home unfurls like an unforgettable movie I didn’t know I was starved to see.”—Bridgett M. Davis, author of Love, Rita and The World According to Fannie Davis