Will Smith reveals childhood abuse experience in new memoir

Actor, Will Smith has revealed his complicated relationship with his late father in a new memoir.
In the memoir, ‘Will’, scheduled for release on November 9, Will described his dad as a man with dualities.

In an excerpt highlighted by People’s magazine, Smith wrote, “My father was violent, but he was also at every game, play, and recital. He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies.”

He added: “The same intense perfectionism that terrorised his family put food on the table every night of my life.”

Illustrating the terror, Smith tells a story about an occurrence when he was 9 years old. He had watched his father “punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed.”

“I saw her spit blood,” he writes. “That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am.”

His father died in 2016, 16 years after Smith’s parents divorced.

Despite caring for his father when he was ill, he admits that the incident haunted him even then.

“As a child, I’d always told myself that I would one day avenge my mother. That when I was big enough, when I was strong enough, when I was no longer a coward, I would slay him,” he wrote.

He also revealed that one day he found himself pausing at the top of some stairs as he wheeled his father toward the bathroom and experienced a dark thought.

“I could shove him down, and easily get away with it,” he writes. “As the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom.”

Will Smith is currently on a speaking tour ahead of his new book release with dates scheduled for Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles.