I have a list of memoirs I want to read, and when this book became available, I dropped everything to read it. I’m so glad I did. I couldn’t put it down, even when it was way past my bedtime, even when the end of a chapter provided a good stopping point. I couldn’t stop making a list of people to recommend it to. I highlighted at least four lines per chapter, and I’m still thinking about so much of it.

We’re Going to Need More Wine is a memoir by actress and activist Gabrielle Union. Each chapter focuses on a different theme, and each one is fascinating and painful, compelling and wrenching, and often hilarious. She writes candidly about growing up as the lone Black family in a predominantly White California neighborhood with a very visible class structure delineated by where one lived. She compares her school year environment to her summer visits with her extended family in Nebraska, where she was “too White” for her friends and cousins, while also experiencing the isolation of being one of a very few Black students in her school.

Union focuses intently on colorism as it intersects with sexism and racism, both in her own personal story and her professional experience, and in the experience of her friends:

We darker girls should not be pitted against our lighter-skinned sisters, but our pain at being passed over shouldn’t be dismissed by people saying, “Love the skin you’re in.”

You can love what you see in the mirror, but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you. Not when we are made to feel so unloved and exiled to the other end of the beauty spectrum.

TW/CW: The chapters about her sexual assault, her experience trying to overcome the trauma, and her activism are very tough reading, but also inspiring. Each time she touches on painful and complicated topics, she doesn’t pull her punches or shy away from the brutal and difficult parts, but she tempers each story with humor and compassion.

Her stories of her own upbringing, her marriage, her career, and her role as the stepmother to three boys are fascinating because she balances major issues that are complex and difficult with personal moments that are poignant and sharply real. She writes about the burden and goal of assimilation, the false promise of belonging:

There’s this idea that you will be safe if you just get famous enough, successful enough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move into the right neighborhood, do all these things to fully assimilate into the America people have been sold on. We all bought in, and we keep thinking if we just get over this mountain of assimilation, on the other side is a pot of gold. Or maybe a unicorn, perhaps a leprechaun. Any of those is as plausible as the acceptance of the wholeness of me.

But there’s just another mountain on the other side.

One thing I admired so much about this memoir is that Union doesn’t shy away from talking about the times when she really screwed up, and ways in which she deeply hurt people while trying to figure herself out. She’s candid about her own feelings, and equally candid about ways she hurt the feelings of people she cares about. So when she writes about her triumphs and moments of victory, they’re not humblebrags or outright brags.

She also tells fantastic, gossipy, and touching stories about people like Prince, who threw the most incredible parties. There is one moment I won’t spoil of her first meeting Prince, and it is so pure and hilarious in its midwestern-ness, I texted a picture of it to so many people.

The chapters function individually as essays, but as a cohesive whole they add to one another in a way that makes reading the book in one sitting pretty rewarding (except for the part where I stayed up too late). My only frustration was that sometimes the ending of a chapter was not as satisfying as the stories within it; a one-line quip couldn’t hold up the weight of the topics that preceded it, and I’d feel sort of let down by the abruptness.

It seems trite to say that reading the memoir of a famous and self-proclaimed flawed person who owns who she is so fully and fearlessly is inspiring, but it truly was:

I follow Union on Instagram because her pictures are often fantastic and funny, and reading her memoir and her account of surviving trauma and being an actress whom members of the public feel entitled to interrupt, talk to at any time, touch, or grab has given me a lot to think about in terms of how we consume stories, and how we see entertainers. But more than that, her perspective as a parent, an actress, an activist and artist, and as a person was a treat and a privilege to read. Half my friends are probably tired of hearing about this book in every text and message, but it’s worth passing along. This was a thoughtful and honest memoir, and I very much recommend it – especially for the Prince stories.