BookLife Review: Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me (Whoopi Goldberg, author) by Carol O’Day

Memoir, death and grief, loss, childhood, NYC, housing projects, celebrity, mother-daughter, sister-brother, cultural enrichment and education, single parent, African-American experience

Whoopi Goldberg’s 2024 memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, is a reflection and study of grief. It is the complete life story of Whoopi Goldberg and deals almost not at all with her career trajectory, celebrity and success. Rather, it focuses on her experience of grief following the loss of her mother, Emma Johnson, then her beloved brother, Clyde.

Born Caryn Johnson, Whoopi Goldberg, grew up in a family of three–her mother, her older brother Clyde and Caryn. Emma’s husband left the family when the children were young and had almost no role in, and made little to no financial contribution in support of, their upbringing, The threesome lived in the public housing project buildings in Chelsea in Manhattan and New York City was an essential component of the family’s literary, artistic and cultural education. Goldberg wrote Bits and Pieces as a method of processing her grief over their deaths and to pay tribute to the deep impact her mother and brother had on her own development and her professional success.

The memoir is contemplative and almost conversationally casual. It is accessible. While it conveys the hardship and poverty of her childhood, it is not laden with self-pity. To the contrary, Goldberg intimates that while she has not totally unpacked how her mother managed to support her and her brother with such limited resources, she did not grow up feeling impoverished. Emma Johnson diligently utilized the immense public and cultural resources of New York City to raise her children. They visited museums, parks, and events of all types to augment their education. They were raised in a cultural and racial melting pot of families who resided in the Chelsea housing development. At times, perhaps Goldberg does not go deep enough. She provides some background about her extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins), and the basics of her father’s absence (he came out as gay and left the marriage early). Her language is not formal and is often colloquial. Her style makes the book both accessible and a bit pedestrian. It is reflective and an important voice to represent African-American lives in the death and grief space. It is not a deeply historical, political or biographical memoir in the style of Michelle Obama’s Becoming or Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It is a contribution to the genre in the arena of entertainment. Bits and Pieces is also a powerful tribute to the foundational value of family across socio-economic strata, the essential nature of a strong, steady and engaged parent, and the devastating loneliness and grief that arises when those familiy members die.

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