I caught a cable interview with Hollywood funny-woman Jenifer Lewis this past week in which she discussed her recently-published memoir Walking in My Joy: In These Streets. The tome, her second, is by turns a wicked, hysterical, sometime expletive-laden screed on the one hand, juxtaposed with a solemn, serious no-holds-barred treatise on the other. She lays it all out there, warts and all. She freely writes about her bipolar diagnosis (something I share with her) and her struggles to get her condition under control. And she dips a toe into her insecurities regarding her dating life — though since 2012 she has been married to Arnold Byrd, and she has an adopted daughter by the name of Charmaine Lewis. Lewis’s Showbiz credits are impressive. Her collaboration with Bette Midler as a back-up singer in the Harlettes and her role as Ruby Johnson on Black-ish are standouts for me. I was lucky to take in Lewis’s one-woman show some years back in West Hollywood, California. Song and dance with her trademark, irreverent comic wise-cracks thrown in. Get the book. It’s a hoot.
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