Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapter 13-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapter 13-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary: “Revelation”

The narrative picks up the thread at the end of the Prologue: Kerry is back with her parents in the present. They reveal that Kerry was conceived using artificial insemination, meaning that her father is not her biological father. Struggling for words, she thanks them for being honest. This is the first time that they have given her the full truth of her life.

They do not know who the donor was, requesting only that he be Black and healthy. She tries to comfort Earl, making him feel like nothing will change between them. She admits that she’s curious and asks when they were going to tell her. Her mother admits that they initially planned not to do so. Kerry then says that they can now all love one another in the light of knowing each other more.

A few months earlier, she approached Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., about being on his show Finding Your Roots, which she had not previously been able to do because she was always swamped with films and Scandal. However, she was interested in being a guest on the ancestry-oriented program. She thought it might help her transition after Scandal. When she mentioned that Finding Your Roots would use DNA as part of its genealogy, her father started having panic attacks. Kerry had set up a phone call for them to talk to Skip and later learned that they told Skip that Earl was not Kerry’s biological father, and he noted that if Kerry were on the show, she would discover this. As a result, they decided to tell her the truth.

After talking to her parents, Kerry returned home and felt like she was keeping a secret from her children. She told her husband. That night, they had dinner with Kerry’s cousins and her parents as she wondered who she was now. The next day, they all went to Disneyland, and Kerry started to feel like she’d been given “the role of a lifetime” in figuring out who she really was (265).

She decided to find her biological father. Earl was uncomfortable, but her mother replied to all of her questions, finally feeling free from the secret. Kerry learned that the doctor inseminated Valerie with the sperm but then told her and Earl to go home and have sex. At the time, genetic testing would not have been able to differentiate whether Earl was Kerry’s father, so if the donor’s sperm didn’t work and Earl’s did (or vice versa), they would never know.

Eventually, Kerry asked Earl to take a paternity test, but he refused. She asked for advice from someone who worked on Finding Your Roots since she was no longer scheduled to appear on the show, and they recommended a DNA test through a consumer-based company. The results did not show any further information on the paternal side. Another indication that she was not Earl’s daughter was that no results linked her to another member of the Washington family, some of whom had submitted their DNA. Earl again refused to take a test, not wanting Kerry to share the truth about it. However, people commented on her children looking like their grandfather. She did not want to hide from the truth.

She remembers that when she vacationed with him once and they swam in the ocean, he was not as strong as he had been in the past, partly because of a respiratory illness. She had to borrow a boogie board to help him navigate the undercurrent and get to shore. Her father later understated the danger, but it made Kerry realize that she could navigate the truth better.

Kerry reflects on how her mother’s stillbirth affected her and how her own miscarriage and abortion were both difficult to talk about but sharing with others brings healing. She also thinks her children challenge her to be better, as do projects. She feels like she chose her parents and her life and wouldn’t do anything differently.

Chapter 14 Summary: “Cues”

Looking back, Kerry recognizes that clues about the truth regarding her father were all around her. Three months before her conversation with her parents, she wrote notes in a Scandal script margin about Olivia Pope’s relationship with truth and her father. She thinks about the film She Hate Me because her character had had a sperm donor. In addition, she appeared in a film adaptation of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, in which her character struggled with infertility. She also read Celeste Ng’s book Little Fires Everywhere when Reese Witherspoon sent it to her. She later played its central character Mia Warren, who acted as a surrogate for a couple and then decided to keep the child, whom she named Pearl. Kerry reflects that her role as Mia made her think about her own situation from her parents’ perspective. She remembers filming two takes of a scene in the show in which Mia and Pearl discuss Pearl’s father, and she advocated using the less calm version of the scene because she felt like it was truer to her father’s experience.

After learning her family’s secret, Kerry feels much closer to her mother. She remembers a moment with her daughter when she felt no distance between them, and now she feels that closeness with her mother. In addition, she remembers how she thought her mother was afraid of so much when it turns out that she was brave. They did a photoshoot together in 2021 and not long after, she was admitted to the hospital, where Kerry found out that her mother had been treated for cancer not twice but three times. She was shocked. After an investigative surgery, Kerry’s doctor called her about her mother’s illness, having been on the team of doctors, and revealed that Valerie’s cancer had returned and spread. Kerry delivered the news, and her mom decided to try to fight it.

Kerry stayed with her as her primary caretaker. She was torn between leaving to shoot a Netflix film in Northern Ireland and staying with her mother, but her mother urged her to go. In Belfast, she struggled to sleep and worked to coordinate Valerie’s care while also filming the movie. When she returned home, her mother had lost a lot of weight but slowly started to eat more. Her parents seemed more in love with one another.

A few years earlier, Earl agreed to do a DNA test, finding out that there was a .000001% chance that he was her dad. Kerry laughed, thinking that even that small a number would make Earl see it as proof that there was always still a chance he was her father. The news helped her heal, and she felt like she could trust herself and her instincts.

When she learned the truth, Kerry was driving to Santa Barbara to spend the weekend with her family. She told her father the results shortly after arriving. He accepted the answer, and Kerry told him she loved him.

Kerry remembers taking a trip to Maui and encountering three blue whales, a calf, its mother, and a male whale that wanted to mate with the mother for the next season. He would travel with them to show that he was “worthy.”

Epilogue Summary: “Marisa”

Marisa, Kerry’s middle name, means “of the sea” (307). It always symbolized her love of water.

Her dad never wanted to talk about infertility, and Kerry remarks that so much shame unnecessarily surrounds reproductive issues. Kerry feels sure that she is her father’s daughter but also wants to find out about her lost family member.

Legally, Kerry’s first name is now Kerry Marisa, her middle name is Washington, and her last name is Asomugha. She does not want to give up the Washington in her. She sees Marisa as the part of her that most belongs to her. As of the writing of the memoir, she had not found her biological father.

The Epilogue closes with Kerry remarking how, under the water, sound is muffled, and the surface is like a “fun-house mirror” (309). She has not fully trusted the image of her family and her life. In the water, the only voice she hears is her own.

Chapter 13-Epilogue Analysis

Narratively, Kerry picks up where she left off in the introduction, using the framing of the conversation with her parents to build tension about her their secret throughout her memoir. She then offers further context about the moments leading up to that revelation by detailing her investigation into her story in conjunction with her inquiry about being on Finding Your Roots. This moment recalls Olivia Pope’s insistence at the end of Scandal that she would do “whatever [she] want[ed]” (16) because Kerry too is looking to do whatever she wants to do, such as appearing on a show dedicated to family history. Kerry, at this moment in her career, is at a place where she can discover more about herself because the roles that she played helped her understand herself more, and the appearance on the show would be the culmination of that. Instead, she has a similar opportunity to learn about a key part of her that has been missing. The effect of the truth is near-instantaneous for her: Discovering that her father is unknown to her does not fracture her sense of self further. Instead, “[i]n that moment, it was as if my instincts and sense of self were instantly stitched back together and readied for long-term healing” (301). This final section thus resolves the theme of Searching for Truth and Trust, but this resolution does not require that Kerry’s whole picture be complete; rather, it restores her trust in herself. Four decades of feeling like something was off is affirmed in her genes.

However, Kerry emphasizes that she “would not change a thing” (280). She loves her parents despite the complicated relationship that she has had with them. This love for her parents gives the memoir its title, as she explains that “[b]lood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood” (287). Choosing to focus on “thicker than water” and not “thicker than blood” nods to the consequences of her parents’ secrets about her life because the lack of blood is what drove a wedge between her and them (her father because he is not her biological father and her mother because she kept this secret). However, Kerry does not lean on blood in the title, symbolizing how her love for her parents triumphs above all the complexities.

Just as in film she supported several leading actors in their quest for award-winning performances before moving to her own stage as the lead, she moves out of “the role that best supported their story,” referring to her parents (265). She choose to be the lead in her life. This choice allows her to see more clearly too the effects of the truth on her parents. For her mother, the truth is freeing. Kerry describes how she and Valerie became closer than ever and how she came to see her mother as an “adventurer” willing to risk having a then-experimental procedure. For her father, on the other hand, Kerry came to realize that “my ability to accept and metabolize the truth, just like my ability to move through the water, was perhaps stronger than his” (277). Earl, always the creative dreamer, struggled to accept that the role he’d made for himself as Kerry’s father was not one rooted in blood.

The end of the memoir also brings it back to the beginning, as Kerry finishes by describing her experience of being underwater, highlighting the motif of Swimming once more. Her conclusion that it is the best place for her to hear herself symbolizes her new focus on herself. By ending with her name and this moment in the water, Kerry asserts the primacy of her life to her story, which is a marked contrast to the years she spent creating “real” lives for characters as she faded into the background of what it was like to inhabit them, eating, walking, and talking like them. She is ready to be Kerry Washington, and she uses the title of the Epilogue, “Marisa,” as a device to explain that her family (including her husband) is essential to her name but that Marisa is the only part of it she feels belongs entirely to her since her mother picked Kerry, her father gave her Washington, and she took Nnamdi’s last name legally. In choosing to focus on this, she centers the narrative on herself, even though the question of who her father is remains a mystery. Either way, she has found a role she was always destined to play: Kerry Marisa Washington.