Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Kerry’s mother, Valerie Washington, is a retired professor who taught early childhood education courses in New York City. Before meeting Earl, she was married to an abusive husband with whom she had a stillbirth. She was close to Earl’s sister in high school and reconnected with him as an adult. Kerry describes how they encountered one another at a party and how their trip to the beach the following day was pivotal in their relationship: “What my dad saw that day was a woman willing to boldly break from convention. She was not like any other Black woman he had ever met” (22). For some of her young adulthood, Kerry saw her mother as passive, at times encouraging Valerie to divorce Earl because they frequently fought after he came home inebriated. However, in discovering that her mother had used a sperm donor (an experimental option when Kerry was born in 1977), she began to see her mother as “an intrepid adventurer, bold and brave, willing to be innovative and experimental in her quest for a child” (289).

While Kerry and Valerie were close at various points throughout Kerry’s childhood, Valerie encouraged her to pursue acting as a career once she landed an agent. Kerry later learned that her mother didn’t give her too many chores so that she could focus on her passion for performance. However, Kerry felt that she could not be entirely honest with Valerie, feeling some distance from watching the way her mother and father always pretended that everything was fine. After Kerry’s parents told her the truth about her parentage, Kerry and Valerie grew even closer. In 2021, when Valerie was diagnosed for the fourth time with cancer (from which she eventually recovered), Kerry served as her primary caretaker, spending days in the hospital next to her mother and then coordinating her care remoting while filming The School for Good and Evil in Ireland.

Kerry’s father, Earl Washington, is a retired real estate agent whose previous employment led to struggles with the IRS. Though he is not Kerry’s biological father, the two are very close. When Kerry was older, Earl again became close with his wife, Valerie. He was initially reluctant to do a paternity test to confirm that he was not Kerry’s father, feeling shame about the struggles with fertility, but he eventually agreed to the test.

Kerry describes her father as deeply imaginative and creative, inspiring in her a love of fantastical things that she cites as inspirational in her choice to be an actor. Together they could be adventurous, and Kerry recalls swimming together as an “activity that has allowed all the friction, the judgment, the disconnect, to disappear” (274). However, he struggled to accept the reality of difficult moments in his life, in which he “turn[ed] away from it, ignore[d] it, and denie[d] it” (185). Kerry recounts that drinking often provided an outlet for Earl when he struggled financially or professionally, another example of his looking for an escape. She laughs thinking about the near-zero odds that he was her father after taking a paternity test, knowing that “my dad would hear that infinitesimal number as proof that there was at least a chance he could still be my father” (301).

Earl and Kerry didn’t initially grow closer after she learned about the sperm donor, because he was reluctant to let this secret get out further. He felt that it threatened his identity as her father. The “denial,” she writes, was “required to maintain his identity” (269). It was hard for Kerry to let go of her habit of trying to please her parents, but she did so to prioritize herself and her needs, and ultimately, her father came around, partly because he recognized that Kerry still viewed him as her father. She was grateful that he came around to realizing that their bond was deeper than genetics.