Thicker than Water: A Memoir

Content Warning: The source material in this section contains depictions of infertility issues and disordered eating.

Kerry Washington frames her narrative through swimming, noting the muffled nature of sounds one hears underwater and the distorted images one sees when looking up at the water’s surface as analogies for the things that one faces growing up that lack clarity and then finding one’s own clarity. The memoir emphasizes that water and swimming are important to Kerry, but her return to being underwater at the end of the memoir is a reminder that the water holds great meaning relating to her journey of discovery about herself and her family. Being under the water symbolizes a place where she can hear herself think, but looking up at the surface is an apt description of how “that muted state of reality is what life has always felt like to me” (309). She always felt that something was not clicking in her life, and learning her family’s secret allowed her to focus more on herself and her identity. In addition, she notes how her middle name, Marisa, means “of the sea” and feels the most connected to this part of her name.

Kerry notes how water represents complicated symbolism for Black Americans. She addresses this explicitly, writing that “many of us carry a complicated and painful relationship with swimming in general, and swimming in the ocean in particular” (22). Because of where her family lived, she grew up swimming, but this was not the case for her parents’ generation or the many other African Americans who did not have access to a pool.

Memories of swimming with her family often appear in Kerry’s recollections. She recalls swimming across a lake with her father, in which she felt particularly connected to him. She also recounts how Olivia Pope became a swimmer because Shonda Rhimes integrated details or skills from the various actors into their characters on Scandal. The show’s set was always a place where Kerry felt she could relax, and as a result, it was unique since she often did not feel okay with herself, choosing to focus on others or on her roles. It was “a safe route out of myself, helping me to escape my thoughts and then return to a calmer, more centered version of me” (42).

At times, Kerry employs swimming or water to set the scene or as a metaphor. At the beginning of Chapter 2, she describes how “water was still all around us,” referring to the East River (38). This example emphasizes how important water was to Kerry before she explains in the same chapter that she was a strong swimmer. In another instance, Kerry describes how “[s]wimming inside me was an ocean of complex emotions” (124) that she felt while answering her father’s lawyer’s question about how she was. She uses this language to both describe her feelings “fear and embarrassment to courage and hope” (124) and to show how she often wasn’t grounded in her relationship with her parents. Their relationship was complex, so the lawyer’s knowing many details of her life when she did not even know he existed made her uneasy.