Around the Way Girl
Taraji's rise to Hollywood glory
Description
In 1996, a single mother named Taraji P. Henson loaded her two-year-old son into a car and drove from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles with about seven hundred dollars and a degree in theater. She had no agent, no contacts, no plan beyond the conviction that she could act. She enrolled at Howard University before the move, waited tables, danced on a cruise ship, and worked in the mornings at the Pentagon as a secretary while taking classes at night. The arithmetic of that decision — a baby, a near-empty wallet, a city three thousand miles away that owed her nothing — is the spine of her 2016 memoir, Around the Way Girl.
By the time the book came out, Henson had been nominated for an Academy Award for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, won a Golden Globe for the television series Empire, and joined the cast of Hidden Figures. The public version of that arc reads like a clean ascent. The memoir is interested in the part the highlight reel cuts: the auditions that went nowhere, the roles that paid in exposure, the stretch where a celebrated actress still could not get studios to imagine her as a lead.
What Henson wrote is less a victory lap than an accounting. She names the people who carried her, the indignities she swallowed, the moments she nearly quit, and the slow, unphotogenic labor between the breaks everyone else remembers. It is funny where you expect bitterness and blunt where you expect polish — a story told in the voice of someone who has decided she no longer needs to round off the rough edges.
The question we’re asking : How does someone get from Southeast DC to an Oscar nomination, and what does the journey actually cost along the way?What we’ll see : A life told from the inside — the family that shaped her, the years that nearly broke her, and the win that arrived later than it should have.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A girl from Southeast DC
Henson grew up in Southeast Washington, in a neighborhood the city tended to mention only when something went wrong. Her parents split when she was young, and the book draws her father, Boris, in particular detail: a Vietnam veteran who had cycled through homelessness, struggled with his temper, and lived close to the edge for much of her childhood. He was not a stable presence in the conventional sense. He was, by her telling, a fiercely loving one — a man who told his daughter, again and again, that she was special, that she could do anything, and who meant it with an intensity that left a mark.
That contradiction sits at the center of the early chapters. The man who could not always keep a roof over his own head was the one who gave her an unshakable belief in herself. Henson does not tidy this up. She lets her father be both unreliable and indispensable, and she credits his refusal to let her shrink as the thing that later made it possible to drive west with a toddler and almost no money.
02Chapter 2 — The hustle nobody films
The Los Angeles years are where Around the Way Girl earns its subtitle. Henson arrived without the cushion most aspiring actors quietly rely on — no parental safety net, no savings, a child who needed daycare and dinner. She took whatever paid. She sang and danced on a cruise line, worked secretarial jobs, auditioned constantly, and absorbed the particular exhaustion of doing all three at once while raising a kid alone.
She is honest about the rejections, and about the specific shape they took. Casting too often had a narrow imagination for a Black actress: the parts on offer leaned toward the loud, the hardened, the supporting. She booked her first significant role in John Singleton's 2001 film Baby Boy, holding her own opposite Tyrese and Ving Rhames, and the performance announced a serious talent. It did not, however, flip a switch. The work kept coming in fits and starts, and the paychecks rarely matched the acclaim.
03Chapter 3 — Cookie, and the cost of waiting
For all the films, the role that detonated Henson's fame arrived on television, late, and almost by accident. In 2015, the Fox drama Empire cast her as Cookie Lyon — a sharp-tongued matriarch fresh out of prison, fighting for her place in the music empire she helped build. Cookie was loud, glamorous, wounded, and ferociously funny, and audiences responded with an intensity that surprised even the network. The show became a phenomenon, and Henson, after two decades of work, was suddenly a household name.
The memoir treats Cookie as vindication, but a complicated kind. Henson had spent years being told that a Black woman could not anchor a major property, that her range was narrower than it was, that the parts she wanted were not written for someone like her. Cookie was proof those assumptions had been wrong all along. The character also let her braid everything she had learned — the comic timing from Southeast, the emotional depth from years of underused dramatic chops — into one role the whole country could see at once.
04Chapter 4 — What the memoir refuses to hide
Most success stories get retold as overnight myths. The struggling years compress into a montage, the breaks line up like dominoes, and the ending arrives as if it were always coming. Around the Way Girl is, at heart, an argument against that compression. Henson keeps insisting on the duration — the decades, not the moments — and on the price tags the highlight reel leaves off. Her central move as a memoirist is to slow down precisely where other versions speed up.
Part of what she refuses to hide is the role of other people. The book reads, in places, like a long thank-you list rendered honest: the father who built her confidence, the mother who built her discipline, the teachers and directors who saw something, the friends who covered childcare. The self-made narrative is one she actively declines. She made choices, but she names the network that made the choices survivable, and that naming is itself a kind of argument about how anyone actually gets anywhere.
05Conclusion
The book closes where the public story usually opens — with an actress finally recognized, finally cast as the lead, finally able to choose her work. But Henson has spent the preceding pages making sure that ending lands differently. By the time she gets there, we have seen the seven hundred dollars, the cruise ship, the secretarial shifts, the auditions for parts she despised, the Oscar nomination that changed less than it should have. The win reads not as destiny but as the late, hard-won return on twenty years of refusing to stop.
