Good celebrities understand how to turn their personal lives into a public point of fascination, but great celebrities know how to make a living from it. (Hey, Taylor.) Our current era of nano-news cycles and obsessive fan culture—now often combined via live updates of the @PopCrave and @DeuxMoi ilk—has given way to an insatiable appetite for any morsel of celebrity comportment that may offer a glimpse into their real selves. Weeks-long cultural discourses sustain themselves on theoretical feuds and spitgates. So when things go dramatically, unambiguously off-script, as with “The Slap” of the 2022 Oscars that embroiled Chris Rock, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith, complete frenzy ensues.

For Jada Pinkett Smith, walking the line between sharing and oversharing about her personal life—especially as part of an extremely famous, extremely scrutinized power couple—has been a decade-long dilemma, stemming most famously from 2013, when misconstrued remarks in an interview prompted speculation of an open marriage. In 2018, when Pinkett Smith started hosting the strikingly candid Red Table Talk series on Facebook Watch with her family, perhaps inevitably, the multihyphenate used a 2020 episode of the talk show to address rumors about her and Smith’s relationship. Viewers remain divided on whether so much disclosure was brave or cringe, but it’s undeniable that “entanglement” and “Red Table” have since shifted from an individual’s private matter into cultural idiom. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that post-Slap, Pinkett Smith was always going to have more to say.

In her recounting of that notorious Oscars night in her new memoir, Worthy, the actor reveals that The Slap proved to be a critical point in what had been a yearslong separation in their marriage. “What I knew, for the first time in six years since our breakup, was that I would stand with him in this storm as his wife, no matter what,” Pinkett Smith writes. “I had not felt that way in a long time. I would not abandon him, nor would I fight his fight for him like I had tried to do so many times in the past.”

Elsewhere in the memoir, Pinkett Smith takes the reader along a broad overview of her life, starting from her earliest remembrances as a Baltimore native navigating her love for the performing arts alongside her parents’ drug addiction, all the way to the upper recesses of the fairy-tale life that came with Hollywood—which, as becomes a common theme in Worthy, has since caused Pinkett Smith to wrestle endlessly with the belief “that if we achieve enough, we’re exempt from our shadow.” Think of Worthy as the Matrix Reloaded and Madagascar star’s full-length attempt to “Red Table” herself in entirety. In reading through her discussions of everything from suicidal ideation to ayahuasca ceremonies, one arrives at the feeling that Pinkett Smith has mastered, and perhaps also earned, her grip over any remaining taboos we pretend to have about oversharing.

In conversation with Vanity Fair, Pinkett Smith sits down to discuss milestones and meaning making in life—and what the rest of us are still getting wrong.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: In today’s culture, the act of “telling your story” is understood as something that’s important and almost necessary for self-actualization. But how does someone with your kind of spotlight do that? I’m curious how you decide what to share publicly, whether it’s via this book or, say, back during the Red Table Talk days.

Jada Pinkett Smith: You try not to strategize ahead of time, and you try to figure out what's enough to offer for the purpose. Sometimes, you can’t offer too much. You know what I mean? It’s that fine line of like, okay, if your purpose is to help to share your journey to self-worth in order to inspire people who might be in a hopeless place on their journey, you want to keep people wanting to move forward in a certain direction with you. But you have to feel it out as you go.

Has there been a moment when you’ve regretted offering too much?

No, I don't have regrets. I have remorse, but not regret. Because I do feel like everything happens for a reason. I’m here to learn.

Ever since “The Slap” happened during the 2022 Oscars, I’ve been wondering how it feels for you to be in this very famous marriage, where you are expected to play a certain role that’s not entirely unlike a part onscreen.

If we’re paying attention to the roles that we have to play, that’s when we get in trouble. That’s what I learned. You have to give yourself the gift of living your authenticity. Throughout a part of my relationship with myself, I had conformed to playing a role. And I was like, this is not you. That’s when I knew I had lost my way.

Part of my journey to self-worth has been dismantling the need to play a role, and that can be very disruptive for other people. Because if you’re not playing a role, then people don’t know what category to put you in. People can’t feel that you’re safe because they can’t predict what you’re going to do.

There is safety, in both what we want from ourselves and what we want from other people, to have that predictability.

It takes a lot of courage. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying it's for everybody, but I'm going to tell you what, I've found so much freedom there.

In much of Worthy, you’re spending your 40s exploring what your sense of self is outside of your marriage, your children, and your career. As a 30-year-old, I found this interrogation so fascinating, because I still feel like I’m at the age when society expects women to have those three things figured out. And then no one talks about what the rest of it is for.

Who’s to say you’re supposed to be anywhere at 30? For someone to say you should have all those things figured out at 30 is crazy. There are all these unreasonable expectations all over the place that people think they have to adhere to, that create so much discontent and unhappiness. That’s the part that has to be dismantled. You might not want to be the woman who wants to be married with kids, with the professional career and all of that.

You have the right to be the woman you choose to be by your own design. I don’t have to follow random patriarchal standards, or this random matriarchal standard. Even when we as women try to tell each other what a powerful woman looks like, or what a successful woman looks like, it’s like, hold it! We as women have to give each other the right and power to be the women we choose to be. That’s where freedom is, and that’s where “the rest” lies.

A marriage or a career—those are milestones people can see. You sort of get these external trophies. But they don’t give you a self-worth trophy once you’ve reached a certain stage in your relationship with yourself. Is writing a book the closest thing to having one of those signifiers?

I'm going to tell you, the biggest signifier is when you wake up in the morning, and you look at yourself in the mirror, and you are so happy with you.

There’s a quote that I put on the back of the book that says, “A queen is her own savior, and her power is quiet, potent, and mysterious.” Because it’s not about having those physical signifiers. Usually when we’re talking about feminine energy, it’s that particular energy that is not quantifiable. Our masculine energy goes out and gets things! The feminine energy is about weaving those golden threads within our hearts and within the hearts of others. It’s this magic that you can’t always see. So sometimes, those feminine energies get ignored because it’s like, well that’s not giving me the trophy that I need to show the world that I’m something.

Speaking of signifiers—when I was reading about your friendship with Tupac, which began in high school, it sounded like the kind of relationship that defied easy categorization. Your marriage to Will feels similar, in that you’ve struggled to define it for yourself—and others—using the limited language we have at hand. I get the sense that “husband” or “friend” don’t do these relationships justice.

For me and my relationships, being able to not have a signifier allows it to have some expansion. Once we claim it as something, it’s like, this is a phone. Then the mind goes, we’re only going to use this object as a phone. Signifying Will as a husband is like, oh a husband is supposed to be this. Or it’s supposed to be that. Rather than giving the expansion for Will to be so much more to me than this kind of standard idea of what a husband is supposed to be.

The same with Pac. We were friends, but it had so much stuff to it, which is why I think a lot of people are like oh, they were more than friends. I think what people are trying to say is, well, there was more to it than what we understand as a friendship. Sometimes he was my father, sometimes my big brother, sometimes my therapist, sometimes my freaking platonic boyfriend!

Instead of putting people in verticals—my father taught me that in his death: I was so staunch about “you should have been this father to me,” based on what I identified as a father, that I couldn’t see him as a person. Sometimes when we put labels on people, we can’t see them. We can only see them as the expectation of that label.

I assume the journey to self-worth doesn’t end once you’ve written a book about it. It must be strange to assign it a kind of end, at least in this narrative.

Yeah, because I didn't want to be like, “Okay, guys, we're going to wrap this up in a nice pretty bow.”

“I'm good now.”

Right. I'm like, “Hey, I'm still on the journey,” because that's what's true. I'm still on it, and it’s beautiful. Every day, it's moving and expanding and just twisting and turning and just doing what it does.