Celebrity Memoir Book Club hosts went deep on Keke Palmer’s new book!
On the Nov. 26 episode of the podcast, Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton discussed Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, which came out Nov. 19.
As the hosts discussed the journey the actress and multimedia star, 31, took through her work, Hamilton recalled how Palmer wrote about the impact of people’s perceptions of others.
“She realizes the power of words and the way someone else’s perception can affect your perception,” the podcast co-host recalled. “I learned to separate my performance from my personal emotions. I’m not my work, but I do my work. This marks the beginning of my process with detaching myself from my own feelings.”
That helped Palmer, who landed her first small part in the 2004 film Barbershop 2 at age 10 and went on to play the starring role in True Jackson VP, “navigate feedback with clarity, and grow as an artist.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
In writing Master of Me, Palmer told PEOPLE she learned a lot about herself, too. “My diving into my stuff is less about you saying, ‘Me too,’ and more about you being like, ‘Let me dive into my stuff.’ Because when you do dig, it’s like, ‘Okay, I can move forward with that awareness in a way that’s going to allow me to not hold myself back.”
The podcasters also broke down how Palmer opened up about the challenges that came with being a Black child star in the limelight, noting that “she talks about the triple bind of being a child actor, wanting to be the perfect child, the perfect student, the perfect coworker.”
“She says in addition to wanting to impress everybody and then also support her family, she also has the weight of being Black and the weight of a Black child in the public eye with no room for error or childhood mistakes because everybody’s counting on you,” Parker continued.
“That’s always been the thing with me,”Palmer told PEOPLE, about her journey. “I’m in a mature scenario, having these older experiences in the workplace and with my sense of purpose,” she says, “but then again, I’m just a regular 31-year-old with all of my immaturities.”
The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!
Hamilton also reflected on how Palmer rewrote her narrative by using her child stardom as an “opportunity” to help support her family.
“The more I think about this book, what it seems to really be about, she keeps saying, you get to write your own narrative,” Parker said. “You get to tell your own story. And I do think there’s a lot of power in that and saying … ‘Don’t let anyone disempower you by telling you what your story is.’”
“You tell it to yourself,” she continued. “Be the victor, not the victim of your story. And so a lot of this book is about, ‘I wasn’t forced to support my whole family at 12. I was lucky enough to support my family and, like, break generational curses. And, like, how lucky am I that I had a community who sacrificed so much for me, so what I gave back is finances.’”
Read the full article here
