Nia Long’s first memoir, The Sound of Purpose, traces her road from Brooklyn and Iowa to Hollywood, and the faith, family and healing that shaped her.
By EEW Magazine Online News Editors
Nia Long in the cover portrait for her memoir, The Sound of Purpose, due May 25, 2027. (Photo: Gallery/13A)
When Nia Long was a little girl, her mother told her she would have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame one day. Long has said she never really believed it, because life was hard back then. On Sept. 16, the promise came true, and Long stood on Hollywood Boulevard beside her mother, Talita, and her sons, Massai Dorsey II and Kez Udoka, as the 2,857th star was unveiled in her name. Now the 55-year-old actress is ready to tell the story of the years in between.
Her first memoir, The Sound of Purpose, will be published May 25, 2027, by Gallery Books and its 13A imprint, and is available for preorder in hardcover, ebook and audio. In an interview with People accompanying the Oct. 21 cover reveal, Long called the book “an intimate unpacking of my life,” describing a healing journey inward guided by the signs and sounds that led her to self-love and safety. When she first announced the project in 2023, she told Essence her steps toward “divine purpose” had been thoughtful and intentional.
The cover of Nia Long’s memoir, The Sound of Purpose, due May 25, 2027. (Photo: Gallery/13A)
The book begins in 1970s Brooklyn, where Long grew up surrounded by a large extended family of Trinidadian immigrants. It follows her to an isolated life in a small Iowa town, where she was one of four Black children in her school, and then to South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. According to the publisher, Long writes about the expansive love of her single mother, a painter, and the pain of her father’s absence.
Her father, an acclaimed poet, and her mother gave her an early view of Black artists struggling for representation, which made her more determined to succeed. At her Walk of Fame ceremony, she recalled her mother driving an RTD city bus while she grew up as a latchkey kid.
Her breakthrough came in John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood in 1991, followed by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Friday, Love Jones, Soul Food and The Best Man, roles that made her one of the defining faces of Black film in the 1990s. The memoir examines Hollywood through the lenses of racism, colorism and sexism, and includes behind-the-scenes stories involving Regina King, Will Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, Larenz Tate, Colman Domingo and the late Heavy D and John Singleton.
The book arrives at the end of a banner stretch. Long played Katherine Jackson, matriarch of the Jackson family, in Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, which became the first biopic of any kind to gross more than $1 billion worldwide. She has also wrapped Don’t Ever Wonder, a Netflix film that reunites her with her Love Jones co-star Tate.
At the Walk of Fame ceremony, Long assigned the five points of her star to God, her mother, her sons and the people who shaped her life. Near the end of her remarks, she told the crowd that the woman at the center of those five points was herself.
The publisher pitches The Sound of Purpose beyond longtime fans, to anyone seeking a personal transformation of their own. For a woman whose mother described that star decades before it existed, the title fits.
