By Lexy Perez
Ahead of the release of “I Am These Truths,” “The View” co-host and legal journalist spoke about the revealing foreword to her book, navigating the gray area of being biracial and why the country’s diversity reckoning is “a movement, not a moment.”
Sunny Hostin wasn’t sure she had a story to tell for a memoir.
“I’m only 50 and I was thinking, ‘Do I really have a story?’ ” Hostin tells The Hollywood Reporter. But after receiving encouragement from her book agent and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she realized that her story would be “important to young women of color” given “there aren’t enough stories of representation out there.”
Throughout her 268-page memoir, I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice and Living Between Two Worlds (HarperOne), the Emmy-winning legal journalist and The View co-host details the prominent moments in her life that helped shape her as a woman. Growing up as the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Black father, Hostin chronicles navigating two worlds as a biracial woman and shares personal anecdotes from her school years, motherhood as well as her legal career and time working on The View.
The timing of her book’s release is arriving in a time that’s “very different,” Hostin says. To say her stories are hyper-relevant to the current times would be an understatement: Following the recent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police action, conversations surrounding race and representation continue amid the ongoing movement for racial justice. Hostin says readers now may be willing to “pay attention” to her story because “now people will understand.”
True to her title, Hostin begins her book by pulling no punches to tell her “truths.” In just the first page of her foreword, The View co-host reveals that ABC Network attempted to edit out passages from her book that it deemed put the company in an unfavorable light. Hostin writes that it was confusing as to why a “news organization would try to censor a Puerto Rican, African American woman’s story while they were covering global demonstrations demanding racial equity.” “I didn’t want to believe that racism played a part in their revision requests … Then, on Friday, June 12th, I got a text from a reporter,” she writes in the foreword.
The text pertained to a HuffPost report centered on ABC News senior vp Barbara Fedida who was alleged to have made racially insensitive remarks about colleagues, including Hostin. Fedida would later depart the network following an investigation. Though she doesn’t specify what passages the network wanted removed from her memoir, Hostin says she knows sharing details of the pushback in her forward is “risky” as most don’t “write about their current employers in a book” but it was “important to do.”
Read the full article at HollywoodReporter.com.