Whoopi Goldberg Details How She Saved Her Mom From Suicide During Her Most Trying Years

Whoopi Goldberg‘s rise to stardom may be something anyone would want to covet, but like the rest of us, there are demons we don’t get to see taking place in her personal life.

And in her upcoming memoir, “Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother and Me,” she promises to introduce us to the raw details happening behind-the-scenes, from the gritty to the smooth.

We’ve never known Whoopi to shy away from any topic, no matter how hard or embarrassing – I mean, remember the story about how she got the name “Whoopi?” – and in the memoir, she gets to be even more so.

Whoopi Goldberg – Recalls Discovering Tragic Scene As A Child That “Was Really Bad News”

Goldberg’s memoir will peel back the layers of her childhood to lead us on what made her and shaped her to be the woman that she is today.

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In the memoir, we learn how Goldberg’s lookalike mother, who died of a stroke in 2010, suffered from mental health issues that led her to want to commit suicide. Her brother Clyde died of aneurysm five years later.

When they were children, she recalled how her mother, who was a single parent, never applied for welfare despite struggling to raise two children. Instead, she worked as a nurse and managed to make ends meet as they were growing up in public housing in New York.

However, things went a bit off track when Goldberg came home early from elementary school and found her mom barefoot and disheveled. She also recalled how her mom was incoherent and wasn’t even aware of her presence.

“I watched as she went over to the oven, turned it on, and put her head in there,” she said of the awful moment. “I was old enough to know this was really bad news. I ran over and grabbed her around the waist and pulled her out.”

When the emergency service arrived, Goldberg recalled watching with her opder brother as their mom was wheeled away in a gurney.

At the time, Goldberg recalled feeling protective of her mother and angry that neighbors were watching as she was taken into an ambulance and driven to Bellevue, a psychiatric hospital in the city.

For the next two years, the siblings did not see their mother nor receive health updates about her. They took turns staying with a family member until she was recovered and out of the hospital.

However, when her mother came home, her situation was not the same and her and her brother couldn’t understand why at the time.

You can read more when the autobiography drops on May 7, 2024.

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