Laverne Cox bravely confronted the ghosts of her past in her new book.
In Transcendent, which hit bookshelves on June 9, the Orange Is the New Black star “shares her journey as a transgender woman in Hollywood, confronting childhood trauma, shame, gender identity, her transition, body image issues, her search for romantic love, deep-seated feelings of unworthiness, and ultimately, healing,” according to the official synopsis.
Readers “will experience life in Laverne’s shoes, from her childhood abuse to making her big break, dealing with Hollywood bureaucracy, feeling lonely in a world that is unaccepting, and finding her voice through the chaos of it all.”
RadarOnline.com can now reveal the biggest bombshells from the memoir.
In the book, Cox opens up about how a frightening childhood confrontation left her “locked in terror.”
“We were latchkey kids, left at home for long stretches of time while my mother was working, so after we fulfilled our Cinderella duties, my brother [M Lamar] went outside to play, and I was alone in the apartment,” she recalls in the book.
Cox adds, “I opened my backpack and pulled out my homework, sitting at the little kitchen island. That’s where I was when my mother pounded through the front door. I could hear by her footsteps that she was in a mood, maybe from the stress of the day. But suddenly, the sound veered from what I was expecting – not to her bedroom as usual, but down the hallway to the kitchen. To me.”
The LGBTQ+ advocate recalled that her teacher contacted her mother after noticing her “fanning” herself in class, warning that she would end up in New Orleans “wearing a dress” if she wasn’t put into therapy.
According to Cox, her mother’s furious reaction made her fear she was about to be physically punished, recalling a beating she once received for stealing.
“The question slapped me like a hand to my face. Repeatedly. Whiplashed me over and over so that the only two words in my mind were, ‘Oh God,’ she pens. “My body was numb, shut down. I couldn’t even cry. The idea didn’t even occur to me because I knew she would just yell harder, louder, meaner. I left my body, sitting there in silence, praying it would all be over soon.”
As her mother asked if she really wanted “to be in a dress on the streets in New Orleans,” Cox found herself “locked in terror, unable to form words to answer this impossible question” that her only response was, “I don’t know.”
She continues in the memoir, “The screams carried on for so long, until, just like Charlie Brown, all I could hear was, ‘Wah wah wah wah.’ I heard her – her rage, her disappointment, her deep-seated embarrassment that I was her child, that my teacher had witnessed this and felt so urgently compelled to call about it – yet I was protected, albeit weakly, by this ‘Wah wah wah’ bubble muffling her words. But it could not protect me from these new, terrifying visions of myself on the streets of New Orleans.”
“Now I sensed I was more than the simple inconvenience I’d been made to feel like every day of my life. I was an embarrassment. A horror,” Cox points out.
In Transcendent, the four-time Emmy-nominated actress revealed she and her twin brother were both abused as children.
The matriarch also reportedly left Cox and her twin brother after he broke a neighbor’s window, dropping them off at their father’s home. It marked the first – and only – time Cox met her father, who allegedly refused to take them in.
Per Cox, her father brought her and her brother to a police station, after which they were placed in an orphanage for a month until their mother returned to pick them up.
She was then reminded of her time in the orphanage when she stepped onto the set of Orange Is the New Black decades later.
“It was the not knowing if I’d ever see her again that tore at me every day, the uncertainty of not knowing what my life would be like a day, a week, a month, even a year from now. It haunted me,” she admits in the book. “The shame of being discarded by my mother, who was supposed to love me and take care of me, absolutely crushed me.”
Meanwhile, Cox revealed her brother stopped speaking to their mother roughly two decades ago. She said their final argument erupted after their mom continued to misgender Cox and use her former name years into her transition, an issue that left her brother “upset on [her] behalf.”