What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

Winfrey is an American media personality, author, and philanthropist, famous for her television talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey has received numerous awards and accolades for her work in media, and she is also recognized as being the world’s first female African American billionaire. Despite her successful and affluent adult life, Winfrey grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She was born to a teenage single mother, Vernita Lee, but was raised by her maternal grandmother, Hattie Mae, for the first few years of her life. Winfrey describes the experience growing up with her grandmother as somewhat paradoxical: while Hattie Mae was firm to the point of being physically abusive in her manner of disciplining, Winfrey also credits her grandmother for instilling a positive sense of self in her. Nevertheless, Hattie Mae’s particular brand of discipline did leave a mark; the book opens with Winfrey recounting her experience of being “whupped” by her grandmother for an innocent childhood infraction. Even though “whupping” seemed to be the cultural norm in many African American families, Winfrey describes realizing, even at that young age, that what was happening to her was not right. Hattie Mae’s method of disciplining, coupled with harsh reminders that Winfrey ought not to cry but bear her suffering with a smile on her face, led to a pattern of compliance and people-pleasing later in life that Winfrey retrospectively acknowledges.