Whoopi Goldberg grew up poor in the New York projects of Chelsea with her mother, Emma Johnson, and big brother, Clyde.
But as the Oscar winner writes in her memoir, “Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me,” she never considered their circumstances as reduced. Her mother, who worked as a nurse, managed to enrich her children’s lives with regular trips to shows, museums, Shakespeare in the Park, Radio City Music Hall and excursions to Coney Island. It was a life full of music, old movies and culture.
Emma encouraged her daughter’s aspirations.
“My mom made me believe I could do anything I wanted,” the Oscar winner writes. “Because of my mom, I was able to go from being Caryn Johnson [Whoopi Goldberg’s real name], the ‘little weird kid’ from the projects who no one ever expected to achieve all that much, to being me, Whoopi Goldberg.”
Emma, who helped raise Goldberg’s daughter, Alex, also instilled in her own daughter a ferocious work ethic and self-reliance.
“She really wanted me to understand that I had to be able to count on myself,” she writes. “And do for myself . . . She let me know there was no guarantee, no matter what.”
Goldberg, 68, writes of her utter shock upon hearing of her mother’s sudden death in 2010 followed five years later by her brother.
“The View” host told The Post recently that she wanted to take on a memoir “because I was forgetting things, I realized I needed to write stuff down.”
Goldberg shared that losing a mother is different from losing any other family member.
“You don’t realize that’s the first person that ever looked at you and said, ‘I like you,’ or ‘come here,’ or any of those things.”
She admits that after her mother’s death she waited “to fall apart” but it never happened.
“It still hasn’t,” “The Color Purple” star confessed.
