We're Going to Need More Wine

Gabrielle Union's memoir is structured as a collection of personal essays that move roughly chronologically from her childhood through her adult life, covering race, sexuality, trauma, marriage, motherhood, and career. Union frames the book as an intimate conversation, comparing it to a night out with a close friend over wine. She acknowledges her fear of consequences for telling the truth but commits to honesty, referencing Carrie Fisher's advice: "Stay afraid, but do it anyway" (3).

In second grade, Union's family moved from Omaha, Nebraska, where they belonged to the state's largest African American extended family, to Pleasanton, California, a nearly all-white suburb chosen by her father, Cully Union, to keep pace with a white coworker. Her mother, Theresa, had pushed for Oakland but lost the argument. Within a year, a classmate dubbed Union "Nigger Nickie." She responded by policing her every behavior to avoid what she called "Black Pitfalls": eating chicken only with a knife and fork, performing minstrel routines when classmates mocked her hair. She read three newspapers daily and competed fiercely for top grades, internalizing her parents' warning that she would need to be "bigger, badder, better, just to be considered equal" (7). When a new Black girl named Tarsha arrived from Oakland, Union voted against her at the lunch table to protect her own social standing.

Beginning at 13, Union spent summers in Omaha with her maternal grandmother, reconnecting with her cousin Kenyatta. Kenyatta's friends labeled Union an "Oreo" for her white-coded speech, and Union studied them to relearn blackness. Over successive summers, she watched North Omaha transform as L.A.-based gangs arrived and multiple friends were killed, imprisoned, or permanently injured. Back in Pleasanton, Union never shared these experiences, resenting the code-switching her dual life required.

Union's adolescent essays chart her inadequate sex education and her friend group's scramble to arrange an abortion for a classmate who became pregnant at 14. Union stole a basket of condoms from a Planned Parenthood waiting room and became her circle's unofficial dispensary. Other chapters detail the chemical burns she endured from hair relaxer at 12 and explore colorism, the belief that lighter skin equals greater worth. In a family where light skin was the beauty standard, Union measured her worth by her ability to attract boys not expected to find dark-skinned girls attractive. A friend named Eric eventually called her out for never dating anyone darker than herself, forcing Union to confront her own internalized bias.

Union traces her parents' disintegrating marriage. Her father financed a secret relationship that Union and her older sister Kelly uncovered through a hidden bank card. For the last five years of the marriage, her parents did not speak. After the divorce, her father married the other woman, Toni, and skipped Union's graduation from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for a Hawaii honeymoon.

The memoir's most harrowing chapter recounts Union's rape at 19. Working at a Payless shoe store, she was robbed and raped at gunpoint by a man who had previously robbed other Payless locations, a fact the company had not disclosed to staff. During the assault, the rapist set his gun down; Union grabbed it and fired but missed. He wrestled the weapon away and pointed it at her head. She offered a gold necklace for her life; he did not take it but left through the back door. He struck again within days and turned himself in after police staked out his mother's house, accepting a plea deal of 33 years. Union developed post-traumatic stress disorder, timing every activity to minimize danger. She joined the UCLA Rape Crisis Center's group therapy and found healing among other survivors. Twenty-four years later, the fear still governs her daily life: She cannot sit with her back to a door and experiences panic when strangers grab her in public.

Union's first marriage, to a football player named Chris, was marked by mutual cheating and financial dependence; Chris never worked again after being cut from professional football. A therapist told them within 15 minutes they did not belong together. They split after a rare night of mutual honesty and ironically became better friends afterward.

A turning point came in 2012, when Essence magazine asked Union to give a speech. She wrote the most honest thing she had ever said publicly: that she took joy in other women's pain and was "a victim masquerading as a survivor" (172). Union describes a period in her early thirties when, after her divorce and a show cancellation, she crawled under her bed. Her dog, Bubba Sparxxx, army-crawled under to find her. Union called a life coach who forced her to confront her inability to identify what made her happy, connecting that emptiness to her failed marriage and her pattern of tearing other women down.

Chapters on Union's acting career track her rise from a two-line debut on Saved by the Bell: The New Class through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the summer filming 10 Things I Hate About You with Heath Ledger. On Bring It On, she rewrote her character Isis's dialogue with director Peyton Reed to eliminate blaxploitation stereotypes, tropes drawn from a 1970s genre built on exaggerated depictions of Black life. A guest appearance on Friends illustrates Hollywood's implicit bias: the episode's director condescendingly explained basic set terminology despite Union's having opened multiple number-one films.

Later chapters cover Union's life with professional basketball star Dwyane Wade. She describes raising his two sons and nephew, the guilt of frequent absences for work, and the "Black Bombs" she drops on the boys: warnings about how their Black bodies will be perceived in wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods. One tense episode found Union panicking after Dwyane gave the boys permission to walk to a friend's gym at night. Police cars appeared, and Union connects the moment to the killings of unarmed Black youth Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.

Union writes candidly about her fertility struggles, revealing eight or nine miscarriages and years of failed in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles. She resents the gendered scrutiny, noting that no one asks her husband about his reproductive plans. A chapter on the couple's prenup negotiation before their August 2014 wedding exposes the financial dynamics of their relationship, with Dwyane's legal team arguing Union was worth less than her actual earning power.

A chapter on assimilation examines the futility of performing respectability. After moving to Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, Union heard a neighbor use the word "thug" after passing her on the sidewalk. The next day, she deliberately wore mittens instead of gloves, reasoning that "thugs don't wear mittens" (219), then caught herself, furious that she thought a clothing choice could erase 400 years of history.

A tribute to Prince celebrates the musician as a cultural connector whose parties broke down Hollywood's racial segregation. Union credits a Prince party with introducing her to Dwyane's brother, the connection that eventually led to her marriage.

The final chapter braids together the stories of Union's closest high school friends, Ray and Sookie Martinez. Ray, a Puerto Rican sophomore from New Jersey, came out as gay during Union's freshman year of college. He told her that every time she casually said "faggot," she broke his heart, just as the word "nigger" had broken hers. Years later, Ray's sister Sookie received a diagnosis of stage IV metastatic breast cancer after delaying a doctor's visit for six months out of fear. Union threw herself into advocacy, only to learn that metastatic breast cancer has no cure. At their last meeting, Sookie delivered the message she wanted Union to carry: "I want you to tell people that fear can kill you. I was afraid, and it killed me" (257). Union closes the memoir by honoring that promise.