The Biggest Bombshells from Jada Pinkett Smith's Memoir, from Chris Rock Asking Her Out to the Oscars Slap

Jada Pinkett Smith has had quite a life — though perhaps “lives” is a better way to put it.

“I was living a lot of them at one time,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. And in her new memoir Worthy, out Oct. 17, Jada traces her path to, as she puts it, “finding self-worth. This is a reclamation of my narrative.”

The daughter of parents with substance-abuse issues, Jada survived a tough Baltimore childhood and became a high-school drug dealer — who also showed immense promise as a performer. (She came of age with the late actor and rapper Tupac Shakur and remained close until his death in 1996. And, in Worthy, she reveals how Shakur asked her to marry him while he was incarcerated.)

Jada studied theater for one year at North Carolina School for the Arts before making her way to Hollywood and landing a role on A Different World. That led to films such as Set It Off, Menace II Society, The Nutty Professor, Collateral and The Matrix.

Of course, along the way, she met a hot young actor named Will Smith, whom she would later marry. After meeting multiple times in passing — and once he got divorced from his first wife, Sheree Zampino — he called Jada and asked, “Who are you going out with?” After replying that she was single, Will declared, “Well, you’re going out with me now.”

Laughing at the recollection, Jada says, “Can you believe I fell for that?!”

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Now, at 52, her life has been filled with immense highs (e.g., touring with her rock band Wicked Wisdom, the births of her two children, her “bonus son” Trey from Will’s first marriage, creating the talk show Red Table Talk), lows and even lower lows, she says.

But today, Jada is — well, worthy, she says. And her children have helped most of all.

“They love every part of me,” she says of Jaden, 25, Willow, 22, and Trey, 30. “The level of love, unconditional love, that they have for me and their dad. And it's one thing to want to be the person that gives that unconditional love. And then there's to be the recipient of that.”

Here are some of the most surprising revelations from Jada's new book, Worthy.

Yes, she talks about "the slap."

In the chapter titled, “The Holy Joke, the Holy Slap, and Holy Lessons,” Jada recalls what it was like to be made fun of for her alopecia by Chris Rock and then witness her husband assaulting the comedian on live television at the Academy Awards in 2022.

She didn't think it was real at first. “When Chris was still standing afterward, I believed my observation to be true — aha, this IS a skit,” Jada writes.

The actress also gets into more detail about the history between Rock, 58, and Will, 55, plus her own history with Rock (this was the second time he had made fun of her at the Oscars, the first time being in 2016) and what she says Rock said to her that night from the stage.

“ 'Jada, I honestly meant no harm,' ” she says Rock told her, as the cameras stopped and video played of the nominees for which Rock was presenting the Academy Award.

She writes that Rock asked her out.

Explaining more to PEOPLE, Jada says, “I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce. And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I'd love to take you out.’ "

"And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ " she continues. "He was like, ‘Well, aren't you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”

Rock's reps did not respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

She opens up about her marriage to Will, including the fact that they have lived separately since 2016.

Jada writes that, at the Oscars in 2022, they had technically split and were not attending “as husband and wife.” But, after the slap, she said she would not let Will go through this alone, yet, “I would not fight this fight for him” either.

She also addresses false rumors and gets candid about how her marriage has stayed intact after all the years and the ups and down. She writes, “Talk of our open marriage was somewhat misleading, because it wasn’t the free-for-all it sounded like.”

Jada explains to PEOPLE, “We eliminated the chance of betrayal. It's like, ‘Let's talk about it. Let's work through it together. Let's be in partnership. Let's not keep each other in the dark.’ And I think that — and this is just for me personally — if you're talking about being with somebody forever, it’s about having emotional maturity, to get through inevitable times when somebody is tired of yo' ass.”

She says she remembers women looking at Will when they first got together. “To say at 25 and 28 years old in Tinseltown, that 'till death do us part,’ and you think that there is not going to be straying eyes — to me, that didn't seem realistic at all,” Jada recalls. “From what I had seen on the streets, being young, the intoxication that you get walking into the room and all eyes are on you. And you can have anybody there.”

“We’re still figuring it out,” she continues. “Relationships, it's an organism — constantly shifting and constantly moving. We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other, and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us. A lot happened over the last two years.”

While she and her husband have shared a lot, Jada says there have been a lot of assumptions about their dynamic as well.

“People haven’t always been privy to what was happening in our relationship,” she says. “I remember saying, ‘You might be on one side of this house with somebody and I might be on the other side of this house with somebody, but we going to be in this house together. That's what we are going to do.'"

One subject that comes up a lot with the couple is the level of exclusivity they have. It was discussed during the 2020 era of “the entanglement,” when Smith revealed on Red Table Talk that she’d had a relationship with R&B singer August Alsina — whom she does not name in the book, referring to him as "entanglee" — while separated from Will. Jada is clear about this: neither she nor Will have ever had an affair. Nor do they have an open relationship. 

“We eliminated the chance of betrayal,” she says. 

“Trust me,” the Girls Trip star adds with a laugh. “I'm going to tell you straight up — it is not for the faint at heart. But I do believe that is why Will and I are still married today.”

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She writes how real — and dangerous — her years selling crack cocaine in Baltimore were.

Jada reveals of her days dealing drugs and the dangerous situations — guns to her head, carrying a knife — she put herself in. She says she graduated from University of the B More Streets. “Growing up, the drug dealers were the ones that had affluence. That’s what we readily saw as success. And so for me, considering my circumstances at the time, my mother [Adrienne Banfield-Norris, with whom she hosts Red Table Talk] was not doing well, she tried to get clean from heroin." Jada became concerned about her own welfare.

Jada says she held several jobs growing up, “legit jobs,” starting at 12 years of age. “Having money in my pocket was a must,” she says. She was a telemarketer, she worked at The Gap. “I just wanted financial freedom.” There was also the “what if” fears, she says. “What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn't come home one night? Either overdosed, arrested, whatever. And so, I decided to sell drugs. I decided to sell crack cocaine.”

Everyone, she says, was dealing with the drug epidemic in Baltimore in the 1980s. “Everybody,” she says. “Drugs were going to touch you, period. You could use them, you could sell them, but there was no being in an environment like that and drugs not touch you. And I'm not saying that it's right, of course, now being in a whole different mindset. But when you're living in a war zone and you just thinking about survival, I wasn't trying to use drugs. I surely wasn't going to be a drug dealer's girlfriend. But I wanted money so that I could be independent. I wanted to take care of myself.”

She laughs at her ambition and hubris. “I thought I was going to be a queen pin, for sure,” she remembers. 

"And I'm not saying that it's right, of course, now being in a whole different mindset," Jada continues. "But when you're living in a war zone and you just thinking about survival, I wasn't trying to use drugs. I surely wasn't going to be a drug dealer's girlfriend. But I wanted money so that I could be independent. I wanted to take care of myself.”

"I was rollin’ with some really high rollers at the time. That's a whole ‘nother Jada, a whole ‘nother Jada that would chase somebody down the alley with a switchblade because they stole $700. Or the Jada that would sell crack cocaine and then get set up and two dudes come in with nine-millimeters and she gets a gun put to her head.”

The star then turns serious. “That was my solution at that particular time to survive. And it really helped me. But it put me into a lot of danger and I hurt a lot of people along the way.”

Jada reveals her bouts with suicidal ideation — and that her life was saved by the plant-based medicine ayahuasca.

After her 40th birthday, Jada was suicidal. She writes, "I’d begun to think about how to have a fatal accident that wouldn’t look intentional — for the sake of my kids. If I remained the way I was, what good would I be to them anyway? Besides, I told myself, they would be okay. They would have their father, a devoted and great dad. Their being okay, in my mind, depended on me doing a good job of making my death appear to be conclusively accidental."

"As grim as it may sound, the world had become less heavy now that I had a solution, a plan for my own exit, and I was resolved. A somber steeliness took hold. Driving around a turn on Mulholland Drive a few times, I settled on a specific cliff that might work. I’d have to summon the courage to drive fast over the side — probably at night. Fatal car accidents happened all the time on Mulholland. My only hesitation was that I might not die."

Jada is aware of how her life looked from the outside, especially about a decade ago. The glamour and the smiles, the mansion, gowns and movie premieres. The “they have it all” of it all.

“But,” she tells PEOPLE, “while I was really living the dream, I hit a huge wall — a massive amount of depression. I think that I looked at having outside sources to supplement for the voids that I was feeling inside.”

The thoughts were back. She reveals in Worthy she had dealt with suicidal ideation previously in her life. “The voices were coming in. ‘Just kill yourself. You're not worth anything, you ain't sh--.’” Jada says a chance conversation in her own kitchen provided a glimmer of hope.

Friends of her son Jaden mentioned that their dad had gone through an ayahuasca ceremony, where a leader supplies a plant-based psychedelic drug, usually brewed into a tea to drink, and guides the subject through hallucinations.

Ayahuasca has shown success in treating anxiety and depression — and has been used in the Amazon for centuries. Jada went through several treatments and says both she and Will have taken the drug “several times,” and their children have as well. “As adults,” she clarifies.

“Ayahuasca helped me,” Jada says. “It gave me a new intimate relationship with myself that I had never had before.”

She also adds that, since the first time she took the drug, in 2011, “The suicidal thoughts completely went away.”

Worthy is out Oct. 17 wherever books are sold.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.