Oprah Winfrey had her award winning daytime television show. She’s acted in movies. She’s opened schools. And, most recently, started a podcast.
But there’s one thing Oprah hasn’t done: write a memoir.
And she’s not interested in writing one, she told a sold out crowd of more than 11,000 people, mostly women, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center during the Massachusetts Women’s Conference Thursday afternoon.
“I’m not even thinking about it,” she said.
Winfrey, her best friend and co-host of CBS Mornings, Gayle King, Gov. Maura Healey, Gail Devers, Beverly Johnson, and WNBA star Cailtin Clark were all keynote speakers at the event. It was the 20th anniversary of the event.
The theme was Power in Unity. Keynote speakers talked about relationship building in the workplace, what it means to be a team and how their failures led to where they are today.
But there were also many sessions from other women leaders in Massachusetts, including sessions on work-life balance, supporting caregivers in the workplace and effectively managing hybrid teams.
Gloria Larson, Massachusetts Conference for Women board president, wants people to leave with new information they can take back to their workplaces and to feel inspired in their careers.
“We want people to have the best experience possible while they’re here,” she said. “I call it a spa day for professional women, because it feels like that for me too.”
Getting Winfrey, Clark and others as keynote speakers for their 20th anniversary was a “home run,” Larson said.
Oprah recognizes she’d have a lot to put into a memoir, telling the crowd of multiple stories, including one when she was 4 years old churring butter on her back porch. Her grandmother told her to watch her closely as she did the sheets “because one day you will have to learn to do this for yourself.” And she thought no, this is not going to be my life.
“But I had sense enough to not tell my grandmother that,” she said.
Winfrey has also shared a lot of stories of her life in various interviews.
During Thursday’s conference, she shared she was the result of her mother and father having sex one time.
During the final night of her virtual book tour for “What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing,“ a book she co-authored with Dr. Bruce Perry about understanding childhood trauma, she talked about the years of childhood abuse she faced.
“I’ve actually gotten whipped again for not smiling quickly enough after a whipping,” she said, according to Oprah Daily. “So not only are you whipped, but you’re supposed to pretend that whole thing didn’t happen.”
And she told the TODAY show about growing up in poverty and facing sexual assault.
“The first time I was able to admit that I had been sexually abused, raped, assaulted as a 9-year-old happened on television,” she told the TV show. “And it happened on television because a woman was sharing her story. And I thought, I swear, until that moment I was the only person who ever had that happen to me.”
On Thursday, she also shared her journey to becoming the celebrated talk show host she became known as. People told her moving to Chicago was a bad choice. But she trusted her gut — and it paid off.
“I’ve listened to the voice that lives inside of me … and I’ve been guided by that,” she told the crowd. “The only time I’ve made mistakes in my life is when I did not listen.”
She said she once started to write a memoir, including that she never felt loved by her family. But Stedman Graham, Oprah’s longterm partner, pointed out that would hurt her family’s feelings.
“I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings,” Oprah said, who was still living at the time.
So, the idea was put on the shelf.
Her mother, Vernita Lee, died in 2018. And her father, Vernon Winfrey, died in 2022. But it wasn’t right to pick back up the project.
Now, she’s focused on her new podcast, The Oprah Podcast, and feels her legacy is already out there.
Her legacy is the girls and women from The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. But it’s also the people who watched her show over 25 years and decided to go back to school, get out of a bad marriage or “get a better bra.”
“When I think about my life and what that show was able to offer every day through myself and the producers, I feel the greatest reward in my spirit for that,” she said.
