Cynthia Erivo Says Mom and Sister Took Time to Accept Her Queerness: ‘Goes Against the Grain’

Cynthia Erivo knows a thing or two about embracing who you are and the cost that can come with it.

The actress, 38, released her first book on Tuesday, November 18: Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They’re Too Much, arriving just days before Wicked: For Good hits theaters.

In the memoir, Erivo opens up about her “close” relationships with her mother and sister — and how both needed time when it came to accepting her sexuality.

“My queerness goes against the grain of what many people think is right and proper,” Erivo, who plays Elphaba in the Wicked films, writes in the book, according to Page Six.

“I think my mother is worried about what others think … I see her working to reconcile the idea of what she has in her head for me, her plans for me, and then working to let go of those plans. I’m aware that this must be hard,” Erivo continues in the book.

Erivo also reflects on when she first understood her sexuality. She says she was a teenager when she realized she was attracted to both men and women, but a crush she had on a girl at school — which wasn’t reciprocated — led her to stay in the closet for years.

Once she reached drama school, Erivo says she began confiding in friends she trusted about “what I was feeling.” It was then, she writes that she started to “see who I was and began to accept myself.”

The Tony winner adds that it wasn’t until her late 20s that she dated a woman for the first time.

Erivo publicly came out as bisexual in a 2022 British Vogue interview and has been dating actress and producer Lena Waithe since that same year.

Though she’s close with her mother and sister, Erivo admits her sexuality is “a territory we’re still navigating.”

For her sister, Stephanie, that process has taken a bit “longer” — but, she writes,“we’ve recently come over a bit of a hump, finding our way toward each other.”

In Simply More, Erivo unpacks a lifetime of feeling “too much” and the work it took to finally embrace who she is. And while she admits it can be difficult to be “our most authentic and true selves hour after hour, day after day,” she writes that it’s ultimately the “most rewarding way to live.”