Contributed by Lauren Taylor 

Will Smith‘s new memoir, Will, is set to release next week, Nov. 9th, detailing the life of the actor and explaining his complicated story.

An excerpt was released to People, in which Smith describes secrets, and the traumatic relationship between him and his late father, Will Sr., that he holds onto till this day.

Early on in this book, Smith describes his father, William Carroll Smith Sr., “My father was violent, but he was also at every game, play and recital. He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies.”

He writes that his father’s intense want for perfection was what put food on the table and also terrorized his family. His father was married to his mother Caroline Bright, he and his three siblings were raised in Philidelphia. His parents separated when he was a teen and divorced in 2000.

A particular incident that Smith witnessed between his father and his mother scarred him, changing his life forever.

“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of her head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am.”

As he said, that moment defined who he was, putting the thought in his mind that he was a coward for never standing up for his mother, even though he was just a child.

Smith goes on to say, ” What you have come to understand as “Will Smith,” the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction- a carefully crafted and honed character -designed to protect myself. To hide to myself from the world. To hide the coward.”

The actor writes that his anger and resentment for his father resurfaced years later while Will Sr., who had cancer, was in his care. “One night, as I delicately wheeled him from his bedroom toward the bathroom, a darkness arose within me. The path between the two rooms goes past the top of the stairs. As a child I’d one day avenge my mother.”

Smith tells that at that moment he pictured killing his father. ” I paused at the top of the stairs. I could shove him down, and easily get away with it,” he writes. “As the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom.”

Smith reflected on the relationship between him and his father after his passing in 2016. It taught him the truth about finding fulfillment in the world. “There is nothing that you can receive from the material world that will create inner peace or fulfillment,” he writes. “In the end, it will not matter one single bit how well [people] loved you – you will only gain ‘the SMile’ based on how well you loved them.”