Kerry Washington felt pressure to distance her real-life persona from Olivia Pope’s

People love Olivia Pope; just look at the reaction to Kerry Washington’s recent, in-character reunion with Scandal co-star Tony Goldwyn (hi!). Half a decade after the end of the series, people can’t get enough of the best fixer in D.C.

Still, Kerry Washington felt a very real pressure to separate her actual life from that of her character back in the day. “In the Scandal years, I could never have written this book,” she said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair to promote her just-released memoir, Thicker Than Water.

“There was all of this attention of, like, ‘It’s been almost 40 years since a Black woman has led a network drama.’ I was in my early 30s at the time, so not in my lifetime had I seen it,” she went on. “There was this sense that if we didn’t get it right, it was going to be another 40 years before they let a Black woman be the lead of a drama. So I felt like I had to maintain a level of excellence that said, ‘we are capable, we are leaders, we are perfect.’”

“Olivia Pope was, in many ways, an antihero,” she continued. But while audiences—especially audiences of the 2010s—love a complicated lead character, Washington had more at stake than actors behind fellow protagonists like Bryan Cranston’s Walter White or Jon Hamm’s Don Draper. “Off the show, I felt I had to be an upstanding citizen because… there she is sleeping around with the president, right?” Washington shared. “So, this vulnerability also comes at a time where I feel like we have so many narratives about what Black womanhood is, that it felt safer to enter this space and tell this truth and not have it misunderstood as all of what we are.”

Now, finally, Washington can take off the costume. “Suddenly I was allowing myself to be in the process of making me, Kerry, as important as any other character I’ve played in my life,” she said of her writing experience. “I love that [the cover] is me kind of navigating a confusing reflection of myself because that’s a lot of what the book is about, trying to figure out who I am.”