Oprah tells Tracy Grimshaw she thought about taking her own life.

Oprah says believing in herself got her through soul-crushing adversity.

Tonight’s A Current Affair interview with Oprah Winfrey has been highly anticipated and the reigning talk show Queen delivered, opening up to Tracy Grimshaw about how she survived being born into poverty, sexually assaulted at age nine and having a baby that died within days at just 14.

“The only reason I didn’t kill myself when I was pregnant, the only reason – I actually thought about it and a couple of times I [attempted self-harm] – (was) there was a part of me that always knew I was going to be okay,” Oprah said in the revealing interview.

“That if I could just get through the shame and embarrassment, and if my father didn’t kill me, that I would be okay.”

“So I have always known this, Trace. I didn’t know what the future held for me, although I thought it would be a good future, but I knew who held the future.”

She said she faced racial prejudice, bigotry and being born into an apartheid state, but succeeded in spite of that.

“Nobody believed you could become anything as a little black girl – my own grandma didn’t believe I was going to do anything other than maybe become a teacher…,” she said.

Oprah said both her mother and her grandmother were maids, “so they didn’t have any dreams bigger than being a domestic for me, the daughter, but I did. I did.”

She said the reason the devastating circumstances of her younger life did not break her was her faith.

“I had a strong sense of being connected to something greater than myself, I call that something God,” she said.

“But I had a strong spiritual voice.”

And succeed she did. And she had plenty more to say.

On shit bosses:

Oprah said working in the TV industry in the 70s was “terrible”.

“I was sexually harassed, but I knew if I did anything about it or said anything about it that I would never work in television again,” the influential philanthropist and media mogul revealed.

“I had the WORST boss. I mean, literally, I’m babysitting for my boss and I’m the anchor on the news. Today, nobody could get away with it, but I knew that if I said anything about it I would have been crushed.

“I always knew that trouble wouldn’t last always, and I would not always be in that position. I knew that whatever I was putting up with, I wouldn’t have to put up with forever.”

On shit boyfriends:

Oprah said she remembered in her 20s trying to grab on to her boyfriend’s car as he drove away.

“As he’s pulling off, he says to me: ‘The problem with you, Baby Doll, is you think you’re special.’ And I am crying and going, ‘No, I’m not special’. Because that was the way I was raised: ‘Don’t think you’re special, don’t think there’s anything special about you’. So I was embarrassed about the idea of doing well and thinking the very idea that you might be special.”

“You choose to be special – or not. You choose.

“I used to be ashamed, embarrassed and put off by… being called the tall poppy. And now I am a very bright tall poppy.”

On succeeding in TV today:

“In today’s market – you know, American Idol, Australian Idol… everybody has to judge everybody for the way you look – I would not have been able to make it. It was literally, I think, divine timing.”

“Because I was a chubby, little, Jheri-curled, no style… no nothing – nothing, other than my personality and my desire to sit in the chair and ask questions and listen to the answers.”

On why she quit her show in 2011:

Oprah says, after 25 seasons, she didn’t want to stay in the job too long: “I never wanted to be the punch-drunk talk show host. I never wanted to be in the position where I was sitting there having to pretend that I wanted to be in the chair. I never wanted to do anything, and I have never done anything, just for the money.”

“I’d gotten to the point where I thought, I cannot ask another person what colour eyeliner is that, I cannot sit in a chair and pretend that I’m cooking something on set… I cannot do it.”

On finding peace:

“I will tell you this, Trace, I do live a pretty extraordinary life, but not for the reasons most people think.”

Oprah said she found peace when she stopped doing anything she didn’t want to do and put herself first.

“There is a peace and a contentment that I’ve had since about 1989, 1990, that cannot be measured or bought. There is a peace and a contentment and a real joy that has nothing to with the… things that I’ve acquired, but it comes from being fully present with myself in this life.”

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