Whoopi Goldberg: ‘I Was Afraid If I Didn’t Write It Down, I’d Forget It All’

Given how your mom and brother both died, are you doing anything preventively to check for brain aneurysms?

[After my mother died] nobody said to us: “Hey, by the way, you should check.” After my brother died, I was like, Yeah, maybe I’m going to check. Maybe I’m going to look. Because there’s a whole section of me that is a hypochondriac [so] I have to be very careful. There’s a teeny, tiny little hole … that’s the size of the aneurysm that’s in my head now. So as long as we watch it … they don’t go boom and grow and then kill you. They slowly grow and kill you.

Have the deaths of your mother and brother — and perhaps getting older — made you rethink your physical or dietary habits?

My mother and my brother had the best eating habits. We grew up as vegetarians. I said, “When I grow up, I’m never going to eat another vegetable … I don’t care.” My mother and my brother would try anything. My daughter is the same, my granddaughter is the same. I have no interest. I live in a house with a gazillion stairs. I go up and down the stairs all day long, and I’ll maybe take a walk around the block.

You write about a sometimes rocky relationship with your daughter. How are things between you now?

We talk maybe six times a day. We’re a chatty family in that way.... She’s really quite a wonderful woman. I feel like because my mother and I and people we loved surrounded her … she didn’t always have the best time, but it was never boring and she wasn’t always right because she was a kid. She gets it now, as does my granddaughter who has a 10-year-old.

Will you spend Mother’s Day together?

Well, her birthday is on Mother’s Day. This year I won’t be able to be with her. But I said, “It’s OK, because you’re going to Vegas, and the whole trip is on me.” She and about 15, 20 people are going, and her kids are going.

You talk about how your career started on stage. Would you ever return to the stage? What role would tempt you to return?

Well, Phylicia Rashad and I were talking about getting on stage together to do Having Our Say. LaTanya [Richardson] Jackson, who is Sam Jackson’s wife, would be our director. We’re talking about that. I also still have to do Sister Act [3]. I just also finished a comic book, which is going to come out, I think two months after Bits and Pieces comes out. It’s called The Change [out July 9]. And I have a documentary we need to do. There’s lots going on.

Goldberg, seen here on "The View" with fellow host Joy Behar, has co-hosted and moderated the daytime talk show since 2007.

Lou Rocco/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images

So it sounds like there’s no retirement in your near future?

Oh listen, I’m going to change what [retirement] looks like, because I do this crazy show [The View] every day, and we have had more people in their 90s coming to the show. It’s so magnificent. I say to people in their 60s: “Y’all are the teenagers. We’re just the teenagers.” These are the new young people, because I never met anybody who was 90 when I was little. So AARP [and retirement age is] no longer something to be feared by people. You are getting older — thank goodness. You’re lucky you lasted long enough to do that.