Whoopi Goldberg Reveals Her Mom Had Electroshock Therapy and Forgot Who Her Children Were (Exclusive)

The actress discusses her late mother’s hospitalization, how it impacted her childhood and shaped her as a person

When Whoopi Goldberg was in elementary school, her mother experienced a mental breakdown — a moment in the actress’ childhood that forever changed the way she approached life.

During an interview with PEOPLE to promote her upcoming memoir Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, due out May 7, The View cohost recalled how her mother, Emma Harris, had a breakdown that led to a two-year hospitalization. During that period, Harris, a teacher, endured electroshock therapy that wiped her memory to the extent that she didn’t remember Goldberg and her late brother Clyde.

“My mother at one point when I got older … said, ‘Can I tell you a secret?’ I was like, ‘Sure,’ ” Goldberg tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “She said, ‘I didn't know who you were when I got out of the hospital.’ It's like, ‘I'm sorry, what? I'm sorry, what?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I had no idea who you were. I just knew I never wanted to go back to that hospital. So I had to do everything I could. If they said the sky was green, and I could see it wasn't green, and it was blue, I'd say, 'Yes, the sky is green.' 'Cause I never wanted it again.’ "

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“I said to her, ‘And nobody knew. You didn't tell anybody,’ ” she continues. " 'I said, ‘So you carried this for 40 years?’ She said, ‘Well, what else was I going to do?’ ”

Harris’ deeply traumatic experience also had a huge impact on Goldberg, who was eight years old when her mother was first hospitalized. Not having her mother around for two years — “children were not allowed at the hospital,” she says — forced the Oscar-winning actress to face the world in a way many of her peers didn’t have to at such a young age.

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“Living without my mother, who was always my world, who had always been that center of gravity. Suddenly the center of gravity wasn't there,” she explains.

Thankfully, Harris by then had taught Goldberg how to “comport” herself with adults.

“If I needed information, I was to ask somebody, explain why I was asking and do all the things that I would do with her when she was not there,” she explains. “Because she would say sometimes, parents do this to kids, they say it all the time. ‘Who knows how long I'm going to be here?’ It's like, ‘What do you mean? Where are you going?’ ”

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Harris died on Aug. 29, 2010, following a stroke, almost five years before Clyde died from a brain aneurysm. But her mother's legacy lives on with Goldberg and the lessons she imparted to students in her classroom, whom she “loved.”

“They’re power people now. All of her kids are power people,” Goldberg says. “But they loved being with her because she was like a big kid. She wanted to know. She would say, ‘Let’s find out together.’ … She was really something. She really was.”

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