As a teenager growing up in Baltimore, Jada Pinkett successfully negotiated for her life twice at gunpoint after drug deals went awry.

Though she didn’t realize it at the time, the mental toughness and survival skills she acquired in childhood would prove invaluable later in her career, as an A-list actress navigating treacherous, palm tree-lined Tinseltown.

“The streets of Baltimore,” Pinkett Smith said during an interview with The Baltimore Sun, “definitely prepared me for the streets of Hollywood in ways I did not expect.”

The 52-year-old actress discusses her Baltimore upbringing in depth in her new memoir, “Worthy,” which is being published Tuesday by HarperCollins. Among other things, the book explores her days at Baltimore School for the Arts, where she was mentored by her “kind but firm” theater teacher Donald Hicken, palled around with the actor Josh Charles, and forged an intense, though platonic, bond with the future rap icon Tupac Shakur, who teasingly called her “Square.”

“He created a nickname to remind me I wasn’t as up on the game as I acted,” she writes.

Chances are, Pinkett Smith will go into even more detail about her Baltimore beginnings when she appears Wednesday at the Enoch Pratt Free Library as part of the Writers LIVE! series. All in-person tickets for the event have been claimed, but Pinkett Smith’s talk will be streamed live on the library’s Facebook and Youtube pages.

“A friend has been telling me for years that I should write a memoir,” Pinkett Smith told The Sun. “She thought that my journey from feeling unlovable to discovering a sense of self-worth was an important story to tell.”

It’s not difficult to find the teenage girl portrayed in “Worthy” inside the actress walking the red carpet. Both come across as headstrong, a bit reckless, constantly probing, questioning and exploring.

Pinkett Smith has often lived her life wide-open, which has made her irresistible tabloid fodder.

In 2018, she brought her husband to Red Table Talk, the online talk show she hosted with her mother and daughter, to discuss their long and occasionally troubled marriage and her two-year affair with a much younger man.

In 2021, Smith published a memoir, “Will,” that among other things revealed his jealousy over his wife’s close friendship with Shakur, who died in 1996.

Now, it’s her turn to talk.In the 416-page “Worthy,” Pinkett Smith reveals her lifelong battles with depression, suicidal thoughts and experiences with ayahuasca, a psychedelic, plant-based brew that she credits with healing her.

And yes — she has much to say about the ruckus that erupted at the 2022 Academy Awards after the comic Chris Rock made fun of Pinkett Smith’s hair loss (she suffers from the disease of alopecia) and was slapped by her enraged husband.

“I wasn’t upset at what Chris said about me,” she told The Sun.

“But I know so many people who have suffered in such extreme ways from alopecia, to the point of suicide. It is not OK to make fun of someone with a medical condition.”

For a woman whose life has been chronicled as exhaustively as Pinkett Smith’s, perhaps the most surprising thing about “Worthy” is how surprising her autobiography turns out to be.

Below are five things about one of Baltimore’s favorite daughters that we didn’t know before.

Pinkett sold crack cocaine as a teenager

“This was my way to financial stability and mobility,” she writes. “I wasn’t going to become a hustler’s girlfriend. I had seen with my own eyes the level of control and enslavement that came from being financially dependent on a man. ... I came to the conclusion that I could be as successful a drug dealer as any man. In my view, I could work my way to running a whole organization — be a queenpin.”

For a while, she was successful — so successful that she was determined to shield a new friend from New York from the dangers of that life.

“I didn’t bring Pac around that often because I didn’t want to pull him into the Baltimore dope scene,” she writes. “The game wasn’t for you if you weren’t from Baltimore and didn’t have your people.”

As an adult, Pinkett Smith came to realize the harm her actions caused.

“In the urban community, we were all touched by drugs,” she told The Sun. “I think often of the lives we affected. I don’t have regrets, but I do have a deep remorse.”

Tupac Shakur wrote a letter asking her to marry him

At the time, the rapper was incarcerated in New York at the Rikers Island penitentiary on a sexual assault charge.

“After deep reflection and spiritual awakening,” he wrote, “I have come to realize the friend, lover and soulmate was there all the time. I have not seen or felt from anywhere or anyone the intensity & loyalty that you have shown me.”

Pinkett Smith was torn. She writes in her memoir that the deal-breaker was Shakur’s expectation that if they married, she would be “not just a psychological wife, but a physical wife.”

She turned down the proposal.

“Tupac didn’t have romantic feelings for me,” she told The Sun. “We had a lot of deep love for one another, but there was no chemistry between us at all.

“He might have thought there was at the time, but you have to understand the conditions at Rikers. He was in a really fragile state, and he was looking for a foundation to plant his feet upon. You can trust and believe me that he would have divorced me as soon as he walked out of that prison gate.”

She had a pervasive feeling of being unworthy

Pinkett Smith attributes the feeling to being the child of two parents whose top priority was drugs, not her.

In the memoir, she recalls the terrifying night she visited a Cherry Hill stash house. Three men forced their way inside, and one pressed a 9-millimeter handgun against the 5-foot-tall, 95-pound teen’s head.

“I can see the thoughts running through his mind,” she writes. “‘Should I kill her, she knows who I am. I could kidnap her, rape her.’ ... But he backed out slowly, paused for one more glance, then closed the door.”

She later had an opportunity to meet the gunman and ask him why he had allowed her to go free.

“He looked at me for a second,” she writes, “with eyes that appeared as if he had never felt a warm touch in his life, and said, ‘You were too pretty.’

“You know what was crazy? That was the very first time I actually believed it.”

Chris Rock once asked Pinkett Smith out

Pinkett Smith writes that she learned to appreciate a different side of the comedian when they were promoting the 2005 Disney film “Madagascar,” in which both starred.

“I found him to be quirky,” she writes, “with an unexpected sweetness, and very intelligent, with a biting wit that’s impressive if you are on the right side of it. At one point, during rumors that Will and I had divorced, Chris even called to ask me out on a date. Once he found out I wasn’t divorced, we laughed, and he apologized profusely, and life went on.”

The slap brought her and Smith closer together

She writes that she and Smith had been living apart since 2016 when they attended the 2022 Academy Awards together.

Then came the slap.

“What I knew, for the first time in six years since our breakup,” she writes in the memoir, “was that I would stand with him in this storm as his wife no matter what. I had not felt this way in a long time.”

She writes that one of the “holy lessons” of that night was that she learned how to love her husband unconditionally.

“All that thorny history of our life together became a non-issue,” she writes. “The only thing I could guarantee was that I wasn’t going to leave his side.”

Pinkett Smith told The Sun that her marriage remains a work in progress.

“We’re doing a lot of healing together. It’s been a really beautiful experience, but we still need to figure a few things out: Are we husband and wife? Or are we life partners?

“You can express it however you want to express it.”