Whoopi Goldberg Says Writing a Book About Her Dead Brother and Mom ‘Was Like Losing Them Again’ (Exclusive)

"I couldn't remember anything after my brother passed," Goldberg says, of the emotionally-harrowing time

Whoopi Goldberg is making emotional vulnerability a definitive aspect of her latest written work.

Titled Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, a nod to her late mother, Emma Harris, as well as her late brother, Clyde K. Johnson, Goldberg recalls to PEOPLE for this week's print issue that putting pen to paper for the memoir "was almost harder to do because it was like losing them again."

"I couldn't remember anything after my brother passed," Goldberg remembers, of the emotionally harrowing time. "I don't know why, but for some reason in my head, my brother's only been gone five years and my mom's been gone seven. It's not so, my mom's been gone 16 years and my brother's been gone 11."

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Harris died of a stroke on Aug. 29, 2010, while Johnson died suddenly as a result of a brain aneurysm at 66 on May 11, 2015.

"I just thought, 'Wow, if you can't keep how they've been gone together, it's no wonder you can't remember anything," The View host explains. "It's no wonder you can't remember anything. So just maybe you should just write some stuff down, see what happens if you do that.' "

That she did, penning a powerful memoir that exists as both an emotional tribute and candid reflection on her family, spanning everything from heartwarming memories with Johnson and Harris to shocking revelations about her father forcing her mother to undergo electroshock treatment while staying at New York City's Bellevue Hospital.

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"I talked to a couple of friends and talked about what I wanted to do. And then I just thought, 'Well, I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to do it.' And I did and it's great," Goldberg says of the writing process, noting that the whole project "took about a year" to come together.

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The star, who jokes her "thinking process is quite scattered" and that she has "the attention span of a gnat," entrusted a close friend to "talk" out the memoir with instead of sitting down and writing it completely alone. She says that the collaborative effort "[helped] me get it in an order that made sense to people."

All-in-all, Goldberg wants the memoir to serve as a way for "people to get a little bit more insight into me."

"It's a little bit more of where I come from and the people I've come from, what my blood is, who my blood is," she adds.

Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me releases May 7 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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