Will Smith has delivered his first public response to revelations from wife Jada Pinkett Smith that they have been separated for years.

Last week, in a string of interviews promoting her upcoming memoir Worthy, Pinkett Smith revealed that while she and Smith were not divorced – and would never be – they had separated years ago.

She also detailed her complicated relationship with comedian Chris Rock – who Smith famously slapped in a show-stopping Oscars incident. Rock had asked her out, Pinkett Smith said, before adding in another interview that rapper Tupac Shakur was her “soulmate”.

At the weekend, Smith emailed the New York Times to declare that his wife’s memoir had “woken him up” and helped him realise she was more “resilient, clever and compassionate”.

“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life,” he wrote, according to the Times, “a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”

The NY Times article on the saga explains that Smith and Pinkett Smith are not divorced, uncoupled, or even in an open marriage, as many have speculated. Instead, they are “life partners in family and business”.

It also discloses Pinkett Smith’s purchase of a home for herself as a 50th birthday present. She has moved out of the home in Calabasas she shared with Smith.

Jada Pinkett Smith’s “soulmate”

Worthy delves into Pinkett Smith’s Baltimore childhood with parents who were addicted to drugs, and how she sometimes lived with her maternal grandmother.

Pinkett Smith’s father was often absent in her life, and died in 2010. Eventually her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, became sober.

“Our parents are not responsible for our wholeness,” she told People magazine.

“But I didn’t know how to create healthy boundaries, to create healthy relationships.”

The book discusses how Pinkett Smith had legitimate jobs from the age of 12. But she also turned to selling drugs, after noticing it was drug dealers who had “affluence”.

She discusses her friendship with Tupac, revealing the late rapper once proposed to her while he was in jail. Pinkett Smith told Rolling Stone, she said she believed they were soul mates, but they never would have worked romantically.

“If there is such a thing as past lives, I definitely think Pac and I have travelled a few together, in various forms,” she said.

Tupac was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in 1996. Last month, former gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested and charged over his death, in a breakthrough for investigators.