Did I break up with someone?
Yes, I broke up with the world.
You can, too.
My name is Rose McGowan and I am BRAVE.
I have to admit that I didn't know Rose McGowan's work – I've never seen Charmed, or Scream, or the Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse movies. I've certainly heard McGowan's name tied to the recent takedown of the Weinstein machine, but not being a consumer of Hollywood “news”, I never clicked on any links for more information; the gist of a bad man finally getting his desserts was enough to satisfy me. All this to say that I don't know if my ignorance makes me a more or less ideal reader for McGowan's memoir: I had zero preconceived ideas about her (every time she confronted gossip or criticism that she endured over the years, I had had no exposure to the original “controversies”, so had no entrenched opinion of her), so while this wasn't especially revelatory for me, I also didn't go into this book with either a fangirl or a hater bias; I could take everything McGowan writes at face value, and what I found was a bit horrifying and a bit inspiring. Rose McGowan has lived a crazy life, and in Brave, she sketches out that life and ends with a manifesto for making the world a better place. It would be hard to ask for more of someone.
My life, as you will read, has taken me from one dangerous cult to another, one of the biggest cults of all: Hollywood. I say biggest because short of a nuclear bomb, Hollywood has the furthest reach.Rose McGowan was born into the Children of God cult, in a stone barn in the Tuscany region of Italy. Despite being noncompliant from the very start, McGowan believes that early attempts to earn the love and attention of a Messianic father set her on a lifelong path of trying to please the men in her life; always bartering her independence for paternalistic caretaking. When the cult started advocating sex between adults and children (something McGowan witnessed but was never a party to), her father escaped with his children (if not her mother) and made his way to the States. McGowan spend the next few years bouncing between her father, and eventually, her mother (who had a string of abusive boyfriends herself), and then all too young, McGowan hit the streets. After more years of instability, then living for years with a spoiled prince of Hollywood royalty who encouraged her anorexia, as soon as McGowan ran off to be on her own once more, she was literally picked up off the streets and offered the lead in an independent film (The Doom Generation). This is when she became ensnared by the “cult of Hollywood”, and the twenty years that followed certainly sound as abusive and isolating as anything McGowan experienced with the Children of God: the attack by Weinstein (followed by an industry coverup and her official blackballing); her relationship with Marilyn Manson that dominating gossip blogs and went down in flames; her time with Charmed and its exhausting filming schedule (and constant abuse by practically all male directors and screenwriters); her relationship with director Robert Rodriguez that ushered in a return to the movies – and the ending to that particular story is a nasty bit of betrayal that should turn anyone off of Rodriguez and his skeezy pal Quentin Tarantino. Through it all, McGowan realised that she was being used by the male dominated industry to sell a warped version of femininity out to the world (the effect of which could only be to make women feel badly about themselves), and despite knowing that she wasn't honouring her own spirit, her lifelong need to be a man-pleaser and her fears of ending up on the streets again made her feel trapped. Until she decided to get BRAVE.
I wanted to go back to before when I was a whole person. I wanted to go back to being a strong badass, but I was now in a million pieces. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop the screaming nightmares. I couldn't stop Hollywood. I just wanted out and away. My body kept having its own flashbacks.The book does end with a manifesto – a call for people to start living more authentic lives and to demand that Hollywood start allowing stories to be told from a point-of-view other than that of the white cis male (so interesting that Charmed – what McGowan calls the longest running female led series in history – was written and directed nearly exclusively by men; even when women get to talk, it's in the words that men think they should be saying.) And she's not wrong about any of this.
On the less positive side of the ledger, despite the fact that I liked McGowan's voice in general, I don't know if this book was terribly well written. The following is representative of a recurring cliche-clunkiness to which the prose can descend:
Hollywood operates like the Mafia when it comes to protecting its own. Especially if your “own” is a rich white male. Yes, I said it. But here’s the thing, it’s true. I didn’t make it so, it just is. In other news, the sky is blue.McGowan tells us several times that she was a perfect blow-up doll of idealised beauty, and that when men in the industry would meet her for the first time, they'd be shocked to discover that she is also intelligent and articulate – which, by inference, means that the average beauty queen actress actually is a bubbleheaded ninny. This backhandedness comes in again when McGowan states that the “naked” dress she wore to an awards show with Marilyn Manson was meant as an eff you to Hollywood; she was reclaiming her own sexuality and daring anyone to judge her for it. She then goes on to say that anyone who copied that look in later years was missing the point – other actresses, the bubbleheaded ninnies, were falling into the Hollywood trap and giving their misogynistic overlords exactly what they wanted on a platter. As someone without an agenda who saw that dress for the first time when I googled Rose McGowan while reading this book, her intent wasn't obvious to me; and yet McGowan dared people to judge her motives while feeling free to judge those of other actresses. And one more minor complaint: it seems that every time McGowan chose to use the word “whom”, she'd end that sentence on a preposition, which seemed so jarring to me; a choice of proper over colloquial grammar immediately followed by the more casual (I didn't mark an example and can't find one after too much time flipping through my book, but I mean something like, “They couldn't decide whom it should be given to.” And it drove me craaazy. every. time.)
After reading Brave, I can totally see why Rose McGowan would be a polarising figure: She's brusque, self-confident, angry and doesn't seem to care one bit if anyone likes her. And I'm okay with all of that – this is an incredible life story, and if McGowan is able to transform her pain into a fight for a better world, I wish her and the #RoseArmy nothing but success.
And I didn't want to mention this in the body of the review, but you get the sense - in the book and in the videos that came up when I was googling Rose McGowan - that she might be a bit mentally fragile, despite the warrior woman bravado. It can't be good for her that her former manager (Jill Messick, accused in Brave of being one of the people who covered up the Weinstein attack; for which she was then rewarded with a job as a producer at Miramax) killed herself last week - and while McGowan has tweeted that "the bad man did this to us both", Messick's family and some portion of the public have been saying that it is the accusations in this book that sent Messick (a known depressive) over the edge. Gosh, but that's a lot to put onto McGowan's shoulders - and while I suppose I'll never know whether she was assaulted against her will or simply later regretted a consensual liaison (as Messick remembered having been told at the time), I believed McGowan's story while I was reading it and too many other actresses have come forward with similar stories for this not to have been an acknowledged and accepted continuous Hollywood coverup. Weinstein is the bad guy here, and McGowan isn't wrong when she points out that it's always the girl who takes the fall. Also, I did watch the video of McGowan being confronted by the trans woman at the Barnes & Noble event, and after googling around to see what the deeper "transgression" was supposed to be, I can't help but be totally on McGowan's side. How dare anyone show up to an event where a woman is revealing her truth and start yelling, "Your truth isn't complete because it doesn't include mine." I saw no evidence of exclusion or transphobia in McGowan's response ("You're just like me, sister"), and you don't need to be a "TERF" to want to say, "I'm just talking about me here. I don't need your labels."
I sincerely do wish McGowan the best and hope that she remains strong as well as brave.