Book Review: Rose McGowan Tells All in 'Brave'

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Rose McGowan was born in one cult and came of age in another, more visible cult: Hollywood.

In a strange world where she was continually on display, stardom soon became a personal nightmare of constant exposure and sexualization. Every detail of her personal life became public, and the realities of an inherently sexist industry emerged with every script, role, public appearance, and magazine cover.

The Hollywood machine packaged her as a sexualized bombshell, hijacking her image and identity and marketing them for profit. Hollywood expected Rose to be silent and cooperative and to stay the path. Instead, she rebelled and asserted her true identity and voice. She reemerged unscripted, courageous, victorious, angry, smart, fierce, unapologetic, controversial, and real as f*ck.

Brave is her raw, honest, and poignant memoir/manifesto—a no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches account of the rise of a millennial icon, fearless activist, and unstoppable force for change who is determined to expose the truth about the entertainment industry, dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multibillion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny, and empower people everywhere to wake up and be Brave.

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Brave is righteous and resentful with a generous dollop of rage.

The streets of Hollywood are paved over the bodies of the vulnerable, the fucked with, the lied to, and the hurt. I know, I was almost one of them.

In her introduction Rose McGowan urges us to be loud, push back and refuse to be hoodwinked by Hollywood. Rose doesn’t pussyfoot around the issues at hand. When she commands that we “breathe fire”  she means it. Her memoir, Brave, is a battle cry aimed at the once seemingly impenetrable white male dominated film industry.

Hollywood after Harvey has been crumbling. It’s cascading down around us and Rose is here kicking through the rubble and debris. Bruised and battered though she may be, she continues hurling it away. Shunting the lies and efforts to manipulate to the side.

At least that’s what I expected Brave to be. The reality is Rose McGowan’s memoir is extremely misleading.

In her inferno of rage Rose outright ignores many of the breaking news victories from other actresses who’ve been wronged by Hollywood. For almost the entirety of Brave Rose McGowan paints herself as a one-woman-activist fighting the big bad Hollywood machine. There is zero acknowledgement of what other women writers, directors, screenwriters, actresses, filmmakers and other artists have  done and CONTINUE doing. Erm...Ashley Judd, Emma Watson, and Salma Hayek don't count for anything? There are so many feminist activist actresses out there kicking butt and taking names.The fact that so many of these women are glaringly absent is puzzling.

Brave is righteous and resentful with generous dollop of rage. This a woman who’s done with keeping her mouth shut. There’s a jaggedness to this tell-all. Rose has no qualms about cutting through the BS. But by a third of the way through it gets exhausting.

The men who thought they owned me think that they own you. They’re the latest in a long line of myth peddlers, from the men behind the Bible to these modern-day ‘content creators’. They’re mostly self-aggrandizing, egomaniacal abusers of power. And they’re never been more dangerous. 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. In other news, the sky is blue.

I understand where Rose is coming from. And unless you’ve been living in a self-imposed exile for the last year and a half, you’ve heard her name and her talk about the assault and abuse she’s been through. However in Brave there’s such a livid hatred for ALL men pouring out of these  pages that it’s immediately off putting. I’m talking pure, unfiltered misandrist blanket statements. I’ve been hurt by men. I’ve been wronged by them. I’ve been disrespected and threatened by them. But  don’t I claim to hate ALL men.

Another issue I have with Brave is Rose’s recollections. Many of her memories, especially the ones from where she’s 3, 4, 5 or 6 years old are so detailed that they feel fabricated! I’m not trying to bash Rose or call her a liar by any means, but it just feels kind of… fudged at times.

For example, she’s a young teenage girl in this moment:

I remember the exact moment, walking down Tenth Street in Seattle, when I started seeing myself through men’s eyes. Horns started honking and I heard men yelling. . . . I had developed a chest almost overnight. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I felt like I was leading men on just by existing, just by having these appendages. . . .

I didn’t enjoy the attention because it made feel dirty. I wanted to see what I could do about it. I went to the Seattle Public Library and combed through medica books researching breast reductions. The surgery looked terrifying, not like I could afford it, anyway.

The other half of me asked, Why does a man’ desire supersede my right to dignity? What makes certain men think their perversions are more important than a girl’s right to exist as a free human in society?

Eventually I figured out that I needed to be like the sad carriage horses that walk with blinders on the side of their face. . . . What a pity so many of us girls and women have our peripheral vision taken away simply because of unwanted attention.

My instant reaction is that Rose is going for martyr status. I can’t help but think she wants our jaws to drop when we read about the ordeals she’s been through, and that she wants to be patted on the back again and again and again. I hate to come across like I’m criticizing Rose. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely respect her and her words and how she writes so so so openly about everything. I just have a really hard time being enthusiastic about this memoir because it’s so unapologetically one sided.

There were so many moments that made me shake my head while I read Brave. Not necessarily because I was relating, but frequently Rose came across pretentious. Consider these two Roseisms:

For all the flaws of my childhood, I consider myself lucky to have been raised with a European sensibility. I find the . . . American system, aggressively determined to crush free thought and those who it labels “other”

And:

I’m from Europe, I’m not a freak about my body. American puritanical society shames you for daring to show any part of yourself, especially when it’s done in a nonsexual manner. When a woman owns her body, she gets vilified.

Even before I finished Brave I got one message loud and clear from Rose. That she see us as victims as well. Being described as someone who is repeatedly tricked and wronged by Hollywood doesn’t make me feel empowered. It makes me squirm. I don’t consider myself blindly ignorant. I’m not so easily swayed by what’s bright and shiny. Consider the following passage:

I want to have a frank conversation about an inner sickness that I see few, if any, addressing: how and why Hollywood creates a fucked up mirror for you to look in. How you are seeing yourself through your own eyes, but perhaps not your own mind.

In our as-seen-on-TV society, the simple fact is that what you have watched and consumed, from birth, has formed you and continues to form you.

Her writing almost makes me feel guilty for being such a fan of films and tv, for being an entertainment reviewer and enthusiast. It feels like Rose is trying to put me and other movie/tv fans in our places here.

She also talks about hating acting. Her constant criticism towards acting was grating. If she hated scripts, characters and telling stories through film and tv, why oh why did she continue to do it? Why does she keep patting herself on the back and saying she knew she was destined to be famous?

I channeled my efforts into playing Paige. . . Meanwhile, my own growth as a woman was stunted because of it. I had so many milestones on camera instead of in real life. My “first” wedding was a very meta experience. I walked down the aisle with a fake dad, with fake friends, fake sisters, a fake husband-to-be, a fake pastor: it was all fake fake fake. All told I was fake married three times on film before my “real” marriage. By then, I was repeating an emotional scene I’d already played. Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers. You should know this and acknowledge.

The one thing that I was pleased to see is that regardless of her complaints about acting Rose is extremely respectful to the fans who love Charmed and her character Paige Matthews. By this point in the book --more than halfway through-- I was already acclimated to Rose’s angry tone and indignation that I expected her to bash fans. It was so refreshing that she didn’t take that route and it’s a reason why I went ahead to nudge this up a star rating.  

“If you are reading this book because of Charmed, thank you for being a fan of the show and my character. I respect you and I honor you.

When I say anything negative about the show, you have to understand I’m speaking about my personal experience. Not Paige Matthews, my character, but me, Rose.

There is much I’m proud of from this period. For a long time Charmed was-- and still might be-- the longest running female-driven hour-long show in history. I wish we got more credit for that, because it’s important.”

There were moments in Brave that really did stand out to me and gripped me with their intensity, such as the moment where Rose talks about the trials she went through filming in a movie helmed by her toxic then boyfriend, Robert Rodriguez. And the time she was forced to strip and stand butt-to-butt barely covered by belts holding bullets with her “Grindhouse” costar Rosario Dawson on her first Rolling Stone cover. Rose’s writing was more articulate when she wrote about being pressured to model in a way that became so quickly fetishized. So is Brave an “empowering manifesto” ? or a “voice for generations” as promised? I’m sorry to say that for me, no. That was not the case.

Often Brave was a sensationalized account full of misandrist blanket statements and I found myself flagging SO many passages that were so venomous and blatantly hateful I couldn’t stop cringing . There’s also a lot that Rose writes about that is unresolved. Like her eating disorder! She writes so so much about it but it just *POOFS* away. We don’t hear about her recovery or healing process. Brave is blazing with rage, but it’s all fire. It’s a towering inferno of indignation that offers little solutions and acknowledges no victories in the Times Up  and Me Too movements.

Recommended?:  Eh. In small doses. Brave is more effective if it’s parceled out a little at a time. It’s in no way a ‘must read’

You can also read this review on my Goodreads

First image the front and back cover art of Brave 

All other photos from IMDB