Brave by Rose McGowan

You will note the missing numeric review. How can you review someone's experiences? I've reviewed Memoirs before but nothing like Brave. This book is 246 pages of cathartic verbal diarrhea for her. I don't mean that in a bad way, but you can clearly see the suffering, the frustration, the anger, the pain. There is literally no good experience that lasts more than a couple of paragraphs in the entire book. How she is still standing and functioning as a person is beyond me. It's a testament to the person she's shaped herself to be. So... #triggerwarning
That being said, I feel like the book was very repetitive. The man shoves us down, girls stand up. I didn't matter because I was just a girl. She didn't matter because she was just a girl. I realize that this is legitimately how Hollywood operates. I realize that toxic masculinity is incredibly, brutally pervasive, but Rose's experiences go far beyond what most celebrities who achieve her level of fame must endure so I found I had to take the book with a grain of salt. I had to stop and remember that not every experience is so horrible.
She straight up admits that her rise to fame was not the typical struggling actor trope that is so pervasive. She was literally discovered on the street and just like that, was launched. She didn't spend months or years auditioning for a breakout role. She didn't hear the gossip, who to avoid, what to watch out for. She knew nothing of the industry and because of this, spiralled into several traumatic situations and relationships that she found she couldn't get out of.
This launching into the stratosphere without any warm up seems to be what she blames most of her trauma in Hollywood on. She had an incredibly brutal childhood, adolescence and this continued right into her 30s. I say she "blames it on" and that is very much accurate. Rose blames every misfortune she's had on every male in the industry, and every female that didn't stick up for her. While I understand that she lacked the emotional maturity to navigate these situations, I also find she is really ungrateful for the opportunities she did have. She repeatedly complains about everything being about her body and being exploited for her looks, but you're in the acting industry. What did you think was going to happen? Unfortunately, that's what you get into when you get into the industry.
Now, I am probably biased. I will fully step into my motivations here to admit that I am a great, great lover of the show Charmed. I literally am on season five of probably my 30th rewatch of the series. I find now when I'm watching it I really have to extract "Rose" from "Paige." She says right from the start I always knew I was going to be an actor. She'd been in dozens of movies, so when she found she was working 16 hour days, and then flying to Texas to act in Grindhouse and Planet Terror, it was their fault. Their fault she was so exhausted, their fault that the directors brought her past emotional trauma into the scripts of the movies, their fault that she lost herself. I have a difficult time reconciling the show that I love, that helped shape who I am as a person, and is the longest running female led TV show in history... with this awful environment where she was oppressed and everyone was horrible. I just have to hope that Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano eventually write memoirs that discount what she is saying. There are two sides to every story.
Rose talks a lot about who's fault it is. The actors. The directors. The producers. The actors' guild. Why didn't you step up for me? Why didn't you protect me? But I find she doesn't spend much time taking accountability for her own decisions. I definitely feel like I'm attacking her, but I'm not intentionally. I am wildly impressed by how thoroughly she has inspired the #metoo movement. My issue is that she always says she just disassociated herself. That phrase is so used so many times it's almost completely meaningless. It was her defense mechanism. I guess I have a really hard time connecting the "Rose" of Brave, with the "Rose" of #RoseArmy so I hold her to a higher level of accountability than she was emotionally able to bear at the time of her trauma.
I'm lucky enough to never have experienced assault so I guess it's me disassociating myself from her trauma, where it makes it harder for me to understand where she's coming from, especially since my only frame of reference for Rose McGowan as a person is Paige, and the leader of #RoseArmy. Both women are strong, ass kicking role models. The Rose of the book is not.
This will probably be my worst book review because I'm so all over the place. Overall, I didn't like the book. But not because it detailed trauma, it was hard and painful and gritty, but because I feel like she took the opportunity to say something, and just said the same thing over and over with slightly different verbage. I started skimming paragraphs to keep to what was real. The real experiences, the real memories rather than the blame, the shame, and the deflections. But this is her platform to use how she sees fit. I can't say that I wouldn't do the same, in her place because I've never been in her place and thank god for that.
I'm not even going to edit this post because it is my very honest reaction to very difficult subject matter so I'm just going to wing it and hope I don't hate it, and neither do you.