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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A revealing memoir and empowering manifesto - As featured in Ronan Farrow's CATCH AND KILL and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's SHE SAID
"BRAVE works beautifully as a manifesto. It's a call to arms--not just against the specific men who mistreated McGowan and the men and women who enabled that mistreatment, but against an industry."--The Boston Globe
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. Rose escaped into the world of her mind, something she had done as a child, and into high-profile relationships. 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.
"My life, as you will read, has taken me from one cult to another. BRAVE is the story of how I fought my way out of these cults and reclaimed my life. I want to help you do the same." -Rose McGowan
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a strong and urgent voice, actor McGowan clearly conveys her anger at Hollywood's male culture and women's acquiescence to second-class status as underpaid, easily manipulated, and violently abused sex objects. McGowan, recently heralded as one of the "Silence Breakers" chosen as Time magazine's "2017 Person of the Year" and among the first to accuse movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, persuasively narrates her view of Hollywood not as an entertainment business, but as a propaganda powerhouse that primarily reinforces the norms of misogynist culture. Her blow-by-blow reenactment of her rape by Weinstein is full of ghastly details and very difficult to listen to-especially knowing it is McGowan herself who is reliving the experience. With McGowan as both writer and narrator, this audiobook forcefully connects readers, both women and men, to the #MeToo movement. A HarperOne hardcover. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
This may not, in time, be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it will surely remain the most visceral anger burns from every page In the week that I read Rose McGowans memoir, Brave, I went to see All the Money in the World, the Getty biopic that originally starred Kevin Spacey, before he was hastily swapped for Christopher Plummer after Spacey was publicly accused of groping multiple men in the past. I downloaded some shows made by Amazon Studios, which is no longer headed by Roy Price, as he resigned last year after a producer accused him of sexual harassment. I read an interview with Uma Thurman in which she called out her former longterm collaborators, Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino, accusing the former of sexual assault and the latter of life endangerment, when Tarantino asked her to drive a car she felt was unsafe while shooting a movie (and which Thurman then crashed). And I saw pictures from the red carpet: at the Golden Globes, female actors wore black as a sign of solidarity with victims of sexual assault, while at the Grammys singers carried white roses for the same reason. In the last six months the entertainment world has changed almost beyond recognition, and one person who has done more than most to bring about this change is McGowan. Tarantino, who has admitted about Weinstein I knew enough to do more than I did, gets a brutal shot in the neck That McGowan has turned out to be an avenging warrior, determined to expose Hollywoods toxic lies and cover-ups, would have once seemed as improbable as the most ludicrous superhero movie; a spoilt rich guy saving the city while dressed as a bat has nothing on her tale. For almost two decades, she was seen as a good if underused actor, one whose career was hampered by her reputation for being, as the saying goes, difficult. But it turns out both of these sides to her public image underused and difficult may have had less to do with her and more with Weinstein. Last year, McGowan publicly claimed he had raped her in a hotel room in 1997. According to her, after the assault he proceeded to trash her reputation, telling producers: Dont hire her. Shes bad news. Weinstein has denied all specific allegations of non-consensual sex; yes, he did pay her a settlement of $100,000 in 1997, according to documents obtained by the New York Times last year, though not as an admission, merely a means to avoid litigation and buy peace. It has since been alleged that other actors from the 90s, including Annabella Sciorra, Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, whose careers had a similarly mysterious lack of traction, may have also had their reputations tarnished by Weinstein after being assaulted or harassed by him. For a long time, he was celebrated as the maker of movie men: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Tarantino. But it turns out he might have also damaged the careers of a generation of female actors. The Weinstein allegations are the biggest scandal to hit Hollywood since the blacklist era, and they have revealed a national shame that wasnt even below the surface it was right in front of everyones eyes. At the last count, 122 high-profile men have been accused of sexual assault or harassment since the New York Times published the first story about Weinstein in October, and many have resigned from their jobs or are at least making the suddenly de rigueur noises about the importance of listening to victims. And yet because the men are high profile they have tended to hog the conversation. McGowan is determined to change this. She doesnt even name Weinstein in her memoir, calling him instead the monster; this is McGowans story and she will not share the spotlight. She has proved to be a sexual predators worst nightmare because she has not just a public voice but a deeply admirable lack of fear and shame. When Weinsteins lawyer last week called McGowans claims a bold lie told merely to promote her new book, she unhesitatingly retaliated, calling him sad, pathetic and an old-fashioned sexist. But Brave also reveals why she would have looked like a predators perfect target. McGowan was born in the Children of God cult, and her childhood, even after the family left the cult, was spent bouncing between her mentally unstable father and her mother, who had a bad habit of dating abusive men. She went to rehab and lived on the streets for a short time before ending up in Hollywood as a teenager, emancipated from her parents and living with a controlling boyfriend. Abusers pick vulnerable characters: the alone, the unstable, the unreliable, people whose cries are easy to ignore, and McGowan ticked a lot of those boxes. She still cuts an eccentric figure: on her US publicity tour last week she shouted at a transgender activist I dont come from your planet, leave me alone! and appeared on a US TV talk show where she discussed how wearing suits psychologically makes people insane. A lot of her story sounds just as incredible. My life was infiltrated by Israeli spies is how she begins her book and, amazingly, we now believe this may be true: Weinstein allegedly used ex-Mossad agents to spy on accusers who he feared would expose him. Maybe we should all stay away from suits after all. McGowans book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page. Tarantino, who has admitted about Weinstein I knew enough to do more than I did, gets an enjoyably brutal shot in the neck. Recounting how he used to tell McGowan he liked to watch on laser disc one of her movie scenes in which she paints her toes, she sneers: Tarantino has a known foot fetish. That means Tarantino paid extra money to jerk off to my young feet and he told me about it loudly, over and over, for years in front of numerous people, as if I should be so thrilled that he donated his solid-motherfucking-gold semen that is clearly better than all the other semen in the world, and he gave it up for little ol me? Its time men realized their semen isnt all that. But the problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not. I was fake married three times on film before my real marriage. By then I was repeating an emotional scene Id already played. Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers. You should know this and acknowledge, she admonishes the reader. This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldnt have written this book: self-control isnt helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women. - Hadley Freeman.
Booklist Review
Rose McGowan survived a childhood in a cult and intermittent teenage homelessness, but what really broke her was Hollywood. Anyone who consumed any media at the end of 2017 knows of producer Harvey Weinstein's downfall as allegations of rampant sexual assault came to light, led fiercely and publicly by McGowan. In Brave, she does not shy away from details of her assault at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 (though she refers to Weinstein only as the Monster). But first, her life story: born into the Children of God cult in Italy, she instinctively rebelled against religious brainwashing, despite the resultant punishment. When the cult started justifying pedophilia, her father moved the family to the U.S., and McGowan's childhood was spent in Colorado (beautiful) and rural Oregon (rednecks). Her freakish style (described as Moth, a cross between mod and goth) led to her being literally plucked off the streets to star in Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation. Because she was new, she was not privy to the whisper network that surrounded Weinstein; after her assault, a male costar muttered, I told him not to do that anymore. Essentially blacklisted from film, she turned to television, replacing Shannen Doherty on the sister-witch show Charmed. The grueling schedule (and costars with whom no love has been lost, apparently) left her exhausted and vulnerable to the creative charms of Robert Rodriguez (referred to as RR), who left his wife for her, and the boys' club led by Quentin Tarantino, where women can be strong as long as they are also mostly naked and willing to die in really gruesome ways. Brave will appeal in two ways: it is a celebrity memoir, and although McGowan's insistence on her own inner strength and superior intelligence can be exhausting, she dishes some good dirt, especially for those who grew up during her indie-darling phase. (As a side note: she has very sweet things to say about ex-boyfriend Marilyn Manson.) But it is also a fierce, sometimes dryly funny calling out of the hypocrisy and misogyny of Hollywood. She excoriates everyone who is culpable, from the assaulters to the complicit female producers to the public who knows the representation of women in media is dangerous and wrong but who consume it anyway. She also speaks to fellow survivors, who are perhaps the most important audience for this book. McGowan has been through hell, and she knows you have, too. The book may be self-promotional at times, but it is also a battle cry.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF I HAD READ Rose McGowan's new memoir, "Brave," in a vacuum, absent the feats of investigative reporting that took down the former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, I would have thought it overwrought and paranoid. McGowan describes a life of almost ceaseless abuse, of falling into the clutches of one sadistic ogre after another as powerful forces conspired to crush her rogue spirit. "My life was infiltrated by Israeli spies and harassing lawyers, some of the most formidable on earth," she writes on the first page. "These evil people hounded me at every turn while I went about resurrecting the ghosts that have made up my time on earth." Come on - Israeli spies? Of course, we now know: Yes, Israeli spies. In October 2016, McGowan posted three tweets accusing a "studio head" of rape, using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport. She was referring to Weinstein, who, it's since been revealed, had paid her $100,000 for her silence about a 1997 encounter at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. As Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker in November 2017, shortly after McGowan's tweets Weinstein hired several private security agencies, one run largely by veterans of Israeli intelligence, to try to stop the story of his longtime sexual predation from coming out. Agents were explicitly directed to spy on and undermine McGowan. "It was like the movie 'Gaslight,' " McGowan told Farrow. "Everyone lied to me all the time." One of the greatest tricks that the patriarchy plays on women is to deliberately destabilize them, then use their instability as a reason to disbelieve them. Much of "Brave" reads like the diary of a woman driven half-mad by abusive men who assume no one will listen to her. In this case, the truth was finally - and, for McGowan, triumphantly - exposed, but reading "Brave," I kept thinking about how many more women must be written off as crazy and crushed under the weight of secrets no one wants to hear. Even before she met Weinstein, McGowan had been through hell. She was raised in the polygamous Children of God cult, though her family fled when its leadership started encouraging sex with children. She then spent years bouncing back and forth between her cruel father and her unreliable mother, who for a time dated a vicious man who McGowan says was later charged with sexually abusing his own daughter. McGowan did a brief stint in rehab during junior high school and later lived as an itinerant street punk. Eventually she made her way to Hollywood and was emancipated from her parents before she was old enough to drive. This bitter history clearly left a mark, and her book is furious and profane, wild and a little unhinged. "Very few sex symbols escape Hollywood with their minds intact, if they manage to stay alive at all," McGowan writes early on. There's no glamour in "Brave," and very little joy; I've never read anything that makes being a starlet sound so tedious and demeaning. The book hinges on McGowan's encounter with Weinstein, whom she refers to only as "the Monster." Here, for the first time, she tells the story of what he did to her. It's both disgusting and, if you've followed the Weinstein coverage, very familiar. She was summoned to a morning meeting in the restaurant of an exclusive hotel in Park City, Utah. When she arrived, the restaurant's host directed her to Weinstein's suite, saying he was stuck on a call. "I was certain we would be working together for many years to come, and we were here to plot out the grand arc of my career," McGowan writes. Instead, Weinstein pushed her into a room with a Jacuzzi and pulled off her clothes. "I freeze, like a statue," she writes. As she describes it, he put her on the edge of the Jacuzzi, got in and performed oral sex on her while masturbating. Her experience sounds similar to the one that the actress and director Asia Argento described to The New Yorker. Like Argento, McGowan says that she feigned pleasure in the hopes of bringing the event to a quicker conclusion. "He moans loudly; through my tears I see his semen floating on top of the bubbles," she writes. Afterward, McGowan writes, she was taken to a photo-op with Ben Affleck, her co-star in "Phantoms," a movie she was promoting. Seeing her shaken and hearing where she came from, the actor said, "Goddamn it. I told him to stop doing that." (It's unclear what Affleck meant by that statement; he has never responded to the accusation that he knew about Weinstein's abuse.) Others, McGowan writes, "counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run." Wanting to press charges, she spoke to a criminal attorney who told her she would never be believed. Soon she heard that Weinstein was calling around town telling people not to hire her. "It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment," she writes. "And I was the one who was punished for it." Her film career was derailed. McGowan would eventually find success playing one of a trio of witches on the TV show "Charmed." She describes working on the show as a deadening experience, a "prison for my mind." Her sense of martyrdom can be a bit much; she writes of feeling "robbed" by having to get married on TV before her real wedding. "Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers," McGowan writes. "You should know this and acknowledge." Yet it's McGowan's profound dissatisfaction with her profession - one she seems to have fallen into rather than pursued - that has given her the freedom to gleefully burn bridges. She loathes the entertainment business, describing Hollywood as a cult worse than the one she grew up in. Though she's in her 40 s, she sometimes writes with the grandiosity of an alienated adolescent whose mind was blown by "The Matrix." "You may think that what happens in Hollywood doesn't affect you," she writes. "You're wrong. My darlings, who do you think is curating your reality?" For most adult readers, it won't be much of a revelation that Hollywood trades in distortion and exploitation. But I hope "Brave" finds its way into the hands of teenage girls who may still look to actresses as they try to figure out how they're supposed to be in the world, girls who aspire to the life McGowan once had. In the end, McGowan finds a measure of peace and redemption when she moves behind the camera, becoming a director and multimedia artist, subject rather than object. One of the lessons of her story is that being desired is no substitute for being powerful. MICHELLE GOLDBERG IS an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.