Rose McGowan: "Their discomfort isn't your issue"

Actress. Director. Survivor. Silence Breaker. Rose McGowan joined the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk about her memoir Brave, life in Hollywood and the #MeToo movement.

Feature by Heather McDaid | 16 Aug 2018

“This is not a tell-all. It’s a tell it how it is.” These words perfectly capture Rose McGowan’s book Brave, and her hour at the Edinburgh International Book Festival alongside journalist Afua Hirsch. McGowan is an established actress and director, activist and now author, a thought leader and agent of change. As a feminist whistleblower, she was at the forefront of the movement to break the silence and has openly been fighting the machine.

“The title is not about me,” says McGowan on Brave. “It’s about all of us. I wrote it for us to unwire what we’ve been wired to think.” Rose grew up in a cult and now recognises Hollywood to be one. Even our thoughts on ourselves – it’s shaped by what we consume. “We can be trapped in a structure without realising it.”

She was street-smart as a child; she had to be. She didn’t apply the same suspicion to Hollywood when she first joined the fold. The people she was meeting were her employers: she believed them. She was surrounded by people, but she was alone. Rose let her guard down with Hollywood; Afua suggests the whole world has, only now confronting the horrors it holds.

“I was mad at myself,” Rose recalls. “I’d survived so much already.” She was furious to have let her guard down; she believed with the bigwigs of the industry she’d be safe – it’s a misplaced blame, she now understands.

Harvey Weinstein is called the Monster in Rose’s book; he was the highest profile abuser to fall in the #MeToo movement to date. As a producer he was omnipresent, he was everywhere – you’d be hard pressed not to have seen a movie of his. He is in everyone’s head. He was powerful; Rose believes his abuse will span thousands of victims. For years this story had been attempted and crushed, but Rose pushed to bring it to the public eye, being named as one of the Silence Breakers as Time’s Person of the Year for doing so.

The #MeToo movement has been a tipping point in the conversation, though there are still ways to go. How does she feel about the aftermath? “I think it’s pretty great to show we can cut off the heads of power,” she says. It has been a hard ten months for her; part of bravery is not thinking too far ahead. “I just wanted him to stop. I just wanted the lying to stop.”

It has been, she admits, a very lonely road. She’s always felt an outsider in Hollywood. People would treat her as if they didn’t want her to sit at their table; but to her, their table didn’t exist in her reality. “If all you have is yourself, that’s what you fight to keep.”

Now she speaks up and has inspired others to do so. She wants children to be free of these issues; she wants 85-year-olds to know it’s never too late to be yourself. Trump is a horror, but it’s making people confront the realities of racism, sexism and hate who would have otherwise swept it under the carpet. It’s all a starting point, but “it’s not time for metaphors any more, it’s time for bald truth.”

McGowan is proud, she writes, about ‘having a hand in this cataclysmic global reckoning and the feeling of monsters’. She talks openly about the darkest moments of her life, touches on how navigating this world is an individual journey, deconstructing media messages, the power in one’s voice and story, and offers advice on how to support those looking to be brave themselves ("Their discomfort isn't your issue - it's your truth"); for an hour, the book festival witnesses an exceptional candidness and light from someone whose voice triggered a global conversation.

‘Did I break up with someone?’ writes Rose. ‘Yes, I broke up with the world. You can, too.’

Edinburgh International Book Festival 2018 takes place until 27 Aug at Charlotte Square