Image from Amazon
[Author’s note: my friend who works in mental health gave me a head’s up that I used the wrong wording to talk about suicide in this article, so I updated my language. My apologies for using inconsiderate phrasing.]
Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be, by Rachel Hollis (library ebook):
I wanted to read this because it’s so popular and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I didn’t want to read this because it looked kind of insufferable.
So I put it on hold, which is a great way of letting the library decide my reading schedule for me. Since I came up in the queue last week and am spending a bunch more time at home nowadays (like everybody should be doing), I got through it fairly quickly and decided it warrants its own post because my reactions touch on more than the usual deconstruction of narrative or structure and all the rest of that lit crit jazz.
The first couple of chapters are fine. They’re not the cupcakes-and-unicorns explosions of tough love that they want to be and are advertised as, but the general message of “stop hating yourself because you don’t live up to society’s standards and figure out how to be true to what you really want to be” is something everybody needs to hear.
But the further I read, the more I noticed a gap between what Hollis tells the reader to do and how they should go about doing it. Just decide to be happy, more prosperous, that you’ll get that Louis Vuitton bag! It’ll totally happen! And if it doesn’t, it’s totally your fault because you don’t want it enough!
BuzzFeed News did a great critique on the tone-deafness of this book. Basic argument: Hollis ignores all the outside factors that can keep one from moving in the direction they want to in life. Like systemic poverty, racism, sexism, and biological factors of mental health and body size.
I’m not a POC or a mom, and I make enough money to get by, and I totally have a side hustle although I will punch you if you call my freelancing such a dirty name, and although I am a pansexual heathen atheist I was raised Southern Baptist and I at least retained the church language (it comes in handy more often than I’d like down here). So please read what folks in other demographics have to say because they talk about it from firsthand experience that is much more valuable than any criticisms I can put in their mouths.
That being said, even as someone with more in common with Hollis than not (ugh), I found her methods and conclusions about getting to your bliss more and more disingenuous and irresponsible as the book went on.
Here are the red flags that lead me away from faintly appreciative indifference:
Turns a terrible first relationship into her marriage. I should say that the worst part about Hollis’s methods is that she doesn’t seem to recognize there’s anything wrong with them because they happened to work for her. The clearest case of this is how she and her husband got together. They started dating when she was a 19-year-old receptionist at Miramax; he didn’t realize how young she was for a disturbingly long time, and when she finally let it slip, he wanted to break up. She convinced him not to, but became more of a booty call than a real girlfriend to him.
Finally, she realizes how badly he’s treating her and breaks up with him. Awesome. Go, girl. Find you a nice boy your age at your church who can -
And then someone’s at the door and it’s him and they get back together and end up getting married. She treats it like the ending of a rom com, and says not a goddamn thing about how he changed so suddenly and completely into the Man of Her Dreams. Shit had to have gone down that she says nothing about, which basically took away any feeling that she was being totally honest about all the hard times in her life within like two sentences. And she stops short of giving details exactly when they would be most useful, which makes everything look way neater than they are in real life. Which is what she’s supposedly “getting real” about.
No acknowledgement of the vast support systems she can afford. All throughout her sections on how she grew her business, I kept waiting for her to talk about how her husband’s high-profile and well-paid position in a world-famous company boosted her own visibility in the same exact circles in which he ran.
Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Her own horn is the only one tooting.
And she talks all throughout the book about how hard it is to be the mom of four kids - which I totally believe, one hyper pup is hard enough for me some days - but then she takes the time in the Acknowledgement page - literally the last page/screen in the book, and literally something that only other writers will read because they’re secretly comparing it to their own acknowledgements page in their blossoming novel or whatever - to say that oh wait, she has a nanny and has all along.
Oblivious to emotional baggage she carries. One part that did affect me was her description of her childhood. It was chaotic, emotionally confusing, and ended at fourteen when she found her brother after he completed suicide. Nobody deserves that, and she does talk about going through therapy and how that’s helped her. Brava.
However. She also tosses off references to “screaming” (her exact words) at her kids sort of frequently like, eh, it’s a fact of life, just move on from it. Nobody’s perfect.
But she should know better than a lot of people how damaging that can be to growing children. It’s not just about getting yourself to accept your own imperfections, it’s about working on your flaws until they don’t cause hurt to other people. Especially your offspring, because, as she seems to know and talks about so much, that shit sticks. She doesn’t seem to realize that except when it comes to her own self and feelings.
Equates success with more and better stuff. I’m sure y’all’ve heard of prosperity gospel by now. If you haven’t grown up hearing about how material things are God’s blessings, you might’ve seen the John Oliver episodes about it or caught the excellent parody of it in The Righteous Gemstones. (I realize those are both on HBO and not everybody has that, so holler if you want a password, we’re all friends here.)
Hollis displays an earnest dedication to this message in a clear-conscious way that only a rich white lady wouldn’t question. One of her early career goals was to make a $10,000 paycheck for a gig so she could justify buying a $1,000 handbag to herself. And most of her goal examples are similarly material-driven, as if she can’t fathom anyone needed or wanting anything like extra time with their family or friends, time and money to get into a new hobby, or even the means to finally travel where they want. Or, you know, to not worry about rent every month.
Shames those who can’t live up to her standards. That’s kind of the premise of the whole book when you read deep enough into it. If her advice fails you, it’s because of something you fucked up, not that her words only apply to a select sliver of a homogenous Instagram population. And this comes out most clearly when she’s talking about weight.
Not health, not how your body feels, but its weight. I struggle myself with unhealthy eating habits on both sides of the spectrum, and it doesn’t help to have someone pretend to be your friend while she says humans aren’t meant to be overweight. It’s actively angering when the person saying that also says that losing weight is not only necessary but as easy as burning more calories than you take in when that has been scientifically proven to be untrue for years now.
It’s supposed to be easier to take because Hollis use to be bigger. But it becomes laughable when you realize she now could fit in my big-hipped, fat-assed back pocket.
I’m not body shaming her; I’m just pointing this out because she makes her appearance relevant to her advice as proof that it can be done. Yes, when you have a nanny and a big paycheck to buy healthy food that tastes good and nothing but your own willpower holding you back, I’m sure it’s pretty easy. But this goes back to her completely ignoring relevant outside factors because they don’t fit her neat premise.
Why Should You Care?
Advice books like this thread the fairly large loophole of “I’m not offering professional help, I’m just telling you what a good girlfrann would!” so they have an out if anyone complains about how the content doesn’t work for them.
But my dudes, this is a New York Times bestseller for I didn’t look up how many weeks because it will make me want to stop writing forever, and since buying an advice book (or checking it out from your local library!) is much cheaper and more convenient than therapy, many people do take these tomes as their only sort of mental health help.
Hollis is not the only person pushing this twaddle. She’s been doing it for years on her blog, and this approach has been standard Instagram influencer fair since “influencer” became a thing.
And the audience isn’t dumb. They’re drawn in by the friendly tough love approach, and then they’re left out in the cold or feeling worse than before because they can’t actually do what the rich white lady advises, for financial, physical, mental reasons and so they count themselves as failures who don’t deserve to get help to succeed.
Which is bullshit and harmful, especially for women who need the most help getting out of shitty situations of any kind.