The Great Peace – Mena Suvari
Mena writes with a sparing straightforward style, which deceptively, seems a little lightweight at first. However, then, as the book draws you more and more in: WHAM! Super powerful writing; raw, honest, incisive, like a surgeon's knife getting to the core root. Ms Suvari writes with a touching modesty and unassumingness. There are no airs and grace, there is no bragging about her fame or successful film career. Underneath the great success of American Beauty - and she is incredibly beautiful with babylike wide set eyes that convey a charming innocence - we discover that Mena was going through great pain in her life. The book is not about Hollywood and the film world but as she explains in the final chapter, it is about #metoo and the raw pain and distress she suffered between the ages of 12 to her twenties, when she was sexually abused and treated as a sex object by older men. This had the effect, she believes, of affecting her later relationships for a long time.
I love her poems. Some of the lines are absolutely brilliant, fantastic images, great use of words for an untrained poet. I really, really, loved this book and found myself looking forward to picking it up to continue where I'd left off, reading it a chapter or two at a time.
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Mena writes with a sparing straightforward style, which deceptively, seems a little lightweight at first. However, then, as the book draws you more and more in: WHAM! Super powerful writing; raw, honest, incisive, like a surgeon's knife getting to the core root. Ms Suvari writes with a touching modesty and unassumingness. There are no airs and grace, there is no bragging about her fame or successful film career. Underneath the great success of American Beauty - and she is incredibly beautiful with babylike wide set eyes that convey a charming innocence - we discover that Mena was going through great pain in her life. The book is not about Hollywood and the film world but as she explains in the final chapter, it is about #metoo and the raw pain and distress she suffered between the ages of 12 to her twenties, when she was sexually abused and treated as a sex object by older men. This had the effect, she believes, of affecting her later relationships for a long time.
I love her poems. Some of the lines are absolutely brilliant, fantastic images, great use of words for an untrained poet. I really, really, loved this book and found myself looking forward to picking it up to continue where I'd left off, reading it a chapter or two at a time.
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