'I was not being loved. I was just a body': Mena Suvari on sexual abuse, acting & American Beauty
When Mena Suvari’s memoir came out last year, her son was only a few months old and she was dealing with postnatal depression, all while promoting her book, The Great Peace, and talking about the traumas within: rape; predatory older men; drug addiction; and a terrifying and abusive relationship. “So, as you might be able to guess, I was in a state,” she says with a laugh. It felt strange to even have to care about things such as sales. Writing it was the important part: “I needed to express myself. I needed to purge this in order to move on … I very much wanted to let it go.”
But she did rounds of promotional interviews even if, she says, it felt contradictory “to get all made up and pretty on camera. I felt like that’s what I was trying to have conversations around.” For much of her life, Suvari, who is now 43, believed her worth was not just in what she looked like but how sexy she was. The film roles that made her a star – as the virginal Heather in American Pie, and Angela, the focus of middle-aged lust in American Beauty – firmly positioned her as a teenage sex object, though her brutal sexualisation had begun far earlier. When we speak on Zoom – Suvari in her office at home in Los Angeles – she has her hair pushed back from her makeup-free face, looking defiantly anti-Hollywood.
Suvari had worried about how her book would be received but the response was positive. People sent her messages on Instagram, relating their own experiences of sexual abuse, and thanking her for writing it. “It was bittersweet because it felt beautiful to feel seen and heard, but it was heartbreaking to hear that others had identified in similar ways. I didn’t want that for them, but overall I feel very proud. We’re living in the craziest time, the world’s on fire, but at the same time things are a lot more open. I always hoped that [the book] could help create some kind of change and initiate further conversation.”
The youngest of four children and the only girl, Suvari grew up in Rhode Island, in a big house with a ballroom, where her father, a psychiatrist (who was already in his 60s when she was born), would see patients. Her early childhood was happy, but it became unstable – first, she moved with her mother and one of her brothers to the Virgin Islands, then the whole family moved to South Carolina. Her parents were distant. “I struggled to be seen and heard, engaged with,” she says. “But I didn’t feel such a loss of sense of self until I was 12. When I was raped.” A friend of one of her older brothers paid her lots of attention, wrote her love letters, encouraged her into sexual activity, and then raped her several times at his house. He then told other people at school that she was a “whore”. She was so ashamed, she denied that it had happened. “That sucked the life out of me. I think that was just excessive confirmation that no one was going to save me, no one was going to do anything for me.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/27/i-was-not-being-loved-i-was-just-a-body-mena-suvari-on-surviving-sexual-abuse-acting-and-american-beauty
This is so incredibly sad.
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