‘Girl, Wash Your Face’
By Rachel Hollis, Nelson, 240 pages, $22.99
for Donald Trump in 2016, even as she uses the language that the right might denigrate as snowflakese. She questions the patriarchy and advocates for being “woke,” but also embraces stay-at-home moms and quotes Scripture. “I love Jesus, and I cuss a little,” she wrote on Facebook recently. “I love Jesus, and some of my best friends are gay.”
But she also insists that she’s apolitical — and that it’s a conscious choice. Politics, she says, divides people. She’s more interested in bringing them together. Whatever she’s doing, it’s working.
Hollis has roughly 2.5 million followers on social media, and that number grows with each pithy quote, photo and intimate moment she posts. More than 50,000 people tune in to her daily Facebook Live feeds, where she and her husband, Dave Hollis, a former Disney executive, casually banter about their personal life and take questions from the audience. Often wearing a baseball
“Other people’s opinions are ruling your life,” she intoned. “And the thing is, at least as far as women are concerned, I don’t even think it’s your fault.”
She took a few steps, let us take that in. “I think that most of us as little girls were taught that in order to be a good woman, we needed to be good for other people. And that good little girl turned into a good woman, and that was always defined by someone else’s opinion of how you were doing.”
“And when you don’t do things because you’re worried about what someone else will think or when you do things because you are trying to please anyone but yourself, you’re falling into a trap.
“Who out there is struggling under the weight of someone else’s opinion? Shout it out! What’s keeping you back?”
Voices emerged: “Family! Friends! Haters! Social media!”
Brenda Reider, a 53-year-old retailer from Brooklyn, N.Y., was a Hollis newbie and instant convert. “I thought she was amazing. What she says I know in my head, but I haven’t been able to get through it. She just touched me.”
Hollis has sparked a community of catharsis-seekers. On one of several private “Girl, Wash Your Face” Facebook book clubs, women have confessed that they were sexually assaulted, that they are depressed, that their husbands have cheated, that they are bad mothers. Other readers rally around in support. At a recent speaking engagement, Hollis asked women to check off a list of hardships they’ve experienced. Every single woman wrote down that she hated the way she looked. “It’s 2018,” Hollis later commented. “How are we still here?”
Hollis understands that women are angry — and frustrated, unfulfilled, fearful. She also understands the particular brand of anger that has set women afire over the last year. “That’s exactly how some people should be allowed to process what they feel,” she said. And even if it’s not how she feels (“that’s not who I am”), she also understands that her book — written long before #MeToo came to be — has in some ways benefited from the moment we’re in. “In a sea of polarizing stuff,” Dave offered, Hollis’ book and her talks are “a respite from having to be pulled into a debate about whose side is right.”
Hollis has only a high school diploma — a fact she advertises proudly — but could probably teach a course in marketing. The success of “Girl, Wash Your Face” — it’s been licensed for translation into Hebrew, Farsi, Spanish, German, Korean, Turkish, Vietnamese, Serbian, Arabic and Indonesian, among other languages — has been fed not just by Hollis’ magnetic personality but by her brand-making savvy.
In March 2015, an Instagram of her celebrating her stretch marks went viral. In December 2017, a video called “The Video EVERY Woman Should Watch!” — a series of vignettes that could easily have been a campaign ad (“Go all in. Take massive action immediately,” she says with a go-get-’em punch) — popped up on Facebook and nearly lived up