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.
