Girl Wash Your Face – Book Review
Girl Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis
Published by: Thomas Nelson
Publish Date: 2018
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Self Help, Contemporary, Christian
HB&W Rating: 5
View on Goodreads
Buy on Amazon: Barnes & Noble, Book Depository
It’s not about the goal or the dream you have; it’s about who you become on your way to that goal.
Synopsis
With wry wit and hard-earned wisdom, popular online personality and founder of TheChicSite.com founder Rachel Hollis helps readers break free from the lies keeping them from the joy-filled and exuberant life they are meant to have.
Founder of the lifestyle website TheChicSite.com and CEO of her own media company, Chic Media, Rachel Hollis has created an online fan base of hundreds of thousands of fans by sharing tips for living a better life while fearlessly revealing the messiness of her own. Now comes her highly anticipated first book featuring her signature combination of honesty, humor, and direct, no-nonsense advice.
Each chapter of Girl, Wash Your Face begins with a specific lie Hollis once believed that left her feeling overwhelmed, unworthy, or ready to give up. As a working mother, a former foster parent, and a woman who has dealt with insecurities about her body and relationships, she speaks with the insight and kindness of a BFF, helping women unpack the limiting mind-sets that destroy their self-confidence and keep them from moving forward.
From her temporary obsession with marrying Matt Damon to a daydream involving hypnotic iguanas to her son’s request that she buy a necklace to “be like the other moms,” Hollis holds nothing back. With unflinching faith and tenacity, Hollis spurs other women to live with passion and hustle and to awaken their slumbering goals.
Synopsis source: Goodreads
Review
Wow. This book was incredibly, inexplicably powerful. I had waited and waited for this title from the library for some time, finally snatching up an audiobook version, and I am not even lying to you when I tell you that immediately after finishing the audio recording, I started it over again right then and there.
There is soooo much wisdom in this book, told in a no-nonsense, listen-up girlfriend kind of way. Honestly, I kept finding myself pausing the book, to write down so many different quotes, it was unreal. This is one of those books that you need to keep, highlight, and return to for affirmation as often as needed.
People will treat you with as much or as little respect as you allow them.
Mrs. Hollis lays it all out on the line for us, sharing with us her personal trials, fears, successes, failures, and so much more, exhibiting a vulnerability that can only be applauded, her hope being that someone else, somewhere can draw from her shared experiences and relate them to their own life, because as she points out:
Let that which is in the darkness be brought into the light.
Ephesians 5:13
Our fears have power over us because we keep them to ourselves, but talking about them with others who love and support us, bringing those fears into the light, can begin to take away their power.
I personally didn’t even realize that this was a Christian book, published by a Christian publisher until she came right out and said it in the book. I just assumed that she had a deep and abiding faith, and she wasn’t afraid to talk about it, which I personally applauded. Generally speaking, due to past experiences with people whose religion differed from mine and judging me harshly or forcefully trying to impose their beliefs onto me, when someone starts quoting scripture to me, I can’t help but perceive them as similar to the people who I had dealt with in the past, people I would avoid at all costs. But Ms. Hollis does it in such an off-handed and casual sort of way that it isn’t preachy at all, not about God anyway. Don’t get me wrong, she’s definitely preaching, but this is a sermon you want to hear.
She addresses the excuses we make to ourselves, the permission we get from others after a traumatic experience shatters our confidence, and she rescinds that permission, saying
Don’t you dare squander the strength you have earned just because the acquisition of it was painful. THOSE are the most important stories to share.
and reminding us that our Heavenly Father has perfect timing, and sometimes you have to walk through this season to prepare you for the next.
While some of the experiences she draws from smack of privilege, ultimately the advice she offers from having been through them can be applied more broadly to the individual reader’s life as well. In a world where the world has dictated to women for so long, since the dawn of time, what and who we should be, how we should act, what we should and should not do, this is a must-read for any woman. A must read so that we stop judging ourselves, stop judging each other, and stop believing the lies society would tell us to hold us back from the people we can become. I eagerly await my turn for her sequel, Girl, Stop Apologizing when the title becomes available at my library.
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