At other times, she’ll unflinchingly look you in the eye and describe her darkest hours in crushing detail: “I remember looking up [Web] pages where I know that it’s gonna say how ugly I am, and ‘How could he ever have been with her?’ It’s the same feeling as when I used to be bulimic and I’d look in the mirror with vomit on my face and burst blood vessels in my eyes and go, ‘That’s you. I caught you. That’s what you’re really like.’ ”
Forrest met Farrell at a party in L.A.; she describes him in her book as looking, at the time, like “the world’s campest terrorist.” They fell in love nonetheless. Throughout Your Voice in My Head, and in person as well, she refers to the Irish star as “Gypsy Husband,” or “GH”—a nickname he gave himself.
She met him at a happy time, when she’d stopped cutting and making herself throw up, and she’d felt stable enough to cut back on her visits to her psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Rosecan (“Dr. R” in the book). When Rosecan died, unexpectedly, of cancer at age 56 (having chosen not to reveal his illness to his patients), Farrell, she writes, penned poems for her and tried to convince her “that Dr. R’s keeping his sickness a secret was not a betrayal.” And soon, he was trying to convince her to get pregnant. The couple named their prospective daughter in advance (“Pearl”); Farrell bought a baby coat. But one day, returning from a movie set, he explained to her, out of nowhere, that he needed “space…all the space.”
Forrest describes this time as her “lowest low point,” where her self-esteem plunged and she even flirted with suicide again. And yet she looks back at Farrell with a degree of fondness: “I don’t say he’s a prick; he’s a smart and lovely and sensitive man, and I can’t believe he crushed my heart.”
She’d started writing her memoir when they were together, as a way of working through her mental illness and commemorating her time with Rosecan; after she lost both men, writing it became a means of coping.
The book recounts her difficult return to health and happiness. At one point, she’s admonished by a colleague of Dr. R’s to stop trying to psychologically profile Farrell; that their time together can be viewed as having been “only a movie.” The defence mechanism helped. Actors, she has concluded (referring to Heath Ledger, a friend of an ex-boyfriend, whom she last saw, with “grey” skin, a week before his overdose), are “very often ghosts… They’re vessels for their gift, and they don’t understand their gift, and it makes them unhappy.”
Your Voice in My Head has been labelled by the Observer as a “misery memoir.” Forrest riles at the label: it’s “a way to be dismissive of women’s voices,” she says. “There’s always a tag for women. I saw 127 Hours and I liked it, but that was based on a memoir [in which] a guy was really f–king stupid… he went and did this without telling anyone where he was going. Into the Wild, same thing. Why isn’t there a whole category of male memoirs about being a macho, immature idiot?”
Forrest says she hopes Farrell reads her memoir and “sees the purity of it… GH’s all-time favourite song is Diamonds & Rust, which is Joan Baez’s riposte to Bob Dylan for the way he just left her behind. Every time I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to be so upset,’ I just thought, ‘No one who likes Diamonds & Rust that much could really fault this book.’ ”
She also transmuted her feelings into a buoyant screenplay: Liars (A-E), which was two weeks away from being filmed by director Richard Linklater when its production company, Miramax, got into dire financial straits. Its heroine gets dumped by a musician who looks like “the world’s gayest terrorist” and who tells her he needs “all the space.” With a friend, she goes on a road trip to reclaim things she left with a series of exes—the concept is part revenge, part redemption.
Recently, Forrest optioned Your Voice in My Head to producer Alison Owen (Elizabeth, Shaun of the Dead); she and director Joe Wright (Atonement) have worked on a treatment. Wright’s idea, it seems, was for “GH to play GH.”
And how would she feel about that? “I’m just like, ‘Whatever’s good for the art,’ really, and I know that I deserve a punch in the face for talking about art at all. I say in the book, I have no shame, I have no dignity. I never have. I just have writing.”
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