It’s not enough being happy on stage’… Melanie Brown

Title: Brutally Honest Author: Melanie Brown Review: How girl power won through Scary Spice’s gruelling memoir of marriage to her abusive ex-husband aims to enlighten victims of domestic abuse. ‘It’s not enough being happy on stage’… Melanie Brown. Photograph: Harry Borden for the Guardian Publisher: Quadrille. As the Spice Girls return, so do debates about […]

Title: Brutally Honest
Author: Melanie Brown
Review: How girl power won through Scary Spice’s gruelling memoir of marriage to her abusive ex-husband aims to enlighten victims of domestic abuse.
‘It’s not enough being happy on stage’… Melanie Brown.
Photograph: Harry Borden for the Guardian
Publisher: Quadrille.

As the Spice Girls return, so do debates about girl power: a marketing ploy or a generational radicalisation that still reverberates today? The arguments are inseparable. Capitalism was the perfect vehicle for the fivesome’s gaudy feminism, rooted not in intellectual doctrine but in their keen sense that they deserved to act, love and, yes, earn just like men did.

Their cultural legacy was to make feminism mainstream. Highlighting the voices of working-class, uneducated women was similarly key to their mission, but those groups don’t share the platform of today’s pallid pop feminism. Melanie Brown’s Brutally Honest continues this side of the Spice Girls’ work: writing for readers who aren’t steeped in the theories of domestic abuse, but imprisoned by its everyday assault, as she was.

Brown details her marriage to Stephen Belafonte, a nasty Hollywood chancer who approaches her in an airport and persuades her to swap numbers so a group of gawping Spice Girls fans might want to sleep with him. He appears in her bedroom days after she gives birth to the baby Eddie Murphy (portrayed as a hermetic control freak) had just denied fathering, her disorientation drowning out what should have been an air-raid siren-volume warning to stay well away.

Suddenly, Belafonte is her husband, manager and sole confidant after he verbally abuses Brown’s family in Leeds, provoking an eight-year estrangement. He spends her cash, monitors her communications, threatens to leak their sex tapes, makes her children eat on the floor and punches their dog. When Brown becomes dependent on alcohol and cocaine, he forces her eldest daughter to witness her signing contracts pledging sobriety. Brown ultimately attempts suicide but leaves hospital during her recovery to appear on US X Factor: bruised and defiantly minus her wedding ring to show Belafonte it’s over.

What may seem like a tawdry scene was a refuge: Brown’s work physically distanced her from Belafonte. To their credit, her wary colleagues – Simon Cowell, the other Spices – enforced that distance. You worry about her putting faith in fame’s fickle sanctuary, so it’s a relief when she finds contentment on her own terms: “It’s not enough being happy on a stage,” she writes. She takes pains to keep educating herself: “I never knew about this stuff,” she writes after learning about gaslighting. “I wish I had been in a position to nod in understanding rather than have to go through it to even know about these words and syndromes.”

Bruised and defiantly minus her wedding ring, she appears on X Factor to show Belafonte it’s over

Brown makes the point that if it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone. If she often does so with a loud clang – with her fame and fortune! – her candour on how abuse affected her parenting is a sobering counterweight: “I would rather risk vilification if it helps another woman in an emotionally abusive relationship to admit her children have been damaged and those children to get therapy and help.”

There’s some levity. We learn that 4am chip butties and lambrusco were a Spice Girls tradition. Her sister dated Jay-Z before Beyoncé. Apparently, there exists a celebrity dating website where men submit photos of their penises next to juice cartons for scale. Otherwise, Brutally Honest is gruelling and structurally odd. But academic frustrations are beside the point: if Brown awakens even one reader to the reality of their situation, her legacy will endure long beyond the second Spice Girls reunion.