Before going onThe Bachelor, Hannah Brown had her life planned out: get her degree, marry, have kids, live in Alabama. Now, as the newly-appointed Bachelorette, Brown knows that’s not what she wants. “I want my life to be [exciting] regardless of whether a man is in it or not,” she tells Glamour. “I want to see more of the world and, through that, find out more about myself.” So before this new journey begins, Brown sat down with us to explain why you’ll see a different side of her when The Bachelorette premieres this May. Read on.
I wanted to be a trophy wife, and I was fine with that. I thought I had my life written out—what it was going to be, what kind of woman I was going to be—and none of it happened. I dated this guy forever, and I thought we were going to get married. We looked at land where we lived, and he was going to take over his dad’s business and get his engineering degree. I was going to get my degree and ultimately have babies. And there is nothing wrong with that. I was going be the queen of Tuscaloosa, and it was OK. There was always something in my heart that knew I wanted more, but I settled because that’s kind of what he wanted—and what everybody did back home.
When we broke up, it was shattering for me because I loved him, and it’s what I thought I wanted. Then I won Miss Alabama, which was another dream. It pushed me to start figuring out myself a little bit. Then The Bachelor happened. I was nominated for it, because I had never otherwise put The Bachelor on my list. I was skeptical and kind of terrified, but when Colton was announced I saw potential. On the show, you have to talk about what you want, where you see yourself, who with, and what you want in a person. I don’t think I ever asked myself those questions before. And then all the travel and seeing the world—it just opened myself up to realizing that I don’t want to go back to the life I had before. That is not me, and never was me. I was settling.
Hannah Brown with Colton Underwood on The Bachelor.
ABC
It’s not that it isn’t for other people, but it just wasn’t going to be enough for me. I realized I deserve to be happy and have all the things I want in life. It might be scary and outside the norm of what everybody else does, but I need to just go for it. Ultimately, my future wasn’t with Colton, but my journey isn’t over. I’m so excited for the rest of my life, and I want love to be an adventure. I want it to be fun. I want it to be exciting, and I want my life to be that way regardless of whether a man is in it or not. Alabama will always be home and have a special place in my heart, but I want my life to be more than just living there. I want to see more of the world and, through that, find out more about myself.
In a way, the hardest part of this journey has been the time since I’ve been off show. I haven’t been able to really do much. I’ve worked a little bit for some of my friends that do home decor stuff, but I’ve just had to hang out, which has not been fulfilling at all. I’m kind of living in the past, and I’m ready to move on. The in-between stage is the toughest.
Annie has an epiphany at a “Fat Babe Pool Party,” where she sees women of all shapes, sizes, and colors enjoying themselves without a care in the world. It leads to one of the most poignant monologues in the show. “I’ve wasted so much time and energy and money…for what? For what?” Annie says to her roommate, Fran (Lolly Adefope), and a new friend they meet at the pool party. “I’m fat. I’m fucking fat. Hello? I’m fat!”
Bryant experienced a similar “a-ha” moment in her own life. “At a certain point, after all the dieting, weird exercise programs, or Weight Watchers—all these different things that I had tried—I didn’t look any different,” she says. “I didn’t super care, but people were telling me that I was supposed to. So I was like, ‘I’m going to wash my hands of this.’ I just started trying to be healthy for myself and put all that energy into trying to achieve my dreams.”
The pursuit of those dreams first took Bryant to Chicago, where she attended Columbia College and became a member of the famed Second City improv group (Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert are also alumni). The change of scenery—Bryant grew up in Phoenix, Arizona—did wonders for her, both personally and professionally.
“I went to a sporty high school with a lot of very thin, very athletic girls. I always felt like, ‘I don’t fit in, and I should, and that’s what matters,'” she says. “Then I went to Chicago and met these girls who were big, like I was, and fashionable and had boyfriends. They didn’t seem encumbered by their own thinking of themselves. I remember being like, ‘Well, I want to be like them.’ That was a big game-changer for me.”
Not everyone in Chicago was enlightened, of course. Bryant says the first few talent agents she met had limited ideas about where her career could go. “They were basically like, ‘Look, you know, there’s not a lot of roles for your type,'” she says. “At the time, I think I was 21 or 22, they would send me out for mom parts in, like, Walmart commercials where it was like, ‘This is a mom with three kids.’ I think because of my body type they were like, ‘Oh, she’s a mom,’ which is wild.”
You’d think making the first move would come easy to Serena Williams, one of the most successful athletes of all time. But even with all her accomplishments, the tennis legend admits that advocating for herself is sometimes difficult.
“I mean, 80 percent [to] 90 percent of the time, I feel insecure about making the first move,” Williams tells Glamour in an interview for her new campaign with Bumble, “The Ball Is in Her Court,” which encourages women to do just that: make the first move. “[Women have] kind of been trained to feel like we shouldn’t make the first move, whether it’s in love or whether it’s asking for a promotion or asking to be in the forefront. But now we’re retraining our minds and saying it’s OK to make the first move.”
Bumble will run a 30-second spot for “The Ball Is in Her Court” during the first quarter of the Super Bowl on Sunday night. It focuses on Williams’ tennis career, which started because she put herself in the game. “If I waited to be invited in, I never would’ve stood out,” she says in the spot over a montage of her tennis clips . “If I waited for change to happen, I never would’ve made a difference.”
This partnership is a dream come true for Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who tells us an early vision board for the company included Williams. “At the beginning of Bumble, everyone said, ‘Women don’t make the first move. Why would you ever start a company that would encourage women to speak first? That’s not how nature works,'” Wolfe Herd tells Glamour. “And so, in an effort to try to normalize that, I went to the tennis court, and I texted our very early team and said, ‘If we work really, really hard and prove that the ball is always in our court on Bumble, maybe one day Serena would want to attach herself and be a partner with us.'”
Wolfe Herd’s and Williams’ successes didn’t come without setbacks, though. In fact, that’s a key takeaway from this campaign: Women shouldn’t be afraid of the outcome when making the first move. Just do it. Both Wolfe Herd and Williams embrace this mind-set.
“Failure’s great,” Williams says. “I don’t like the word failure because I feel like it should mean try. It just didn’t work out this time, but it’ll work out next time. When I first started my fashion brand—I’ve been doing it for years—and the first times it wasn’t successful. And now we’re making big moves.”
Adds Wolfe Herd, “There’s so much power in having the opportunity to fail. I think [failure] has a really bad rap sometimes, because the fact that you got out there and tried something and did something—that’s better than never doing anything at all, right?”
So how does Williams bounce back? Or even just motivate herself on an off day, the kind of morning when it’s hard to get out of bed? She remembers why she stepped out on a tennis court in the first place. “In my career, in particular, the thing that drives me is my desire to be the best and my desire to win,” she says. “And I know I’m not gonna do it in bed.”
Williams also hopes to impart this “make the first move” mentality on her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian, Jr. “Everything Bumble is doing is not only good for me, but it’s just good for women in general and the population,” she says. “It’s teaching a new generation of women. It’s retraining a new generation, and my daughter is a part of that. So I’m excited to show her this campaign one day, to show her the messaging, to show her the app, and show her how she can do so many different things. And she can tell her friends. It’s literally retraining the new generation. It’s literally what we’re doing here—and it’s huge.”
Ever since The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up hit bookstores in the U.S. in 2014, Marie Kondo has become a cultural phenom, her tactics shaping the way Americans evaluate their possessions and their hoarding habits. But when I first picked up Kondo’s tiny green hardcover, I thought, I’m a relatively organized person. What could I possibly learn from this book?
As it turns out: a lot—just not about my closet.
Kondo imagined her book would strike a chord with hoarders of past things, but it made me realize I was hoarding past loves. I’m a girl who’s spent more than a decade unconsciously filing away every failed relationship in the small chance that maybe one day the stars would align, I’d bump into an ex at a coffee shop, and we’d ride off into the sunset (or more realistically, on the R train) in some deleted scene from Love Actually. But as I turned the pages of Kondo’s book, I realized that holding on to these ghosts of boyfriends past was doing more harm than good—assembling a warped romantic matrix in my brain that was becoming increasingly difficult to escape. So as I finished the last chapter, knee-deep in my third bowl of Phish Food, I knew there was only one thing left to do.
I had to Marie Kondo my love life.
The KonMari method is based in the idea that you should surround yourself only with items that bring you joy; anything that doesn’t, you chuck. That’s not to say the process is an easy one. Anyone who’s watched Netflix’s Tidying Up With Marie Kondo or tried the KonMari method will tell you: Tossing something that once held sentimental value is hard. “It is human nature to resist throwing something away even when we know that we should,” Kondo explains, as if trying to make us all feel better about that feeling of inertia. “When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life. You’ll be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role.” Taking a long, hard look at my love life, it was clear just how many of my past relationships had “already fulfilled their role.” So I started adapting Kondo’s methods to help me emotionally declutter and achieve the ultimate dating nirvana.
Lesson one: Know when to let go. The first rule of the KonMari method is worth reiterating: If something brings you joy, keep it. If not, out it goes. She argues that when we can’t get rid of something, there are two reasons—“an attachment to the past or a fear for the future,” she writes. “If you come across something that does not spark joy but that you just can’t bring yourself to throw away, stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘Am I having trouble getting rid of this because of an attachment to the past or because of a fear for the future?’…. As you do so, you’ll begin to see…a pattern that falls into one of three categories: attachment to the past, desire for stability in the future, or a combination of both.” This hit me like a slap in the face. I‘ve done my fair share of holding on to a relationship simply because I was afraid to let go—or more frankly, afraid of the instability that would bring. I stayed with my college boyfriend after he’d cheated on me. I let a fling in my midtwenties drag on for years because he made me feel loved and important. I’m not proud to admit any of that, but it’s true. For much of my adult life, I got into the nasty habit of romanticizing my relationships, looking at them through rose-colored glasses until they morphed into flowery semblances of the truth. Like a fairy tale.
There’s a scene in the film (500) Days of Summer when a hopelessly in-love Joseph Gordon-Levitt swings by a party his crush is throwing and from there, a split screen shows two ways the next scene plays out—one titled “perception,” the other “reality.” (Spoiler: He gets the girl in one; in the other, he spends the entire party sulking in a corner.) So often I’d analyze my relationships through the lens of hopeful idealism, seeing what I wanted to see, not what was there. But just as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character ultimately learns, perception isn’t reality. Falling in love with the idea of someone isn’t the same as falling in love with someone, and it certainly doesn’t save you from heartbreak. If they don’t genuinely bring you joy, cut them loose.
Lesson two: Nostalgia is a bitch. In the past, the second any of my relationships ended or a Bumble date stopped messaging me back, my mind would go into hyperdrive, pulling every cheesy romantic memory into a sappy Hallmark highlight reel. When my last boyfriend and I broke up, I spent hours poring over old texts and Facebook messages, reliving our best moments in a desperate attempt to see when the cracks first started forming. (Tip: Don’t do this. It will only land you in a hopeless loop of DM convos with your lurking ex at 2:00 A.M. Not a place you want to be.) Kondo says feelings of nostalgia can and will derail the decluttering progress. Realize, instead, that your items (or in this case, relationships) have a shelf life. They brought you joy at one point, but they don’t anymore. So move on. And start getting friendly with the Instagram “block” button while you’re at it.
Lesson three: Trust your intuition. Kondo explains that judgment can be either intuitive or rational, and surprisingly, it’s our rational side that tends to make it impossible for us to let go. “Although intuitively we know that an object has no attraction for us,” she says, “our reason raises all kinds of arguments for not discarding it, such as ‘I might need it later’ or ‘It’s a waste to get rid of it.’” Going with my gut helped me weed out the relationships I instinctively knew weren’t going anywhere. Like that Hinge date who loved The Lumineers. (Just because he knows all the words to “Ophelia” does not necessarily make him The One; they have a very large fan base.) Doing this allows you to tap into a deeper understanding of who you are and what you want so you can find a partner that fulfills you—and feel more confident in your partnership once you do.
Lesson four: Practice gratitude and empathy. As odd as it sounds, Kondo wants you to consider your items’ “feelings” as you move through the tidying process. Before tossing any of your belongings, you must thank them for their service. On the flip side, if you’re keeping them, be considerate of how and where they’re kept in your home. This conscious organization supposedly leaves you with a greater sense of peace. The same goes for relationships. If you want a partner to have a permanent home in your life, act like it. If they bring you joy, tell them. It’s straightforward, really: Treat your person with the respect and care you want them to give you. If you’re letting them go, be grateful for what you learned from the relationship and tactfully move on.
Lesson five: Accept the pain. A key aspect of the KonMari method is making conscious decisions about who and what surrounds you. But being honest with yourself about how you acquire things—or relationships—can be both humbling and embarrassing. Says Kondo, “It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.” It’s not easy to look at yourself critically or to acknowledge your flaws. Going through this dating decluttering process, I realized that fear had been a major catalyst for so many of the decisions I’d made. He’s losing interest? Break up with him first. Things going well? Pull away to see if he’ll hang on. My fear of abandonment was so great that I overcompensated by trying to control the uncontrollable. But it was only when I started recognizing these patterns that I was able to start practicing healthier ones, like communicating openly and honestly about whether my trust was being tested, whether the relationship was moving at the right pace, and whether, at the end of the day, I felt valued and appreciated.
Applying Kondo’s words to my love life felt a lot like an emotional gut renovation. My past relationships had, in one way or another, kept me locked in a damaging romantic continuum where my focus was on what could be rather than what was there, right in front of me, in the day to day. Letting go of the people who didn’t bring me joy allowed me to make room for the things and the people who do. Today dating feels easier, largely because I’m grateful: grateful for what I’ve had in the past, grateful for what I have now, grateful for what’s to come. Marie Kondo’s methods can sound kooky. But I challenge you to rid your romantic closet of all your what-ifs so you’re left only with what is—what is bringing you joy.
One of the most poignant moments in Netflix’s new documentary about the Fyre Festival is when Maryann Rolle, owner of the Exuma Point Resort, reveals she drained her savings to pay employees who prepared food for the now infamous event.
“I had 10 persons working directly with me just preparing food all day and all night, 24 hours,” Rolle says toward the end of the documentary. “I had to literally pay all those people. I am here as a Bahamian, and they stand in my face every day. I went through about $50,000 of my savings that I could have had for a rainy day. They just wiped it out and never looked back. Personally, I don’t even like to talk about the Fyre Festival. Just take it away and let me start a new beginning, ’cause they really hurt me. I am really hurt from that.”
Rolle is just one of many people affected by the Fyre Festival, which was founded by Billy McFarland and promised attendees a luxurious weekend in the Bahamas filled with music. Of course, this didn’t happen: Nothing originally advertised about the Fyre Festival came to fruition. There were no fancy accommodations or delicious food or Instagram models running around. It was all, essentially, a scam—and according to Netflix’s doc, many of the local Bahamians who worked on the festival were never compensated. This included Rolle.
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But it looks like she’s finally receiving some justice. Rolle started a GoFundMe on January 14 seeking $123,000 to dig herself out of the hole caused by Fyre Fest—and people are stepping up to help. So far, Rolle has raised over $166,000 from more than 5,000 donors.
“As I make this plea, it’s hard to believe and embarrassing to admit that I was not paid…I was left in a big hole,” Rolle wrote in her GoFundMe post. “My life was changed forever, and my credit was ruined by Fyre Fest. My only resource today is to appeal for help.”
Netflix’s documentary clearly had an effect on people. “Just watched the Fyre Festival doc and I’ve also been to Exuma. As soon as I heard your story of spending $50k of your own money, I knew I wanted to donate somewhere,” one person wrote on the GoFundMe page. “My heart goes out to Maryann. I hope she can rebuild and put the horrible things behind her,” posted another.
If this doesn’t restore your faith in humanity, what will?
Judith Light deserves to sit on a throne, but when I walk in to the room where she’s doing press for her new Lifetime movie, Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story, she is sitting on the equivalent of a foot rest. (With perfect posture, no less.) It’s the middle of January and Light has come down with a winter bug, and the foot rest is perfectly aligned with a nearby space heater. I tell her I’m happy to move somewhere more comfortable for her, but she swears she’s fine. She just wants me to be good. Down to earth, gracious, no frills—yep, Judith Light is an icon.
Light first came to mainstream attention in the late ’70s, when she played Karen Wolek on the ABC soap One Life to Live and won two Daytime Emmys. Then came the hit ’80s sitcom Who’s the Boss?, which she says is the role fans still want to talk to her about the most. As a career woman and single parent to a young son, her character was a mom not often seen on TV, while Tony Danza’s Tony Micelli took on the role of den mother/housekeeper.
In the years since, Light has won critical acclaim for every role she’s played, whether it’s Claire Meade on Ugly Betty or Shelly Pfefferman on Transparent. She’s been living her best life (and killing the red carpet game) as she makes the award circuit rounds with her fellow cast members from Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. And now, she embarks on her latest role as barbaric head nurse Matron Grady in Lifetime’s first of several true crime movies based on real women.
Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story introduces viewers to investigative reporter Nellie Bly (played by Christina Ricci) as she goes on a mission to expose the horrible treatment of patients at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum. While undercover as a patient, Bly encounters Light’s Grady. “[Nellie Bly] was a very courageous and inspirational woman who got herself committed to do a story, but she almost didn’t get out,” Light says. “A lot of people don’t know Nellie’s story, so that was part of the reason I wanted to do the film.” The other reason was that she wanted to continue to shed light on mental health. “We need to keep having an ongoing, consistent dialogue in this country about mental health. It’s really important for us to have that conversation.”
Mental health is just one of the many social issues that Light is passionate about. Here, she opens up about the work being done with Time’s Up, the biggest difference she’s noticed at award shows, and more.
PHOTO: Michelle Faye Fraser/Lifetime
Judith Light in Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story
Glamour: You’ve played such extraordinary characters throughout your career, some more dark than others. How do you let that go once you’ve immersed yourself in that mindset for so long?
Judith Light: You just stop and let it go. It’s like, “Don’t indulge yourself in this.” There’s only been one time when I had difficulty letting something go many, many years ago, but that was because something was happening in my life and it was coloring the situation. But [otherwise] it’s like, just stop, you’re a character. You don’t need to drag that around in your life.
Please tell me that the character in question was not Angela Bower from Who’s the Boss? [Laughs].
JL: No, no. [Laughs] I loved that role. And a lot of people [want the show to come back]. A lot of people do.
She flipped professional and personal norms of being a single mom in the ’80s.
JL: No question. That was ABC [who deserves the credit]. I didn’t know what that show could do [at the time]. It isn’t until now that I have these young women come up to me and say, “Angela was my role model. I knew I could do something in the world because Angela was doing something in the world.” It’s very powerful for me to see all these young women seeing life in this way. I’m very appreciative.
Is there a role you’ve yet to play that you’d love to sink your teeth into?
JL: I cannot at this moment think of anything, and I’ll tell you why that is: If I had thought about what my career should be and what I would get, I couldn’t have come up with the things that have been as glorious as the ones I’ve gotten.
Do you get anxious when you take on roles?
JL: Such a good question. Always. I think, have I done enough work? Is it going to speak to people? Will it work? How will it be? How can I make it better? I want to make sure people are responding to it. And people have really responded to me in a way that I’m so grateful for it and don’t take any of it for granted.
I have a very dear friend by the name of Mary Fisher; you may not have heard of her, but she was the first woman at the Republican National Convention in 1992 to say “I am the face of AIDS.” Mary and I have remained friends [since then]. She had gotten AIDS from her husband. He’s passed on, and she’s still alive. I would always ask Mary, “What do you say before you go make a speech? What is your devotion?” And she said, “I always say, ‘Let me say this the way they need to hear it.’” That’s my devotion.
PHOTO: Kevork Djansezian/NBC
Judith Light at the 2019 Golden Globes
You were just at the Golden Globes and heard some incredible women say powerful things in their speeches. What in particular is resonating with you right now?
JL: Yes, there’s no question. We can’t forget who our sisters were who began this work, that have been unacknowledged, shoved to the side…[our] culture has not allowed for this kind of flourishing, and I am in this moment with all of my sisters in the flourishing of who we all are. All of a sudden at these award shows it’s like there’s no competition. [Everyone is] honored to be a part of it and so happy for you…and really meaning it. [They’re] really saying, “I have seen how the culture has affected the way I have related to you as my friend and my sister and the person who I have great regard for, and now I want to let you know that I am absolutely here for you.” You can see it happening absolutely everywhere. It’s really thrilling.
There’s a shift that’s happening, no doubt.
JL: In the early days of the AIDS pandemic, people were going, “What’s going on? Why are people treating other people this way?” What we saw was that it wasn’t just about AIDS or HIV, it was that homophobia lived in the culture. That’s partly why Ryan Murphy wanted to do the story of Gianni Versace. This homophobia that lives within the culture needs to be addressed and spoken to, so when that happened everybody woke up to the fact that this was happening, that it had always been there. I think the same is true with Time’s Up. It’s like, that’s right, you don’t get to do that anymore.
People who are feeling that women are taking something away from them…we’re not taking anything away from anybody. We are saying we are here. Many people don’t feel that they live in an abundance mentality. They live in a scarcity mentality. So if you live in a scarcity mentality, you can never transform yourself. The universe is either a friendly place or an unfriendly place for you. When you realize you can actually make a difference, that’s when everything begins to shift. That’s what I feel is one of the things that’s happening…there’s a shift in the wind. Something’s happening that is very different.
Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story, stars Christina Ricci, Judith Light, and Josh Bowman, and premieres on Lifetime this Saturday, January 19.
