Megan Fox didn’t hold back about the darkest moments of her life in her new poetry book, Pretty Boys Are Poisonous.
“Some of it is definitely a metaphor,” Fox, 37, told Good Morning America in a Tuesday, November 7, interview when asked whether the book is a figurative interpretation of her experience in Hollywood. “None of it is what I would call fictional. Those are real life experiences that I had.”
While fans will recognize references to Fox’s fiancé, Machine Gun Kelly, in some of the poems, other entries are about past romances that Fox says she plans to keep to herself.
“This is not an exposé that I wrote, or a memoir,” she said on GMA. “But throughout my life, I have been in at least one physically abusive relationship and several psychologically very abusive relationships. … I shared energy with, I guess we could say, [people] who were horrific people and also very famous, very famous people, but no one knows that I was involved with those people.”
In the poem “Oxycodone and Tequila,” Fox details an encounter with a “demon of wrath” who punished her for following his friend to the dinner table rather than waiting for him to lead her.
“You hold me down and perch on me like a demented bird,” she writes. “You spit on me and rub it across my face, smearing my makeup.”
Later in the poem, she says that the person hit her “again and again” and she recognized “the familiar taste of blood on my tongue.” The poem ends with the lines: “I don’t fall asleep / I lie awake and beg God to let me die.”
In another poem titled “F–ked-Up Fairy Tales,” Fox writes about the “prettiest boy” who’s also a “violent boy, full of rage and insecurities.”
“Your hands are so beautiful and strong,” she continues. “You use them to hurt me now. Delicate bruises splayed across my jaw / I wonder what you are thinking while I cry and beg you to stop.”
In a letter to readers at the beginning of the book, Fox said that she decided to write the book after an experience with an unnamed “idiot” broke her.
“And from me poured these poems featuring previously unspoken feelings of … isolation, torment, self-harm, desperation, longing, restlessness, rage and general anguish,” she wrote. “These are the experiences of many of us that I now give voice to in these poems. This book is for anyone who has given much more than they received, or for anyone who struggles to believe they deserve to be heard.”
Fox concluded by saying the book is also for herself, writing, “Because f–k. I deserve better.”
Pretty Boys Are Poisonous is available now wherever books are sold.
If you or someone you know are experiencing domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support.
