She Is Not Your Rehab

Description

Title: She Is Not Your Rehab: One Man’s Journey to Healing and the Global Anti-Violence Movement He Inspired
Author: Matt Brown (Mataio Faafetai Malietoa Brown MNZM) with Sarah Brown MNZM
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2021
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good — secondhand thumbed copy

Description:

Cycles of family violence repeat across generations — until someone decides they are the one who stops it. That decision, and everything it costs and requires, is what She Is Not Your Rehab is about.

Mataio (Matt) Brown is a Christchurch barber of Samoan descent who transformed his shop, My Fathers Barbers, into something the city hadn’t seen before: a space where men could sit in the chair and actually talk. About what happened to them. About what they’d done. About the shame they’d been carrying since childhood. Matt is a survivor of family violence and childhood sexual abuse, and he shares his own story alongside those of his clients — men who found the barbershop and, through it, found a way to begin healing.

The movement he and his wife Sarah built from that barbershop — She Is Not Your Rehab — is now global. The book draws on a wide range of thinkers (bell hooks, Brené Brown, Gabor Maté, Maya Angelou) while staying grounded in lived experience and the specific reality of Aotearoa New Zealand. Sarah Brown (Ngāpuhi/Te Rarawa), co-author and co-founder, brings her own voice to the work — and it’s formidable. The Spinoff’s reviewer called it “a roadmap for the hard work of healing.”

Since publication, 9,350 copies have been donated to NZ men’s prisons. Both Matt and Sarah were awarded the MNZM in 2022 for their contribution to the prevention of family violence. Marama Davidson, former Minister for Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence, called it “a very personal and honest story of hurt, healing and hope… Matt’s book is phenomenal.”

Why We Stock It:

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the OECD, and this book is one of the most direct, humane, and community-rooted responses to that reality that NZ publishing has produced. The barbershop as healing space; the man who decided the cycle stopped with him — this is exactly the kind of NZ story the Gravy exists to amplify.