Facing Madame X
An excerpt from the upcoming title Facing Madame X: The Tools for Women
This coming spring and summer, we are pleased to be bringing our readers a number of outstanding works. In April, we release Ross Barkan’s Colossus, a timely examination of the American identity in the age of performance and decay. In May, South, a “searing” debut novel from a New York City playwright. In June, Emmalea Russo’s The Moon Papers, a follow-up from her debut, Vivienne, as well as the four-volume novel, A Table for Fortune, by the National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann.
We are excited, chuffed even, to bring you these titles, and we already have much more to look forward to in the coming year.
But before all that, we are delighted to present Facing Madame X: The Tools for Women by Jamie Rose, a longtime student of her mentor, Phil Stutz, the coauthor of the bestselling self-help book The Tools and subject of Jonah Hill’s Netflix documentary, Stutz. Jamie Rose made her own way from student to master and has since been coaching and teaching The Tools far and wide.
In Facing Madame X, Rose fills a needed gap, presenting The Tools to a female audience through a blend of self-help and memoir, every page of which will make you laugh. Jamie’s life is an open book, which you’ll learn, and you’ll also learn how to better your own life through her stories as you encounter The Tools through a fresh, feminine lens.
Facing Madame X: The Tools for Women is available March 3, 2026, and she has events booked in California at Book Soup in West Hollywood on March 3 and Godmothers Bookstore in Summerland on March 7. For more information, visit here website here.
“Jamie Rose does something remarkable in FACING MADAME X. She not only takes the idea of ‘The Tools,’ originally evolved by her mentor and partner Dr. Phil Stutz, and conceptualizes them for women and the female hero’s journey . . . but she delivers a helluva brave and compelling memoir of her own up-and-down life as well.”
—Steven Pressfield, bestselling author of The War of Art
“Facing Madame X is both an indispensable tool kit for living with intention, and a gorgeous memoir of lived-wisdom. Jamie Rose breaks our hearts while teaching us how to mend our own.”
—Annabelle Gurwitch, New York Times bestselling author of The End of My Life is Killing Me
An excerpt from Facing Madame X: The Tools for Women,
Chapter 2—The Joy of Anger
“Smile!” he shouted as I passed him on the street.
Not only did I not obey his command, but I wanted to throttle him. I fantasized about grabbing the guy by the collar and whispering, “I will—after you die.” Instead, I ignored him, and walked on by, as the Bacharach song goes. But anger seethed within.
We are born in a storm of rage. Expelled from the warmth and safety of the womb, we choke our first breaths between furious sobs that cry out I AM HERE! I EXIST!
I’m alive.
Men are encouraged to express their anger—or should I say allowed—because it’s part of their masculine “right,” even an indicator of leadership and strength. But women are taught to suppress their rage. We’re told that anger is ugly and unfeminine. We’ve been socialized to be polite, reserved, and “ladylike”—to cross our legs and quiet our voices. When we express rage, we’re indicted as hormonal, psycho bitches.
Nasty women.
So we push our anger down. But it doesn’t go away. Instead, it becomes distorted. In its corrupted form, anger is destructive. It can express itself in violence, resentfulness, judgmentalism, isolation, or self-harm. It dismantles relationships. The perversion and suppression of anger can lead to a host of physical issues such as headaches, digestive problems, anxiety and depression, even strokes and heart attacks.
In the film Carrie, a shy high school girl is controlled by her fanatically religious mother and bullied by fellow high school students. In the movie’s climactic scene, her classmates trick Carrie into believing she’s been voted homecoming queen. After being crowned, she stands onstage, overcome with happiness—when suddenly a pail of pig blood is dumped on her head in front of the shocked, ecstatic student body. In that moment of nuclear humiliation, her face dripping with blood, Carrie (who has unexplored telekinetic powers) shifts from debilitating shame to all-consuming rage. She takes violent revenge on her tormentors, resulting in their deaths, and eventually her own. Within her is a primal, mythic rage, a vital, animalistic force. If she had been organically connected to that anger, it might have become a driving force behind personal expression and ultimate independence. But it was suppressed. Instead of being a vital asset, it became ugly, pernicious, and suicidal.
One could say that vengeful Carrie is a metaphor for the collective fury generated by thousands of years of the oppression of women’s power. In America, as recently as 1974—the year the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed—women weren’t allowed to get credit cards or loans without male cosigners. As we know all too well, such injustices are still going strong. Today, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and in Iran, under an increasingly authoritarian regime, women can be imprisoned or even murdered by showing their faces or speaking in public. Worldwide, women are trained, by forces brutal or subtle, to disconnect from their power and their rage.
Yet, anger is an essential aspect of human expression. In its pure, undistorted form, the emotion is part of one’s birthright, a vital expression of one’s unique, cosmic personhood. Used with intention, rage is an inextinguishable force that can be a catalyst for personal creativity and growth. But first, one needs to learn how to rage against the machine—the machine of a patriarchal culture that tries, at any and all cost, to erase us.
THE TOOL: Cosmic Rage
Close your eyes. Picture yourself inside a circle. This is the I AM space. In it, you feel strong, and powerful. You stand firmly in your unique selfhood.
Outside your I AM circle, surrounding you 360°, is another circle. In this circle, imagine Madame X shouting out whatever specific weapons she uses against you—you’re stupid, lazy, too old, too opinionated, untalented, fat, unproductive, et fucking cetera. You can also imagine specific people who put you down in the past (family members, exes, frenemies), each attacking you in Madame X’s voice.
Generate a feeling of rage inside your body—make it as intense as you can. Then, like the defensive quills of a porcupine, shoot the rage out from your body in every direction. At the same time, shout (in your mind, or out loud), “Fuck you! I AM!” or “Get away from me! I AM!”
The force of your rage pushes Madame X away and gives you space to fully express your individual voice. You feel powerful and free.
Important note: never direct Cosmic Rage at an actual person—always direct it at the MX force coming through them. Do this by imagining a kind of toxic aura surrounding that person. Direct the rage force at that aura.
The emotion invoked by Cosmic Rage isn’t anger on a human scale. It isn’t a variation of what we feel when we’re cut off in traffic or stub a toe—it’s anger on a cosmic level. It’s the rage of the Old Testament God who commanded, “Let There Be Light.” It’s the rage of the Hindu goddess Durga, who uses her awesome wrath to combat evil and empower life. This rage is positive, creationary, and expanding. I AM is a soul statement and demand, one that declares our individuality and sovereign right to exist in all our ferocious glory.
*
My client was afraid of her boss.
He wasn’t unkind but had a harsh style that Rebecca was intimidated by. She respected him and wanted his approval; as a result, she was hypersensitive to his moods. Any time she interacted with him, even through email, she felt as if she were walking on eggshells.
Rebecca grew up with a demanding and critical father. When she got good grades, he criticized the way she dressed. He thrilled in putting down her choice of friends. No matter how hard she tried, Rebecca always fell short in the eyes of that powerful man. He died when she was thirty-five. Ten years later, she was still replaying her childhood dynamic.
The past controlled Rebecca’s present. Her sense of self was completely dependent on the outside world. The reactions and opinions of others jostled her self-worth like the metal balls in the pinball machine that her father lovingly restored and played incessantly in the garage.
Intuitively, I knew that Rebecca’s relationship with her boss was a gift. I needed her to understand—to believe—that he was providing her with an opportunity to be initiated into the world of adults. It was essential that she used her fear as a portal to maturity. If she could learn to anchor her selfhood in his presence, she would gain a superpower. She could break free of those childhood insecurities and step into the full, dynamic potency of adulthood.
I encouraged Rebecca to do the Cosmic Rage tool as a preventive. Before any interaction with her boss (in-person meetings, phone calls, emails, or even if she was simply thinking about him), she was to work the Tool. I told her to close her eyes and place herself in the I AM circle, then imagine herself surrounded by a ring of duplicate bosses. I told her to visualize the clones, all broadcasting her worst fears. You’re not working hard enough! Why can’t you solve this problem? You’re going to be fired! Rebecca blasted out her cosmic-level rage to the Circle. Remember, the rage isn’t directed at her actual boss, it’s directed at the X-force working through him.
The Tool made her feel like she was in an impenetrable fortress, protected from the psychic bombardments of her enemy—Madame X. Within this I AM space, she could detach from the negative story of her past and live in the reality of the present. She soon realized that what she had previously experienced as personal criticism wasn’t that at all; it was simply the boss’s blunt, no-nonsense style. He was good at his job and expected his team to be the same. Rebecca understood that he wouldn’t have hired her in the first place if he had doubted what she had to offer. Once she stopped wasting time replaying hurt feelings and imagined shortcomings, her confidence and creativity soared. She reclaimed that original energy and became boldly innovative. Not only did her relationship with her boss improve, but he became her fiercest ally. Who was the boss now? (A year later, she was. Literally.)
The Tool couldn’t change the trauma of her past but it freed her from its hold on the present.
Jamie Rose is an author, teacher, and coach whose career began with a celebrated four decades as an actress in film and television. Today, she brings the same passion and intensity that defined her acting career to her true calling: guiding others through the transformative work of legendary psychiatrist Phil Stutz, the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Tools® and subject of Jonah Hill’s Netflix documentary Stutz.
Personally mentored by Stutz for more than thirty-five years, Jamie has mastered and taught his methods to countless individuals seeking to break through fear, reclaim inner strength, and take meaningful action.
“By weaving raw memoir with sharp psychological insight, Jamie Rose translates the spirit of Phil Stutz’s work into the daily reality of women’s lives—the pressures, the silencing, the relentless internal (and external) policing. Facing Madame X is a powerful guide to reclaiming the inner authority we were never meant to lose.”
—Elise Loehnan, New York Times bestselling author of On Our Best Behavior
“Jamie Rose has a reverence for this work. She doesn’t just know all the Tools; she is someone who has been through hell and used them to come through to the other side. Her willingness to tap into forces inside and outside herself make her unstoppable, and will allow her to help many, many other women be unstoppable as well.”
—Phil Stutz, co-author of the New York Times bestsellers The Tools and Coming Alive, subject of the Netflix documentary, Stutz
“Jamie Rose is a rare gem of a person. Very few people have her depth of experience with The Tools. Her ability to translate this work—especially through a feminine lens—makes Facing Madame X both groundbreaking and essential. This is a book that everyone should read.”
—Barry Michels, co-author of the New York Times bestsellers The Tools and Coming Alive
“In Facing Madame X, Jamie Rose gives women a fiercely compassionate roadmap for reclaiming their power from the inner forces that hold them back. With striking honesty and vivid storytelling, she exposes the voice that tells us we are too much, not enough, or too late, and offers tools that are both spiritually resonant and deeply practical. Rose’s insights are sharp, generous, and rooted in real experience. This book shows women how to confront self-doubt, rise with clarity, and trust the life-force within them. It is a powerful and needed companion for anyone ready to step into her fullest expression.”
—Claire Bidwell Smith, therapist and author of Conscious Grieving
“If you want to learn about unlocking courage, fostering creativity, and creating genuine change, then Jamie Rose is your person! Her new book offers a powerful roadmap for growth, translating the timeless principles of Phil Stutz into practical, deeply human guidance that resonates long after the last page.”
—Desiree Gruber, executive Producer of Project Runway, founder and CEO of Full Picture Productions
“Facing Madame X is a field guide to overcoming, a meditation on the shadows that walk with us, and an acknowledgement of the unique ways we self-sabotage. I left the pages of this book empowered and with a clearer vision of my future and what stands in the way.”
—Natashia Deón, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Perishing and Grace
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