Gillian Anderson, the film and TV actress, has co-written a book published this week entitled We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.
Anderson is best known for playing agent Dana Scully in the cult sci-fi TV drama The X-Files. Her new book, co-written with author and activist Jennifer Nadel, should have been called The Why Files.
I am struggling to understand why Anderson, 48, who has enjoyed something of an acting renaissance recently, starring in the serial killer TV series The Fall and an acclaimed revival of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire in New York and London, felt compelled, as she describes it in the introduction, “to guide the reader on a path of self-discovery and spiritual awakening.”
Anderson and Nadel’s manifesto is certainly an ambitious one. Their mission, which has also spawned a website Wewomeneverywhere.org promises to “be a guide and a source for inspiration. If you’re hurting, it will help you heal. If you’re lost, it will steer you home. If you’re searching for a purpose, it will gently lead you towards fulfillment.”
Naturally they are big on the journey. In this case “the journey for women is from me to WE.” Women will get there through living 9 Principles (Honesty, Acceptance, Courage, Trust, Humility, Peace, Love, Joy and Kindness). The book contains references to concepts such as “Acceptance Cups” and “Partner Specs” together with quotations from Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama and (most inspiringly) Emma Watson.
Far from empowering women, Anderson’s new movement shortchanges its followers by charging $25 for a collection of hackneyed truths and old quotes. While The X-Files had the memorable tag line, “The Truth is Out There”, when it comes to We, the truth is not so much out there but has been all to see in self-help and women’s health.
Of course the empowerment of female self-confidence and achieving gender parity are laudable aims but so is entertainment to the reader. With the exception of an all-too-brief passage in which Anderson gets angry at not achieving wage parity with her X-Files co-star David Duchovny (“it was insulting and disrespectful and sexist of the company that I’d helped to accumulate billions”), it’s not a case of We but We Know.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone and all that, but I’m not convinced that Gillian Anderson is ideally qualified to instruct others on how to lead a stress-free existence. Anderson has had two failed marriages and three children by two different men. You can be forgiven when it comes to the “Love” section to wonder if she has the right credentials to dispense any kind of advice.
The book contains some odd passages, even by the standards of the self-help genre. There’s an ode to masturbation. Anderson and Nadel write: “You don’t need a partner to have a healthy sex life. You can learn to self-pleasure so that your unmet sexual longings don’t drive you into the arms of someone you wouldn’t want to be with otherwise…whereas for men masturbation is taken as a given, for women there is still a stigma.
“Getting to know your own sexual needs and how to meet them will make you feel more of an agent and less of an object.” (Anderson’s current partner, The Crown writer Peter Morgan, will therefore be relieved to learn he is thanked in the acknowledgements.)
The book exemplifies how the spectacle of actor-as-activist is getting out of hand. What next? Michelle Pfeiffer writing about free speech in school because she played a teacher in Dangerous Minds? Halle Berry, who has made mostly thrillers, penning a treatise on trigger warnings?
There’s a particularly peculiar section entitled ”The Toxic Cs” which declares that “comparing, criticizing, complaining, controlling and competing … rob us of our peace of mind and set us apart from others”.
The notion that everyone should be positive all the time is not surprising coming from a seasoned actor who has had to cope with two decades of wall-t0-wall media coverage and negative reviews (including this one). But the need to not compare and compete will come as news to anyone living on planet earth. (And wasn’t Anderson, earlier in the book, comparing her salary to that of David Duchovny?)
We has good intentions but is a strikingly bad read. The only worthwhile journey to be made in connection with Anderson and Nadel’s book is the journey back to your bookshop, receipt in hand, to exchange it for something that might actually teach you something.
