‘We’ offers women a self-care guidebook
Actress Gillian Anderson ( The X-Files, The Fall) and journalist/activist Jennifer Nadel have teamed up on a new book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere (Atria). It offers principles and techniques (meditating, journal-keeping) for empowering women in
Q How did the two of you as friends come together to write this book?
Jennifer and I have ANDERSON: known each other for about 10 years, and through that time we’ve come to realize that we have very similar tools and practices for dealing with life’s challenges. We decided we wanted to try and create a handbook for women that included nine principles which are universal values and tools that we have found helpful over the years.
And they’ve been distilled NADEL: from almost every religion and spiritual practice. They’ve been passed down, and we just have put them together in one place. They take the reader on a journey that starts with your relationship with yourself because often, in the way we live, we get very alienated. It ends with what we can all do to try and make the world we live in a little kinder.
Q Why do you think women need a book like We?
I know a lot of my ANDERSON: friends feel a huge amount of pressure in society today to have it all. We’re shown on posters that we should look this way, we’re told we should buy this, and if we do these things we will be more perfect. One of the most profoundly healing things that I’ve experienced is to admit to myself and other people that I don’t have it all and that I struggle and I find it really hard sometimes. Part of what We is about is about getting comfortable with ourselves just as we are. The level of self-harm is skyrocketing ... and so much of that is the pressures we feel that we have to be the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect coworker, and it’s liberating to learn ways to care for ourselves.
Q You
are both quite candid about personal and professional issues that the book’s principles have helped you cope with. What are some of those struggles?
One of the things I talk NADEL: about is suffering from burnout and depression. I was a network journalist in the U.K. I had a job that I absolutely loved, but I was also a single mother. I had two modes: I was either working or mothering. And one day I woke up and I just could not go on.
When I was working ANDERSON: on The X-Files, I went through about a year of daily panic attacks. And most of that was because I’d spent so much of my life up until that point running fullspeed ahead toward my career and had not dealt with a lot of stuff from my childhood. ... And I’ve also been very honest about my struggles with parenting. I’m so used to hearing that I have to be a particular kind of parent, that baking and cooking and all of those things are what real parenthood is for women. And I have struggled with noise control with two young boys and the day-to-day stresses. And I’m in a situation where I’m fortunate enough to be able to have a nanny, and even with the nanny I struggle. ... One of the things that has been really valuable to me is just trusting that I’m doing the best that I can.