Gillian Anderson shares her favourite books written by female authors
While younger people might know Gillian Anderson best as Jean Milburn in the hit Netflix series Sex Education, the actor is perhaps better recognised as FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. The show provided Anderson with her breakthrough role, and the character led many young women to pursue careers in science or medicine.
Anderson told Stylist that she took on the role because “for the first time in a long time, the script involved a strong, independent, intelligent woman as a lead character.” Throughout her career, the actor has advocated for positive representations of women as well as engaging in plenty of feminist activism and charity work.
With her role in Sex Education, Anderson’s character plays a vital part in removing stigmas around female sexuality and taboos, something she has done in her real life, too. In early 2023, she announced that she was compiling a book of female sexual fantasies called Dear Gillian, which doesn’t seem far from what Jean Milburn would do.
Anderson appeared on the The Women’s Prize Podcast to discuss some of her favourite books, starting with Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, penned by female writers. Written in 1973, the book comprises different fantasies in an act of challenging preconceived notions of female sexuality.
The actor describes the book as “quite shocking,” although “not necessarily in the way that you’d expect. The level of intimacy and honesty from the women who were interviewed is just completely extraordinary”.
She also selected Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, describing it as “unlike anything I’d ever read before. It’s narrative journalism. It had that kind of curious, incisive journalistic perspective”.
Anderson added: “So it’s about these three women, but it’s really about who we are, as women. It asked big, profound questions about sexual power, politics, desire. It covers quite a lot when you dig down into it.”
Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age is another favourite of Anderson’s, following a black woman wrongly accused of kidnapping a white child. “I remember tearing through this book. Just desperate to know what was gonna happen and how any of these impossibly awkward situations are going to be resolved,” Anderson explained.
Moreover, her list contains Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, which mixes humour with a poignant exploration of mental illness. “It’s one of those rare books that kind of makes you cackle with laughter one moment and then rips you off the next moment and utterly destroys and devastates you. I think that’s what you want when you go to fiction. At least that’s what I want.”
Finally, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn which charts the author’s journey across the South West Coast with her husband after they learn he is terminally ill. Anderson explains that “it takes them through the journey of letting go of the resentment of being forced to give up their life that they had built everything, that they had an attachment to that we as human beings are attached to.”
Gillian Anderson’s favourite books:
- My Secret Garden – Nancy Friday
- Three Women – Lisa Taddeo
- Such a Fun Age – Kiley Reid
- Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason
- The Salt Path – Raynor Wimm
