Actress Gina Gershon has had anything but a conventional career. Her credits range from Showgirls and Bound, to Broadway's Cabaret and performances at Carnegie Hall. She's also a musician and an author thrice over, first with the young adult novel Camp Creepy Time, and an earlier memoir about her lost cat, In Search of Cleo: How I Found My Pussy and Lost My Mind.
Her new book, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs, published this month by Akashic Books, is a memoir-in-stories drawn from Gershon's decades navigating Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, and the minefield of being a woman with strong opinions in an industry full of people who'd prefer she didn't.
It is frank, funny, and occasionally alarming, and serves as an unintentional self-help manual informed by the personal philosophy Gershon developed by dealing with her cats. She spoke with PW about honing her survival instincts and why she wants everyone, regardless of gender, to take on the mantle of alphapussy.
Let's start with that title. What is an alphapussy?
It came from watching my male cats. I made up this game where I would stare at them, not break eye contact, feel very confident and present—and they would look away. I became the alphapussy. And then I realized it worked on human beings as well. It's about not being a victim, about not being pushed around. Not being bullied. Standing on your own two feet, having agency and sovereignty over your life, and being true to who you are.
Once I really latched on to that, I realized it was just a word I'd made up that made sense to me. When I'd tell people, they'd be like, "What are you talking about?" But it stuck. It's strong. I like it as a philosophy.
You've written two previous books. How did this one come about?
I was in lockdown, telling my agents stories about Showgirls one night—which I don't really talk about that much. The next day I had a book deal. It started leaning into Showgirls, into Bound, into more Hollywood stuff. I said, I don't really want to write that book. A moment of bad behavior that's more titillation than edification—I hate that. So I said, don't send this out, let me ponder it. Meanwhile, I was doing a lot of therapy, my mom wasn't well, and I started asking her questions. I call it a percolation period. Once you open your mind up to a certain channel, ideas start coming. It becomes almost like a waking dream, and all of a sudden a lot of memories started coming up.
How has being an actress helped with your writing?
When I would sit down to write, I'd do my sense-memory work—I'd really see the whole scene, and then I'd just try to write it down exactly as I saw it. What I found interesting was that when I read some of these memories back, they seem like funny stories. But when I really dove into them, they didn't feel funny at the time—they felt really stressful. I was in survival mode. I was dealing with a lot of toxic and predatory people growing up in the Valley, and on an instinctual level I got myself out of trouble. But looking back, I thought: I was not made this way, I had to learn how to be this way.
The mythology of the San Fernando Valley looms large in the book. People associate it with Clueless or Paul Thomas Anderson films—but somehow, your Valley is menacing.
There are so many tragic stories—Dorothy Stratten [a model and actress who was murdered in the 1980s] comes to mind—but what was interesting for me, going back, was that at the time I didn't register how dark it was. I was just surviving it. You had a lot more freedom as a kid back then—no helicopter parents, no one really watching. It was "be home before six." So you learned to identify predators on an instinctual level; you developed an antenna. Mine was pretty finely tuned by the time I got to Hollywood, which is probably the only reason I came out of it okay.
So who is the alphapussy philosophy actually for?
It's for anyone who feels like someone is trying to push them off their center, overtake them, make them feel something they shouldn't be feeling—be calm, be confident, speak your truth, and don't look away. It's for everyone. I want everyone to be an alphapussy. I also know that is not always possible, that there are people who haven't had the luck, the instincts, or the support system I was fortunate enough to have. And sometimes, no, you really can't just alphapussy your way out of everything.
You also advise people to get to know their parents.
It really is the only advice I give, and I give it to anyone: find out who your parents were. Whatever your relationship with them, figure out who they were—and who their parents were to them—because it'll unlock a lot of answers. I started asking my mom all sorts of questions when I realized I didn't have a lot of time with her. I start the book saying I was six months in the womb and my mom didn't even know I was there, which explained a lot about my behavior. Once I understood that, so many things clicked. The more you understand yourself, the more decisions you'll be able to make that are actually true to you.
In the past, you've said you always have a secret intention with every project. What was yours here?
With Showgirls, my goal was that all the drag queens would dress like me on Halloween. Very achieved. Once I really latched on to the alphapussy story, I thought, if that's the one thing someone takes away, if they say, "I'm going to alphapussy this situation, I'm going to stand on my own two feet," oh my God, that would be incredible.
