My Secret Garden - Softcover

Friday, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416567011 ISBN 13: 9781416567011

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2008

Synopsis

Newly repackaged, the groundbreaking bestseller that explores female sexuality through women's most intimate fantasies.

Welcome to Nancy Friday's secret garden, a hidden place where ordinary women are free to express the sexual dreams they have never dared to confide before. Safe behind the walls of anonymity, hundreds of real women responded to Nancy Friday's call for details of their own most private fantasies. My Secret Garden is the daring compilation of those fantasies. When it first appeared, it created a storm of outrage in the media...and an equal sense of exhilaration for those women who finally were able to share their sisters' most intimate thoughts. Even now, in a new millennium, over then thousand women each year buy a new copy of this astounding classic of feminist literature. Join them in their exploration of the meaning of desire. Dare to read, dare to dream, and dare to discover the beautiful blossoms, the winding paths, and the hidden nooks of female sexuality.

About this title

Review:

This book caused quite a ruckus when it was released 25 years ago because it directly quotes the sexual fantasies of dozens of women, ranging from the "very common" rape fantasy to lesbian affairs to unusually explicit scenarios that are unmentionable here. While author Nancy Friday maintains that My Secret Garden served to free millions of women from sexual oppression, there's still a need today to get rid of the guilt that millions more still feel when it comes to fantasizing, having orgasms, and making one's sexual wishes be known. "How could it be, you might ask," she writes, "that women today, at the turn of the century, would still think they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that that women impose on themselves?"

My Secret Garden has the prurient appeal that made it one of the most passed-around books in high school study halls (it boasts chapters titled "Insatiability" and "The Thrill of the Forbidden"), but its premise, underneath the tales of lusty longings, is a serious one. Friday, also author of My Mother, My Self and Women on Top, is appalled at how parents, especially mothers, instill in their children a deep fear of sexual pleasure, and she advises how to do away with this stultifying force. While Friday can get a little histrionic at times ("Women's lust ... could bring down not only individuals, but society itself"), that doesn't make this book any less enthralling. --Erica Jorgensen

About the Author:

Nancy Friday is the bestselling author of My Secret Garden, Jealousy, Men in Love, My Mother/My Self, Women on Top, The Power of Beauty and, most recently, Our Looks, Our Lives. She lives in Key West, Florida, and in Connecticut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416567011
• ISBN 13: 9781416567011
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464