Intimacy: A Field Guide to Finding Connection and Feeling Your Deep Desires

What is desire? What is attachment? What is chemistry? What is intimacy?

In Intimacy, the pioneering intimacy coordinator behind the series Normal People offers a groundbreaking exploration of sex, love, and partnership—and the path to forging a deeper connection to ourselves and others.

“A vital contribution to our understanding of intimacy both on screen and in life.”—from the Foreword by Gillian Anderson

As intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien has choreographed some of the most passionate and vulnerable intimate scenes on-screen. From Normal People to Sex Education and I May Destroy You, and in so many more productions, she has also made these scenes safer, more joyful and more empowering to perform in. No one knows intimacy, the power of true connection, better than O’Brien.

So, what can her work teach us about our own relationships, both with ourselves and others? How can we use her tools to discover what it is that we truly want in our intimate lives? And how can all of this create environments in which intimacy can take seed, grow, and even thrive?

Combining embodied wisdom, behind-the-scenes stories, and exercises for connection, Intimacy offers us a field guide to discovering our desires, communicating our needs, and cultivating truly intimate relationships at every stage of our lives.

Ita O’Brien is an intimacy coordinator and movement director for film, television, and theater. For more than a decade, she has been developing “intimacy on set” guidelines: best practices for working on scenes with sexual content and nudity in film, TV, and theater. O’Brien pioneered the role of intimacy coordinator, which is used in production companies including HBO and Netflix. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times, and NBC. She’s contributed to the intimate content praised in shows such as Normal People, Sex Education, and I May Destroy You.