Author put women’s fantasies in spotlight

NANCY FRIDAY

Nancy Friday, a journalist and author whose best-selling “My Secret Garden” was a landmark compilation of women’s sexual fantasies, has died at 84.

Friday died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease Sunday in Manhattan, said her literary agent, Robert Thixton.

“My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” a collection of explicit letters and interviews gathered by Friday, was published in 1973 and is widely regarded as the first major book to compile women’s sexual fantasies.

It was an era of erotic candor, including Dr. David Reuben’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)” and Erica Jong ’s novel “Fear of Flying.” But Friday’s book was still shocking, with its graphic detail of things such as rape and bestiality.

“My Secret Garden” was described as a dirty book with the clean parts edited out. It sold millions of copies.

Her other books included “Women On Top” and “Beyond My Control.”

Friday was married twice, to author Bill Manville and Time magazine executive Norman Pearlstine. Both marriages ended in divorce.

A Pittsburgh native who grew up in Charleston, S.C., Friday was a graduate of Wellesley College and worked as a newspaper and magazine reporter and in public relations in the 1960s and ’70s before the era’s sexual revolution gave her the idea for “My Secret Garden.”

“I do think a lot of women are likely to begin fantasizing after reading this book,” Friday told the New York Times in 1973. “Or rather, become aware that they have been fantasizing all along, and that these sudden odd ideas or notions they have up to now forgotten, or repressed, are indeed fantasies.”