Nancy Friday, chronicler of women’s erotic fantasies, dies

Nancy Friday, a dissatisfied daughter of the sexual revolution whose best-selling books aimed to liberate women from embarrassment over their erotic fantasies and from fraught relationships with their mothers, died Nov. 5 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said her friend Eric Krebs, who produced an off-Broadway theatrical adaptation of her 1973 debut, “My Secret Garden.”

Friday was living in London, penning sex and courtship columns for Cosmopolitan magazine, when she decided to follow in the footsteps of writers such as David Reuben and the pseudonymous “J.,” whose 1969 sex manuals “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” and “The Sensuous Woman” had become nightstand staples for millions of Americans.

Placing an anonymous advertisement in newspapers and magazines, she received hundreds of letters and conducted scores of interviews that formed the basis of “My Secret Garden,” a survey of female sexual fantasies that aimed to show women there was nothing shameful or embarrassing about such daydreams — and to show men that women’s sexual imaginations existed.

“I’ve always suspected that women have richer, wilder fantasies than men,” novelist Henry Miller wrote in an assessment of the book, which featured chapters such as “The Sexuality of Terror, or, ‘Help, I’m Out of Control, Thank God!’” The fantasies Friday cited ranged from violent rape dreams and visions of bestiality (too many, psychologists and sex therapists said) to imaginative chronicles of “group gropes” and adventurous vacuum-cleaner nozzles.

The book sold more than 2 million copies and established Friday “as the liberator of the female libido,” Newsday wrote. In the coming years she appeared as a frequent guest of talk-show hosts Bill Maher, Larry King, Tom Snyder and Oprah Winfrey, where her frank discussions of sexuality made her a progressive foil to many conservative commentators.