Nancy Friday: Chronicler of women’s erotic fantasies in the Seventies

She earned the scorn of feminists whose focus was economic empowerment but her highly sexually curious book ‘My Secret Garden’ became a classic of its kind

The author, pictured in 1986, said: ‘Your sexual fantasies are one of the most valuable X-rays you’ll ever have’ (Rex) (Rex)

Nancy Friday can fairly be summed up as a dissatisfied daughter of the sexual revolution. The American’s best-selling books set out to liberate women from embarrassment over their erotic fantasies, and from fraught relationships with their mothers.

Friday, who has died aged 84 following a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease,caused a storm with the publication of her first book, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, in 1973.

She 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 whose Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) inspired the Woody Allen film of the same name.

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 that 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 for the liking of psychologists and sex therapists – to imaginative chronicles of “group gropes” and adventures with vacuum-cleaner nozzles.

The book sold more than 2 million copies and established Friday “as the liberator of the female libido” – as New York’s Newsday newspaper once put it – and a frequent talk-show guest.

She developed as indelible an association with sexual fantasies as sex educator Betty Dodson did with masturbation. Her follow-up works of pop psychology included Forbidden Flowers in 1975; Men in Love (1980), about male fantasies; and the volumes Women on Top in 1991, and 2009’s Beyond My Control which charted the daydreams of younger generations.

But she also branched into new issues of gender and sexuality with My Mother/My Self in 1977, a semi-autobiographical work in which she argued that women inherit many of their anxieties and insecurities from their mothers.

Although the reception to her work slipped over the years – “Rigorous thought is obviously not her strength,” one New York Times reviewer wrote. Friday maintained a reputation as a lively force of sexual liberation for decades, living by the motto “more sauce and bigger drinks”.

She split her time between apartments in Key West, Florida, and New York, browsed the Sotheby’s whenever she found herself with writer’s block. She was known for flaunting the birth-control pill that she carried inside a gold bracelet.

Yet she also maintained a strained relationship with women’s movement leaders such as Gloria Steinem, whose Ms magazine excoriated Friday in a review of My Secret Garden. “This woman is not a feminist,” the reviewer wrote, joining a group of critics who argued that Friday focused on women’s sexual growth at the expense of their political or economic advancement.

Friday, in turn, lamented what she described as “anti-men, anti-sex matriarchal feminists,” insisting that her work was addressing far more than fantasies or daydreams.

“After I wrote My Secret Garden, ” she told America’s People magazine in 1980, “I began getting letters from women expressing gratitude. ‘Thank God you wrote that book,’ they said. ‘I thought I was the only one.’ Your sexual fantasies are one of the most valuable X-rays you’ll ever have.”

Nancy Colbert Friday was born to a teenage mother in Pittsburgh in the early Thirties. Her parents divorced when she was a child. She was raised in part by her grandfather, a steel tycoon, in Charleston, South Carolina. “There is nothing like the mystery of an absent father to addict you to the loving gaze of men,” she later wrote.

Friday graduated from Wellesley College in 1955 and worked as a reporter in Puerto Rico, where her work drew the attention of publisher Michael Butler. Butler, who later produced the Broadway musical Hair, gave Friday a position as the editor of a travel magazine. She described him as her “sexual emancipator” and eventually she moved to New York, searching for a job that would give her the “freedom to pursue men at a moment’s notice.”

She did public-relations work and in 1967 married Bill Manville, a novelist and columnist on New York’s Village Voice. The couple moved to Britain, where Friday began work on My Secret Garden. The marriage ended in divorce; according to a 1995 story in Esquire, it fractured over the question of the authorship of Friday’s books, with Manville eventually acknowledging that Friday was their sole author.

A marriage to then-Wall Street Journal managing editor Norman Pearlstine in 1988, at a star-studded wedding that included future president Donald Trump and investor Ronald Perelman, also ended in divorce.

Friday had no children and leaves no immediate survivors. “I couldn’t write the books I have if I were a mother,” she told Newsday in 1991. “Then ‘Good Nancy’ would be in charge. The one who’s less comfortable talking about sex.”

Nancy Friday, author, born 27 August 1933, died 5 November 2017

© The Washington Post