Nancy Friday - Bibliography

Writer and popular psychologist, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. She attended Wellesley College and became a journalist and free-lance writer. She published several books based on her research into selected subjects of popular psychology, including My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies (1973), My Mother/My Self: The Daughter's Search for Identity (1978), and Jealousy (1985).

Nancy Friday (born August 27, 1933) is an author who has written on the topics of female sexuality and liberation (with a small "l").

Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She worked briefly as a reporter for the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in New York, England, Italy and France before turning to writing full time and publishing her first book, My Secret Garden, in 1973. This book, which compiled interviews of women discussing their sexuality and fantasies, became a bestseller; Friday has regularly returned to the interview format in her subsequent books on themes ranging from mothers and daughters to sexual fantasies, relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism and beauty. However, she contributed an interview of porn star Nina Hartley to XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits a book by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders published in 2004.

Throughout the 80s and early 90s she was a frequent guest on television and radio programs such as Politically Incorrect, Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America and NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Friday also has a web site, which was created in the mid 90s, to complement the publication of The Power of Beauty.

Bibliography

My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Simon & Schuster, 1973 Forbidden Flowers: More Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Simon & Schuster, 1975 My Mother, Myself: The Daughter’s Search for Identity, Delacorte Press, 1977 Men in Love, Men’s Sexual Fantasies: The Triumph of Love Over Rage, Dell Publishing, 1980 Jealousy, M. Co., 1985 Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Simon & Schuster, 1991 The Power of Beauty, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996 Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power and the Need to be Seen, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999