My Secret Garden [Paperback]

Nancy Friday (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2008

Welcome to Nancy Friday's secret garden, a hidden place where ordinary women are free to express the sexual dreams they have never dared to confide before. Safe behind the walls of anonymity, hundreds of real women responded to Nancy Friday's call for details of their own most private fantasies. My Secret Garden is the daring compilation of those fantasies. When it first appeared, it created a storm of outrage in the media...and an equal sense of exhilaration for those women who finally were able to share their sisters' most intimate thoughts. Even now, in a new millennium, over then thousand women each year buy a new copy of this astounding classic of feminist literature. Join them in their exploration of the meaning of desire. Dare to read, dare to dream, and dare to discover the beautiful blossoms, the winding paths, and the hidden nooks of female sexuality.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"You'll blush, your pulse will race." -- The New York Times

"Delicious...women can share in their sisters' secrets and not feel that they are alone." -- Los Angeles Times

"Provocative." -- Women's Wear Daily

About the Author

Nancy Friday is the author of seven books: My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers, Jealousy, Men in Love, My Mother/My Self, Women on Top, and The Power of Beauty. She lives in Key West, Florida, and in Connecticut.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books (February 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416567011
• ISBN-13: 978-1416567011
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Kind of made me sad to be a woman!, March 15, 2011

By 

Nikkita (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: My Secret Garden (Paperback)

I first heard about Nancy Friday from "Men in Love", a collection of men's sexual fantasies. I found the fantasies in that book to be fascinatingly deep, thought out, and precious to the men who had them. You could actually see the world the man was building in his head. So when I heard there was a book by the same author about women's sexual fantasies I was very interested to see if they measured up.

I was very saddened by most of these fantasies. The sexual world of women in this book, in my opinion, came off shallow and unconcerned with their partners pleasure. The fantasies seemed to only exist to allow the women to bear through the unsatisfying sexual experiences with their men since time after time the women make it clear these fantasies are used during sex and were always of other men. The beautiful chapters in Men in Love where men talk of getting aroused from giving pleasure are absent from this book since the few times a woman is giving a man pleasure, she is being forced to.

While there is nothing wrong with these fantasies in general, putting so many of them in the book makes the book unbalanced. There are even several chapters dedicated to how a woman's sexual frustration can lead her to these fantasies! While I'm sure there are many sexual frustrated women, it made me sad that a woman's sexual world is put forth as simply a by-product of frustration, not a secret world that she loves, just like a man.

My main issue with this is that in the introduction, the author herself reveals a traumatizing experience where she told a lover about how she was fantasizing about another man as they had sex. He became upset and left. So I can't help but wonder if the respondents that made the author feel "normal" were put in the book while women who fantasized about very different things (like their own husbands/boyfriends) were left out.

The saddest outcome of this is that it makes women look like they almost have no attachment to men sexually. There isn't a love for men and the pleasure he is giving you (like there was in men's fantasies of women). It almost seemed like the women were simply using men just to get off, nothing more. And most of the time, it didn't seem to matter who the women were sleeping with. The men in their fantasies were just a means to an end. Some people might say it's liberating for a woman to be portrayed as men have been for years. But I think it does no justice to us to make our sexual worlds a place a man wants to know nothing about since he is lead to believe he isn't even in it. It makes our sexual world look like the place we retreat to to get back at him when he isn't satisfying us.

The part of me that likes to peek into people's minds found some of the fantasies interesting but none of them stuck with me for their depth as the ones in Men in Love. In that book, I felt like the men were happy to finally reveal how precious these fantasies were to them and how much they longed to try them. I felt that the women in this book were more happy in finally revealing when they fantasized (i.e during sex) rather than how precious their hidden sexual world was.

I thought my sexual world was going to be painted with the same beautiful brush a man's was painted with in her other book. But I found too much spiteful fantasizing in this book to feel like the woman's 'secret garden' was portrayed as skillfully as the man's.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Utterly Fascinating, January 11, 2006

By 

Chris (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: My Secret Garden (Paperback)

As a 24 year old man, I loved this book. The majority of the content is simply what it says it is: women's descriptions of their sexual fantasies. I felt this gave me a lot of insight into how women relate to their sexuality.

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent study and excellent erotica too!, April 29, 2007

By 

Patrick D. Goonan "see profile for URL" (Livermore, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Secret Garden (Paperback)

I have enjoyed every Nancy Friday book that I have read. In this one, Nancy Friday, brings together women's fantasies under one cover and tries to represent different commonly occurring themes. The book is well organized and gives a great sense of women's interior fantasy life. It is also RED HOT and broke ground at the time in overcoming ignorance and shame where women's sexuality was involved. There is also a similar book on men's fantasies called Men in Love.