BiographyBorn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Nancy Colbert Friday grew up in Charleston, South Carolina and attended Ashley Hall, a local girls' college-preparatory school, then Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She worked briefly as a reporter for the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in New York, England, and France before turning to writing full time, changing the world with her outspoken views on the sexual revolution and the feminist movement.She published her first book, My Secret Garden, in 1973. This book, which compiled interviews of women discussing their sexuality and fantasies, became a bestseller. Friday wanted to explore female sexuality, relationships, and the idea of fantasy from the woman's point of view. Using the interview format in subsequent books, she ranges in theme from mothers and daughters to sexual fantasies, relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism, BDSM and beauty. In 1996, she published The Power of Beauty (renamed and rereleased in paper-back form in 1999) 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. Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age was published in 2009. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s 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 published her first novel, Lulu in 2012. Despite the questionable judgment of Ms. Magazine that "This woman is not a feminist," she has predicated her career on the belief that feminism and appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive concepts. Literary motivation"In the late 1960s I chose to write about women's sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece in the puzzle, and I loved original research. I had sexual fantasies and I assumed other women did too."Finding research difficult due to the lack of information available, she used her own experiences and fantasies to complete her book. Erica Jong, a fellow writer, tackled similar issues with her first book, Fear of Flying, in 1973, published around the same time as Friday's book. No one had attempted to confront such issues before these two women. They offered a fresh, new outlook on women and their sexuality. For years rejected by editors because of the content of her books, and despite psychologists insisting that men are the only people who have sexual fantasies, in 1973 Nancy Friday finally corrected the damaging misinformation. Friday considered that "more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies in My Secret Garden...women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls." Her later book, My Mother/My Self grew immediately out of My Secret Garden's questioning of the source of women's terrible guilt about sex. When she returned to her original topic of women's fantasies in Women on Top, it was in the belief that the sexual revolution had stalled: "it was the greed of the 1980s that dealt the death blow...the demise of healthy sexual curiosity." Friday, like other feminists, was especially concerned with the controlling role of the images of 'Nice Woman...Nice Girl' - of being bombarded from birth with messages about what a "good woman" is... focused so hard and so long on never giving in to "selfishness"'. However, as feminism itself developed a stunning array of customs, opinions, moral values, and beliefs about how the world of women...should conduct itself, so too it ran into the difficulty of moralism versus human nature - the fact that 'feminism - any political philosophy - does not adequately address sexual psychology' eventually sparking the 'feminist "sex wars" from the early 1980s' onwards. Against that backdrop, Friday's evidential and empirical concerns continue to address the open question of how many of their sexual freedoms the young women...will retain and how deeply they have incorporated them. CriticismSome Critics have labelled Friday's books unscientific because the author solicited responses, thus potentially biasing the contributor pool.My Secret Garden was greeted by a salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies; My Mother/My Self was initially...violently rejected by both publishers and readers; while Women on Top was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content. Personal lifeNancy Friday married novelist Bill Manville in 1967, separated from him in 1980, and divorced in 1986. Her second husband was Norman Pearlstine, formerly the editor-in-chief of Time Inc. They were married at the Rainbow Room in New York on July 11, 1988, and divorced in 2005.Nancy Friday now resides in New York City |
