Best-selling author Nancy Friday dead at 84

Nancy Friday

NEW YORK: Nancy Friday, a journalist and author whose best-selling “My Secret Garden” was a landmark compilation of women’s fantasies, has died at age 84.
Literary agent Robert Thixton said Friday died Sunday morning in her Manhattan apartment. She was 84 and died of complications from Alzheimer’s.
The author’s books about gender politics helped redefine American women’s social identity in the late 20th century.
“My Secret Garden” was published in 1973 and is widely regarded as the first major book to compile women’s fantasies. It was panned by Ms. Magazine, which declared that “this woman is not a feminist,” but sold millions of copies and made Friday a celebrity who was interviewed by Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose and Bill Maher, among others.
Her other books included “Jealousy” and “Beyond My Control.”
Friday was married twice, to author Bill Manville and Time magazine executive Norman Pearlstine. Both marriages ended in divorce.
A Pittsburgh native who grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, Friday was a graduate of Wellesley College and worked as a newspaper and magazine reporter and in public relations in the 1960s and ‘70s before she got the idea for a book which became “My Secret Garden.”
“I do think a lot of women are likely to begin fantasizing after reading this book,” Friday told The New York Times in 1973. “Or rather, become aware that they have been fantasizing all along, and that these sudden odd ideas or notions they have up to now forgotten, or repressed, are indeed fantasies.”