In Want , Anderson has collected anonymous sexual fantasies of women from around the world along with her own anonymous submission. They are all extraordinary: full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and, ultimately, liberation. From dreaming about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these fantasies provide a window into the most secret part of our minds.
My Secret Garden was proof that women enjoyed as rich and diverse an erotic inner life as men. Finally, here was a book in which ordinary women, young and old, were talking honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their minds, nothing was off limits. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousnessness or perhaps the fear of making our partners uncomfortable, in our imaginations we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires.
It was provocative, even revolutionary at the start, and then it became required reading, a multimillion-copy global bestseller. The letters and interviews were astonishingly intimate and very raw. Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me. So much has changed in our social and sexual relations in the 50 years since My Secret Garden was first published. Want started as an invitation to women across the globe, a call for women to share the sexual fantasies, thoughts and feelings that so many of us hold in our heads but so rarely speak out loud.
A chance to gather the voices of women worldwide into a new book of fantasies for a new generation. My publishers set up a portal where the letters could be sent anonymously. And we waited How would people respond? At the close of the submission deadline, the combined letters counted , words β we had received enough entries to fill at least eight volumes.
Clearly, there was a need. The call for letters unleashed a torrent of frank, candid, heartbreaking, funny and downright raunchy outpourings which highlighted fantasies as rich and varied as the authors themselves. It was obvious that participating was, for the women, a process that felt both liberating and illicit. As a society, we habitually put women into boxes, limiting and constraining their identities and roles, and yet what these fantasies demonstrate is that no woman has one sole identity.
