Exclusive: Read a Sneak Peek of ‘Want’ by Gillian Anderson | Literature

Gillian Anderson has a new ebook out and it is all about what ladies need.

Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous (out Sept. 17 from Abrams Press) is a assortment curated by Anderson, 56, that began with a query: How do ladies really feel about intercourse after they have the liberty to be completely nameless?

In February 2023, the Sex Education star put out a public name for nameless letters and the result's greater than 100 uncooked, revealing and actual tales from ladies all over the world — together with one of Anderson's personal. These private accounts contact on a vary of sexual views and experiences, together with consent, a number of companions, gender in addition to sexual desire, our bodies, places, audiences, privateness, eventualities and extra.

Below, in an unique excerpt shared with PEOPLE, learn in regards to the ebook that helped the actor prepped for her position on the hit Netflix sequence — and the way it led to Want coming into being.

I used to be barely 5 years previous in 1973 when the novelist Nancy Friday’s cult basic, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, made its means onto the bookshelves and into the purses of ladies within the U.S. My Secret Garden was proof that ladies loved as wealthy and various an erotic internal life as males. Finally, right here was a ebook wherein bizarre ladies, younger and previous, have been speaking truthfully about arousal, masturbation, sexual desires and needs. In their minds, nothing was off limits.

What Friday’s ebook revealed was that, for some of us, the intercourse we've got in our head could also be extra stimulating than the bodily nuts and bolts of any coupling, irrespective of how scorching. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness or maybe the concern of making our companions uncomfortable, in our imaginations we will bask in our deepest, most transgressive needs. It was provocative, even revolutionary, at the beginning, after which it grew to become required studying, a multimillion-copy international bestseller.

I don’t know if my laptop analyst mom owned a copy of Friday’s ebook. Ours actually wasn’t a puritanical family the place such studying matter would have been frowned upon — however as liberal as my childhood was, it wouldn’t have been one thing that Mom left mendacity about on the espresso desk. I learn My Secret Garden for the primary time after I was making ready for my position because the intercourse therapist Dr. Jean Milburn within the TV sequence Sex Education. The letters and interviews have been astonishingly intimate and really uncooked. Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me. 

So a lot has modified in our social and sexual relations within the 50 years since My Secret Garden was first revealed. Have ladies’s deepest inner needs additionally modified? I'm a lady, with a intercourse life and fantasies of my very own, and I used to be curious to know the methods wherein a various group of different ladies’s fantasies have been just like, or completely different from, mine.

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Want began as an invite to ladies throughout the globe, ‘a name for girls to share the sexual fantasies, ideas and emotions that so many of us maintain in our heads however so not often communicate out loud. An opportunity to assemble the voices of ladies worldwide into a new ebook of fantasies for a new technology. My publishers arrange a portal the place the letters might be despatched anonymously. And we waited … We had so many questions: Might ladies discover one thing fascinating or erotic in placing pen to paper and sharing their internal ideas with others? How would individuals reply? At the shut of the submission deadline, the mixed letters counted 800,000 phrases — we had acquired sufficient entries to fill not less than eight volumes. Clearly, there was a want.

The name for letters unleashed a torrent of frank, candid, heartbreaking, humorous and downright raunchy outpourings which highlighted fantasies as wealthy and diverse because the authors themselves. It was apparent that collaborating was, for the ladies, a course of that felt each liberating and illicit. There have been letters from teenage women but to have their first sexual encounter; from single ladies caught within the infinite cycle of on-line hook-ups and one-night stands; exhausted ladies with younger kids; married ladies or these with long-term companions pissed off with the identical previous, standard; transgender ladies and individuals who determine as non-binary; and girls of their sixties and seventies, discovering that there’s a lot to shout about in post-menopausal intercourse. 

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As a society, we habitually put ladies into packing containers, limiting and constraining their identities and roles, and but what these fantasies show is that no lady has one sole id. I additionally discovered it shocking that a nice quantity of ladies immediately proceed to maintain their fantasies to themselves. Many of those that wrote to me are loud, proud, assured ladies proudly owning and celebrating their sexual energy, however simply as many expressed feeling disgrace and guilt in searching for sexual consolation and satisfaction. There are lots for whom sexual fantasies can solely ever be secret. It was sobering to learn the firsthand expertise of these residing in international locations the place social norms — or, in some instances, the legislation — precludes the chance of something aside from a heterosexual relationship and intercourse inside marriage. But even contributors from so-called liberal societies write of feeling “shame,” “embarrassment” or “guilt,” of their concern or reluctance to speak to a associate about what they really take into consideration when they're having intercourse with them or, typically, when masturbating alone.

I've all the time been intrigued by sexual fantasies and I view my position on this ebook as that of a curator, shepherding these various and wonderful voices into ebook type. It has been an unimaginable journey and so gratifying to see how completely different all of us are but additionally how a lot we're the identical the world over. This ebook is a platform for the voices of ladies, to allow us, in full anonymity, not solely to share however, paradoxically, to be seen and heard. I need to take away the taboo of fantasies and produce within the thrill and the enjoyable within the hope that this ebook, these letters, via disclosure, illustration and identification, would possibly encourage.

Excerpt from the brand new ebook Want submitted by nameless, collected by Gillian Anderson revealed by Abrams Press. Copyright © 2024 Gillian Anderson

Want is out Tuesday, Sept. 17, and accessible for preorder now, wherever books are offered.