Read an Excerpt from Want by Gillian Anderson: 'I Have Always Been Intrigued by Sexual Fantasies' (Exclusive)

Gillian Anderson has published a new book and talks about what women want.

I want: Anonymous sexual fantasies (out Sept. 17 from Abrams Press) is a collection curated by Anderson, 56, who began with the question: What do women think about sex when they have the freedom to be completely anonymous?

In February 2023, Sexual education star put out a public call for anonymous letters and the result is more than 100 raw, revealing and real stories of women around the world — including one of Anderson’s. These personal accounts touch on a range of sexual perspectives and experiences, including consent, multiple partners, gender as well as sexual preferences, bodies, locations, audiences, privacy, scenarios and more.

Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, read about the book that helped the actor prepare for his role on the hit Netflix series — and how it led to Want formation.

‘Want’ collected by Gillian Anderson.

I was barely five years old in 1973 when author Nancy Friday’s cult classic, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasiesit made its way onto the bookshelves and into the purses of women in the US My secret garden it was proof that women enjoy just as rich and varied an erotic inner life as men. Finally, here is a book in which ordinary women, young and old, talk honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. Nothing was off limits in their minds.

What Friday’s book revealed is that for some of us, the sex we have in our heads can be more stimulating than the physical entanglements of any relationship, no matter how hot it is. Unfettered by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of making partners uncomfortable, we can indulge our deepest, most transgressive desires in our imaginations. In the beginning, it was provocative, even revolutionary, and then it became mandatory reading, a world bestseller with multi-million copies.

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I don’t know if my computer analyst mother owned a copy of Friday’s book. Ours was certainly not a puritanical household where such reading would be frowned upon – but as liberal as my childhood was, it would not have been something Mum left lying on the coffee table. I’m reading My secret garden the first time I was preparing for my role as sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn in the TV series Sexual education. The letters and interviews were strikingly 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 then My secret garden was first published. Have women’s deepest inner desires also changed? I am a woman, with my own sex life and my own fantasies, and I was curious to find out the ways in which a diverse group of other women’s fantasies were similar or different from my own.

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Want began as an invitation to women around the world, ‘an invitation to women to share the sexual fantasies, thoughts and feelings that many of us keep in our heads, but so rarely speak out loud. An opportunity to gather the voices of women around the world in a new fantasy book for a new generation. My publishers set up a portal where letters could be sent anonymously. And we waited… We had so many questions: Can women find something interesting or erotic about sharing their inner thoughts with others with pen and paper? How would people react? At the end of the submission deadline, the combined letters totaled 800,000 words—we received enough entries to fill at least eight volumes. Clearly, there was a need.

Gillian Anderson in ‘Sex Education’ with Asa Butterfield.

Thomas Wood/Netflix

The call for letters unleashed a flood of honest, sincere, heart-wrenching, funny and downright raunchy outpourings that highlighted fantasies as rich and varied as the authors themselves. It was evident that participation, for women, was a process that felt both liberating and illicit. There were letters from teenage girls who had just had their first sexual encounter; from single women caught in an endless cycle of online hookups and one-night stands; exhausted women with small children; married women or those with long-term partners frustrated with the same old, same old; transgender women and people who identify as non-binary; and women in their sixties and seventies, revealing that there are plenty of reasons to shout about sex after menopause.

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As a society, we tend to put women in boxes, limiting and constraining their identities and roles, yet what these fantasies show is that no woman has just one identity. I was also surprised that a large number of women today still keep their fantasies to themselves. Many of those who have written to me are loud, proud, confident women who own and celebrate their sexual power, but just as many have expressed feelings of shame and guilt in seeking sexual comfort and satisfaction. There are many for whom sexual fantasies can only be secret. It was sobering to read the first-hand experiences of those who live in countries where social norms – or, in some cases, the law – exclude the possibility of anything but heterosexual relationships and sex within marriage. But even associates from so-called liberal societies write about feelings of “shame,” “embarrassment,” or “guilt,” about their fear or reluctance to talk to their partner about what they’re really thinking when they have sex with him or, often, when they’re masturbating.

I have always been intrigued by sexual fantasies and I see my role in this book as that of a curator, turning these diverse and incredible voices into book form. It was an amazing trip and a pleasure to see how different we all are, but also how similar we are all over the world. This book is a platform for women’s voices, to allow us, in complete anonymity, not only to share but, paradoxically, to be seen and heard. I want to remove the taboo of fantasy and bring excitement and fun in the hope that this book, these letters, through discovery, representation and identification, might inspire.

Excerpt from the new book Want submitted by anonymous, collected by Gillian Anderson, published by Abrams Press. Copyright © 2024 Gillian Anderson

Want is released on Tuesday, September 17, and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education