I read My Secret Garden for the first time when I was preparing for my role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in the TV series Sex Education.
I saw this book for sale in the local Waterstones and I’ve started slowly perusing it as I was waiting for my friend to stop. All I could see from my page flicking was penises. Loads and loads of penises. Talk about girthy, lenghty, droopy and sexually exciting penises.
Of course my eyebrows shot up and I went back to the pink cover with a small nub… oh.
So I went home and bought the book for my kindle. £9 down the drain my lovelies as the only thing written by Gillian Anderson was the introduction, discussing the role of the female sexual fantasies in what feels like a repressed modern day, more puritanical in some ways than the past.
Yet many archetypal fantasies persist in their popularity. Included here are a mere fraction of the imagined threesomes and moresomes that we received, which current research shows are by far the most common sexual fantasies. Similarly, there were any number of fantasies about office sex with a colleague or boss; the risky kind of sex where someone might catch you in flagrante; voyeuristic sex, either as the participant or the observer; sex in front of an audience; sex with strangers; sex outdoors. More unexpected, perhaps, were the fantasies about sex with a tentacled alien or a half-human half-beast – suffice to say, we were spoilt for choice.
Good parts: the book is somehow addictive
Bad parts: some self-censoring from the readers make it a somewhat awkward read. I had better luck with Kim Katrall’s Sex and the city books
This one.. not so much. There’s not a lot of Gillian Anderson in here..
Anderson tells us on the fourth page that she has hidden her own entry somewhere within the collection, which invites you to play a guessing game. Is she the door knob? The Potter fan? The woman who longs for her partner to die? The idea that you might be peeping into a celebrity’s life adds a certain frisson, as you scour the pages for hints. In essence, you are invited to fantasise about her in a way that feels voyeuristic, or least morally ambiguous. But then, perhaps that’s what great fantasy always needs – a dash of moral ambiguity.
Eh, mediocre read. If you want something good, read The Story of O
One Book a Week (Julia Reads Books) 