Read an excerpt from “Want” by Gillian Anderson (exclusive)

Gillian Anderson has released a new book and it's all about women's desires.

Do you want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous (out September 17 from Abrams Press) is a collection curated by Anderson, 56, that began with a question: How do women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be completely anonymous?

In February 2023 Sex education star a public call for anonymous letters and the result is more than 100 raw, insightful And true stories from women around the world – including one from Anderson herself. These personal accounts touch on a range of sexual perspectives and experiences, including consent, multiple partners, gender and sexual preferences, bodies, locations, audiences, privacy, scenarios, and more.

Below is an exclusive excerpt obtained by PEOPLE. Read more about the book that helped the actress prepare for her role in the hit Netflix series — and how it led to Want Origin.

I was barely five years old when novelist Nancy Friday’s cult classic, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasiesfound its way onto bookshelves and into the handbags of women in the USA My secret garden was proof that women had an erotic inner life that was just as rich and varied as men. Finally there was a book in which ordinary women, young and old, spoke honestly about arousal, masturbation, sexual dreams and desires. In their eyes, nothing was taboo.

What Friday's book revealed was that for some of us, the sex we have in our heads can be more arousing than the physical details of a relationship, no matter how hot. Uninfluenced by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps fear of making our partners uncomfortable, we can explore our deepest, most boundary-pushing desires in our imaginations. The book was initially provocative, even revolutionary, and then it became required reading, a global bestseller selling millions of copies.

I don't know if my mother, a computer analyst, owned a copy of Friday's book. Our household was certainly not a puritanical one where such reading would have been frowned upon – but as liberal as my childhood was, it would not have been something that Mom would have left lying around on the coffee table. I read My secret garden for the first time when I was preparing for my role as sex therapist Dr. Jean Milburn in the television series Sex education. The letters and interviews were amazingly intimate and very raw. Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me.

In the 50 years since the Institute of Social Sciences was founded, so much has changed in our social and sexual relationships. My secret garden was first published. Have women's deepest inner desires also changed? I am a woman with my own sex life and fantasies and was curious to see how the fantasies of a diverse group of other women were similar or different to mine.

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Want began as an invitation to women around the world, “a call for women to share the sexual fantasies, thoughts and feelings that so many of us have in our heads but so rarely say out loud. A chance to unite the voices of women worldwide in a new book of fantasies for a new generation.” My publisher set up a portal where the letters could be sent anonymously. And we waited… We had so many questions: Could women find something interesting or erotic about putting their innermost thoughts on paper and sharing them with others? How would people react? By the end of the submission period, the letters totaled 800,000 words – we had received enough submissions to fill at least eight volumes. There was clearly a need.

The call for letters unleashed a flood of frank, honest, heartbreaking, funny, and downright raunchy outpourings that explored fantasies as varied and diverse as the writers themselves. It was evident that for the women, participating was a process that felt both liberating and forbidden. There were letters from teenage girls yet to have their first sexual encounter; from single women caught in the endless cycle of online hookups and one-night stands; from exhausted women with young children; from married women or those with steady partners who were frustrated with the same old thing; from transgender women and people who identify as nonbinary; and from women in their sixties and seventies who found there was a lot to shout about in postmenopausal sex.

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In our society, we habitually put women in boxes, limiting and restricting their identities and roles, and yet these fantasies demonstrate that no woman has just one identity. I also found it surprising that a large number of women today continue to keep their fantasies to themselves. Many of those who wrote to me are loud, proud, confident women who own and celebrate their sexual power, but just as many expressed feeling shame and guilt in seeking sexual comfort and satisfaction. There are many for whom sexual fantasies can only ever remain secret. It was sobering to read the first-hand experiences of people living in countries where social norms – or in some cases the law – preclude the possibility of any relationship other than heterosexual and sex within marriage. But even authors from so-called liberal societies write about feelings such as “shame,” “embarrassment,” or “guilt,” about their fear or reluctance to talk to a partner about what they really think when having sex with him or her or, often, when masturbating alone.

Sexual fantasies have always fascinated me and I see my role in this book as that of a curator, bringing these diverse and amazing voices into book form. It has been an incredible journey and so satisfying to see how different we all are, but also how similar we are across the world. This book is a platform for women's voices, allowing us to not only share, but, paradoxically, be seen and heard, in complete anonymity. I want to break the taboo of fantasies and bring in the thrill and fun, in the hope that this book, these letters, might inspire through disclosure, representation and identification.

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

Want will be released on Tuesday, September 17th, and can be pre-ordered now wherever books are sold.