Home as Fantasy
On indulging and cultivating our imagined homes and lives in 2025
Just before Christmas, a family member sent me some money with instructions to buy a book for myself. “Make sure you wrap it and put it under the tree,” they said.
A few days later, as I browsed the fiction and memoir sections of my local bookstore, I was also scanning the aisles for a book with a bubblegum-pink cover. Eventually, I spotted it over in the self-help section—which is not where it belonged, although I can see how it ended up there.
For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about and working on a new project about female desire. What are women allowed to want? And how does that change depending on her appearance? Alternately, what are women allowed to accept about themselves? Our culture increasingly preaches self-acceptance, yet we still live in a society that demands our wanting. We should love ourselves, but we should also want to be smaller, prettier, and “healthier” (see also: our image more aligned to the wants and fantasies of men).
The book I pulled off the shelf that day was Want: a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies submitted from women all over the world, selected and curated by Gillian Anderson (who plays the sex therapist Jean Milburn in the Netflix series, Sex Education). I’d had my eye on the book since it was released and thought it would make for good “research” as I work on my new project. At the very least, it seemed like it could be a good time.
I bought the book, wrapped it, and placed it under the tree. I opened it on Christmas morning while everyone else was preoccupied. Feeling a little smug, I quickly slid it under a pile of other gifts and carried on with the morning.
I am now about 50 pages in, and this book has surprised me in so many glorious ways.
Some of the letters are what I expected: raunchy, detailed scenes which offer little more to the reader than voyeuristic entertainment—but so many go beyond this. These letters are not just about sex; they broaden our ideas of intimacy and closeness, and many serve as beautiful and vulnerable self-examinations. Some women are speaking words they have never spoken to anyone. There is intense desire here, but also deep fear. There is so much longing, but also gratitude. In these pages, women question whether their desires are normal. They wonder if anyone else feels the same way. As some women speak the truth of what they really want, they marvel at the relief they feel to finally say it, while others collapse, heartbreakingly, into their shame. Some of the letters are wry, witty, and downright hilarious. All of them are deeply, deeply human.
One woman writes that she wishes every woman could have three lives, and goes on to outline the three lives she would choose for herself. One is the real life she lives now, and the other two are fantasy lives in which she has made considerably different choices. Another woman wrote not about sex, but that she fantasized about her husband doing the dishes and putting the kids to bed. One woman admitted that the fantasy life she often visits in her mind is the only thing that makes her real life bearable.
It is now 2025, and we are supposed to have made so much progress. Still, these letters are an poignant example of the truths women will dare to speak when their names are not attached to them.
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
―Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
At some point in my teen years, when I was young and had little control over my reality and the tumultuous happenings in my family, I began to daydream. Mostly, these daydreams were about someone taking care of me, or else I created scenarios in which someone would have to come and rescue me. I daydreamed through my classes, my eyes glazing over. I had the same teacher for both biology and chemistry, and he regularly stopped his lectures to ask me if I was okay. Embarrassed, I would nod and smile and try to pay attention.
I daydreamed any chance I got. On jock bus trips out of town for volleyball or soccer games. In the car while my parents or friends drove. Through silent reading time in English class. I daydreamed through movie nights with friends. I daydreamed to fall asleep at night, and returned there as soon as I woke up the next morning.
This carried on until, eventually, I started writing my fantasies down. I started writing stories, and the stories helped the world feel more tolerable. There was agency, power, and choice in creating these worlds—luxuries I did not yet have access to in my real life.
“For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that’s precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.”
―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
The daydreaming continued well into adulthood, and it was only a few years ago that I realized I rarely go there anymore. While I do spend time thinking intentionally about my writing projects and the worlds I am building there, my fantasy life has proved to be less necessary or interesting as I continue to build a life that is more aligned to my needs, that feels sustainable and survivable. Now, if I slip into my fantasies, there is always a reason—always something intolerable about this world that pushes me towards the other one.
While my fantasies were not sexual in nature, they were still created from desire and wanting. I could lean into the grief of having spent so much of my early years in my imagination rather than present in real life, but the truth remains that those daydreams got me through many hard days (and there are certainly ways to cope). So often we think of fantasy as pure entertainment; we are less often exposed to the narrative of fantasy as something vital, as a means of survival.
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
―Picasso
Reading Want and welcoming 2025 (with mild trepidation) has made me think that maybe we should be cultivating our fantasy lives just as much as we cultivate our real ones. Our fantasies have a lot to tell us about our needs and desires, and they have a lot to say about what might be missing. These letters prove that fantasy so often gets us through the difficult parts of life that seem to have no way out: the bad relationship, the injury or illness, the job we hate, the months-long depressive episode, the grief we think will never end, poverty, abuse and violence of all kinds. Sometimes, the fantasy serves as escapism while we bide our time or simply survive. Other times, because fantasy can show us what we want, it can also show us the way out.
However, these letters have also shown me that fantasy is not always a good way to gauge what we want in real life. In one letter, a woman wondered what she would be left with if all of her fantasies came true—this idea that she would be losing something through their becoming real. She would no longer be able to idealize them, and the world would take them in its many hands and turn them into something else.
That woman’s letter changed my perceptions of fantasy and convinced me of the value in cultivating both a real life and an imagined one, knowing that some parts of each will bleed over, while others never will. I also keep thinking of the woman who wished she could live her life three different times over. Out of all the possible lives we could imagine for ourselves, maybe the most important thing—the thing to strive for—is to live (or try to figure out how to live) our first choices, if we can, while saving the others for a different purpose.
As we begin 2025, the only thing I know is that we need to bring our imaginations with us. Fantasy isn’t wasteful; it’s a safe haven, a way forward, a dose of raunchy escapism. Whatever it is, every woman should get to decide for herself.
Recent and relevant enjoyments:
This poem by Lucille Clifton:
P.S. In case you missed it, my posting frequency and subscription rates have changed for 2025.