The Best Sex We've Had Is In Our Imagination!

Writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup talks to Nathalie Whittle about choosing the stories for a new book, Desire: 100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories, midlife sex – and the fantasies women share.

- Nathalie Whittle

MARIELLA, 53, is married to a human-rights lawyer, Jason McCue, whom she met when she was 39 and married two years later. They live with their children, Molly, 12, and Dan, 11.

I was around 13 years old when I first encountered erotic writing. My parents had huge shelves of books and, one day, I stumbled across the diaries of eroticist Anaïs Nin. Turning the pages, I found myself lost in this world where people were lying around in opium dens doing unspeakable things to each other. It was all so wild and depraved. Physically, I wasn’t yet part of it, but hormonally I was. Not long afterwards, I found my dad’s D.H. Lawrence books and, when I read the description of this brooding male youth with tousled dark hair standing sulkily in the corner, I knew what he was talking about. Even back then, there was something wonderful about being able to lose myself in this ‘other’ realm.

In our twenties and thirties, we’re all too busy having sex to be reading about it– then you get to middle age and suddenly it’s at the bottom of your to-do list! So I admit, being asked to choose a collection of erotic fiction for this book has been a bit of a gift. I was given about 250 stories by the Erotic Review, who asked me to narrow it down to 120. As I immersed myself in the many different and inspired stories, I thought, “Wow, I wish I’d had this on my bedside table for the past 10 years!”