Terry Garrity

Who is Terry Garrity?

Joan Theresa Garrity, is an American author, best known as the author of The Sensuous Woman.

She was raised in Lee's Summit, Missouri and she studied at Palm Beach Junior College in Florida. She worked on the staff of publisher Lyle Stuart and published a book about shopping in New York.

In 1969 she published, under the pseudonym of "J.", The Sensuous Woman, subtitled "the first how-to book for the female who yearns to be all woman". It was also published as The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman. The book spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and nearly a year on the list overall. In later editions, she used the name Terry Garrity. A spoken-word record album was made in 1969, based on the book, called J – The Way To Become A Sensuous Woman.

In 1977, she published Total Loving: how to love and be loved for the rest of your life, and in 1984, Story of "J": the author of The Sensuous Woman tells the bitter price of her crazy success, with her brother John Garrity as co-author. The resemblance to the title Story of O, was presumably intentional. In this book she and her brother discuss how she coped with bipolar disorder.