[4] She worked briefly as a reporter for the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in New York City, England, and France before turning to writing full-time.
Friday regularly returned to the interview format in her subsequent books on themes ranging from mothers and daughters to sexual fantasies, relationships, jealousy, envy, feminism, BDSM, and beauty.
After the publication of The Power of Beauty (released in 1996, and re-released under the tile of Our Looks/Our Lives in 1999),[5] she wrote little, contributing an interview of porn star Nina Hartley to XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits, a book published in 2004 by photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, with her final book being Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age, published in 2009.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s she was a frequent guest on television and radio programs such as Politically Incorrect, Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and NPR's Talk of the Nation.
Against that backdrop, Friday's evidential and empirical concerns continue to address the "open question of how many of their sexual freedoms the young women ... will retain, how deeply they have incorporated them.
My Secret Garden was greeted by a "salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies"; My Mother/My Self was "initially ... violently rejected by both publishers and readers";[10] while Women on Top "was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content.
The journalist Jon Ronson wrote "In February 1998, the feminist writer Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on Lewinsky's future.