Terry Garrity

Garrity was raised in Lee's Summit, Missouri,[1] and 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.[2] 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.[3][4]

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. In this book she and her brother discuss how she coped with depression.[5]

Living in South Florida, Garrity has several new projects underway with expected publication dates in 2024 and 2025.

• Bill Althaus, "Putting 'J' behind Her: For Terry Garrity, Success Was Almost Fatal", Kansas City Magazine, October 1984

• Portrait of Terry [Joan Theresa] Garrity in playful pose, 1973. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.