Intimacy: A Field Guide to Finding Connection and Feeling Your Deep Desires

What is desire? What is attachment? What is chemistry? What is intimacy?

In Intimacy, the pioneering intimacy coordinator behind the series Normal People offers a groundbreaking exploration of sex, love, and partnership--and the path to forging a deeper connection to ourselves and others.

＂A vital contribution to our understanding of intimacy both on screen and in life.＂--from the Foreword by Gillian Anderson

As intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien has choreographed some of the most passionate and vulnerable intimate scenes on-screen. From Normal People to Sex Education and I May Destroy You, and in so many more productions, she has also made these scenes safer, more joyful and more empowering to perform in. No one knows intimacy, the power of true connection, better than O’Brien.

So, what can her work teach us about our own relationships, both with ourselves and others? How can we use her tools to discover what it is that we truly want in our intimate lives? And how can all of this create environments in which intimacy can take seed, grow, and even thrive?

Combining embodied wisdom, behind-the-scenes stories, and exercises for connection, Intimacy offers us a field guide to discovering our desires, communicating our needs, and cultivating truly intimate relationships at every stage of our lives.

Ita O’Brien is an intimacy coordinator and movement director for film, television, and theater. For over a decade, Ita O’Brien has been developing best practices for working with intimacy, scenes with sexual content, and nudity in film, TV, and theater - the ’Intimacy on Set’ guidelines. Ita O’Brien pioneered the role of intimacy coordinator, which is gaining adoption in leading production houses, including HBO, Netflix, and the BBC. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including publications like The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and NBC. Ita O’Brien contributed to the intimate content praised in programs like Normal People, Sex Education, and I May Destroy You.