Books |
Three Women
Lisa Taddeo
By
Published: Sep 19, 2023
Category:
Non Fiction
I wrote a book called Married Sex: A Love Story, and I can report that writing emotionally credible sex is like climbing Everest in sneakers. That novel cured me of any desire to write or read books with strong sexual plots, which is why I didn’t leap to read “Three Women.” But a seriously smart woman several decades younger than this aging romantic said she couldn’t put it down. And she wasn’t an outlier in her enthusiasm. “Three Women” was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Highly regarded female writers praised it (Elizabeth Gilbert: “I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly… I will never stop thinking about the women profiled in this story—about their sexual desire, their emotional pain, their strength, their losses. I saw myself in all of them.”) Now very curious, I invested in the $10 paperback.
Lisa Taddeo was, she says, originally “drawn to the stories of men.” But the more she interviewed men, the less promising were their stories of sexual dilemmas and yearnings: “The men’s stories began to bleed together.” As she writes:
“In some cases, there was prolonged courting; sometimes the courting was closer to grooming; but mostly, the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning. There was complexity and beauty and violence even, in the way the women experienced the same event. In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like.”
She revised her model — she’d update “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” Gay Talese’s 1980 study of the sexual revolution, from a female perspective. And thus began eight years of reporting, and thousands of hours of conversation with the three women she profiles — all of them white, two of them Catholic. She interviewed their families and friends and read their social media, court documents and local news articles. She moved to the women’s towns. She got into their heads — she could describe what they thought and felt.
These are her three woman:
Maggie, from North Dakota, had an affair with her English teacher at seventeen and decided to report him to the police when she was twenty-three, after he was named the state’s teacher of the year. In court, she is humiliated.
Sloane, a restaurateur in her forties. Lives in Newport, Rhode Island, and looks the part — she’s thin and beautiful. And, oh yeah, she has sex with men and women her husband selects for her — sometimes while he watches, sometimes while she records.
Lina, a 30-something Indiana housewife who’s married to a “good provider” who wants only one thing from her husband: a kiss on the mouth. He refuses. Their couples therapist sides with the husband: “Some people don’t like the feel of someone else’s tongue in their mouth.” Lina asks for a separation, begins an affair with her high school boyfriend.
Lina is obsessed: “He will not sing in a band or swim in the Pacific. Outside of his kids and his wife and the things he will have done for them (which count, but they also do not, in that way a man needs something in outer space to count) he will not have done anything anyone will really remember. Except for who he was to one woman. He was everything.”
But, really, all three women are obsessed. You think teenage boys think about sex all day? These women are like that. At first, it’s fascinating reading. But it gets old. And because Taddeo’s research ended before #metoo, we don’t know if the women’s focus on sex — sex as an activity, but more, sex as affirmation, sex as acceptance — changed.
[To watch an interview with Lisa Taddeo, click here. To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback, click here. To buy the Kindle edition, click here.]
The New Yorker was withering about the writing:
When the sixteen-year-old Maggie loses her virginity to a divorced “military man” — the experience that will later send her to her English teacher seeking advice — she is described as “laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city. When they leave, their residue remains, the discoloration on the wood where the sun came through every day for many days, until one day it didn’t.” It doesn’t make sense, but you get the gist: young women, their minds and their bodies, are lands to be colonized by men — and they are also homes in these lands, in possession of surfaces that can become weathered by men’s fickle affections. In the middle of Maggie’s story, Taddeo begins inserting compound nouns to describe emotional states: her teacher makes her cheeks “hot with loveflush,” the feeling of danger when something threatens their affair is “fearquick,” and the response her mother has when she misses her curfew is “angerlove.”
There’s a reason for this language: Taddeo knows these women so well that she believes — and she may well convince you — that she’s inside their heads. “These stories belong to these women,” she writes. “It is these three specific women who are in charge of their narratives. There are many sides to all stories, but this is theirs.” I’m not convinced these women are in charge of their narratives. Or anything important. I saw them as victims at the start of the book and victims at the end. But my friend was correct. I didn’t put it down.
