This brilliant, maddening, fascinating, upsetting book is unlike anything I can recall reading. With Three Women, Lisa Taddeo has told the stories of three American women in the most intimate terms imaginable, and the result is frankly astonishing — if not always in the ways that it might first appear.
Some context is in order. Taddeo spent eight years writing this book; what was intended to be a standard longform essay about the sex lives of American women somehow morphed into an embedded journalistic deep dive that had Taddeo moving into the towns these three women lived in, speaking to them, shadowing them, essentially turning her life over to the project. This is impressive, no doubt, but it also feels like a sort of special pleading; surely a project that has taken this much out of a person’s life deserves acclaim? In this case, though, none is needed.
Taddeo is a dazzling writer. Her prose is alive to the music of the language and her descriptions are so finely tuned and vivid as to compel immediate absorption. These women’s interior monologues vibrate with the subterranean hum of the banausic, and they are often psychologically brutal. “At first they’re afraid of you,” the lovelorn teen Maggie writes of boys, “and then they don’t take their shoes off when you fuck.” The adulterous housewife Lina doesn’t want to be the kind of wife who “looks at your penis like a leftover piece of meat loaf she doesn’t want to eat but also refuses to throw out.” And the rich, elegant Sloane has a story that is a dark fever dream of damage and kink, spooling out from the “elemental truth … that [she] had been lucky, having been born into the right family. Clean water and skiiing vacations.”
Taddeo’s inhabitation of these three women’s inner lives is so profoundly complete as to render Three Women is a living exercise in the epistemological perils of a certain kind of documentary nonfiction. How could the author possibly know, in such granular and complete detail, what her subjects are thinking and feeling? The ventriloquism is so complete that it is faintly disorienting; the banal phrase “it reads like a novel” comes inescapably to mind. “There are many sides to all stories,” Taddeo writes in her introduction. “This is theirs.” Well, maybe. For one thing, the disjunction between Taddeo’s cool and sinewy prose and the very ordinary voices of these mostly very ordinary women suggests that we are seeing not “their” side of the story so much as another, new, boundary-expanding side all its own. It’s a little queasy-making — the border between imagination and reality, between fiction and reportage, has been, at least in formal terms, annihilated, and the relation between the two, always fraught, has been de-centered, blurred, unmoored by an act of radical narrative ambition.
Part of what makes Three Women so entrancing are the unruly implications of these women’s disparate stories. If one accepts that all writing is political, and one does, then reading Three Women might feel like sprinting at top speed into a brick wall. One could argue that any attempt to account honestly for the inner lives of these women is itself, by definition, a feminist act — their stories document copious instances of structural chauvinism. That said, Taddeo’s protagonists repeatedly behave in ways that are mind-bogglingly self-destructive and retrograde. The engine of their abasement is their absolute instinct for valuing the sexual pleasure of the men in their lives above their own well-being, often at great cost. The results are consistently disastrous, and many readers, I suspect, will at times want to throw the book against the wall in frustration. This is a measure of Taddeo’s skill and honesty and of the power of her narrative, which illustrates so potently the messy power imbalances that still dominate commonly held gender roles.
Of the three women’s narrative arcs, Sloane’s is the most sinister and unsettling, Lina’s the most sweetly desperate, while Maggie’s … what Maggie goes through is utterly horrifying, and so grotesquely unjust that the only possible reaction seems to be stunned rage. As a teen, she got involved in a physical relationship — one hesitates to call it “sex” — with a high-school teacher, and the unravelling of her life as a result is like some terrifying contemporary remake of The Scarlet Letter. “It doesn’t get more lonely thatn this,” she thinks at the nadir, “to be thrown to the wolves by people you barely remember.” Sloane and Lina, meanwhile, both fumble along into static non-endings whose indeterminacy feels like its own kind of purgatorial emptiness.
Like drugs, the sex in Three Women takes so much effort, so much maintenance and longing and deception and exhaustion and just endless work, all in the service of such a fleeting pleasure, that it feels both like an immense waste of energy and utterly unquestionable. And despite the book’s graphic, clinical, and thoroughly unglamorous depictions of the act itself, despite all the cumming and grunting and squirming and sucking and fingering, sex remains a mystery; the women remain utterly bereft of any understanding of the brain-scrambling needs, “the heat and sting of female want,” that commandeer their lives. Sex, thinks Sloane, “is everything to do with bodies and nothing at all to do with bodies.” That is the magic, and the curse.
[Published on July 9, 2019 by Avid Reader/ Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $27.00 hardcover]