This is book is a piece of art.
Three Women is a book about female desire and the way the world looks upon and reacts to desire when it comes from a woman. Writing in her prologue, Taddeo explains:
‘As I began to write this book, a book about human desire, I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee…. 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.’
The book is nonfiction but with Taddeo’s sensitive and descriptive method of storytelling, you would never know. She tells the stories of three different women with very different relationships to their own desire. Taddeo spent over 8 years interviewing these women, moving to their hometowns, and getting to know them on an intimate level in order to tell their stories with truth and care.
We meet Sloane who is wealthy, successful, and respectable, and who often enjoys inviting a third person into the bedroom with her and her husband.
There’s Lina who has been mistreated by men since she was a young girl, and who now finds herself in a loveless, sexless marriage, pursuing an affair with her high school crush, a man who also treats her badly but to whom she is utterly devoted nevertheless.
And Maggie, the only character whose true identity hasn’t been hidden. Maggie is a young woman who took a long time to understand that the affair she had with her older, married schoolteacher when she was a teenager, wasn’t the fairytale romance she once thought it to be. As an adult, Maggie is working as a waitress, and still coming to terms with the relationship that shook her life as a young adult. Aaron Knodel, her abuser, ‘North Dakota Teacher of the Year 2014’, has returned to work after being acquitted of all charges against him.
All of these women have acted out of desire and consequently been judged for it. At the core, this is less a book on female desire than an investigation into the tiny, subtle (or big in the case of Maggie) ways the world is still weighted in favour of men.
When it is revealed that a regular partner of Sloane and her husband has not been honest with his wife about his relationship with the couple, it is Sloane who bears the brunt of accusation and hostility. As the ‘other woman’ she is somehow more responsible than any of the men in the relationship, despite the fact that it was her husband who encouraged it in the first instance.
When Lina and her lust-less husband attend couples therapy, she reveals her deep-seated need to be loved, and held, and kissed, only to be informed that the sensation of kissing ‘offends’ her husband. A stance that the therapist sees as reasonable and continues the session without the hint of a suggestion that Lina’s husband should compromise in any way (even though it is implied that Lina should compromise her needs and acquiesce to her husband’s aversion to affection).
And with Maggie, her abuser’s likeability and ‘family-man’ presentation earns him a gold star in the court of public opinion – despite clear evidence of the affair – while Maggie is blasted with harsh words and an obscene level of judgement from the press, the internet, and even old acquaintances.
‘One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.’ Taddeo writes.
We are all so quick to judge other women, branding them as pathetic, or needy, or whores, or prudes, all the while fearful that others may tarnish us by the same brush.
With Three Women, Lisa Taddeo’s aim was simple – ‘To register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn.’ – but the nuance, detail, and affection of this book is anything but.