8 YEARS. 3 SEX LIVES. 1 BOOK
Lisa Taddeo talks female desire
Lisa Taddeo’s eight-year investigation into three women’s sex lives is the book everyone will be talking about this summer. Natasha Lunn meets the Three Women author to find out how she’s pulled it off – and what she learned about female desire along the way
Sloane is a restaurant owner married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other people. Lina is a housewife whose husband hasn’t touched her in years. Maggie is a student developing a bond with her teacher. These are the women journalist Lisa Taddeo interviewed over eight years – yes, eight years! – for her book Three Women.
It’s a non-fiction story about three women’s lives that’s really about much more: the intensity of longing, the inequality of desire, the sting of judgement, the absence of love in childhood, and how we try to find lost parts of ourselves in the arms of another person. It’s painful and beautiful, gutting and sexy. I don’t think I’ve read a book that has captivated me as intensely as this one, which I still think about, months later, in the quietest hours of the night.
I’m not the only one who has been stunned by Taddeo’s ‘immersive reporting’: Elizabeth Gilbert called it ‘a non-fiction literary masterpiece at the same level as
In Cold Blood’, and Gwyneth Paltrow said, ‘I literally could not put it down.’ It also sold for a seven-figure deal in the US and a six-figure deal in the UK. In other words, it’s one of the most hyped books of the summer.
Female sexuality is a hot topic, but it’s the combination of Taddeo’s ambitious idea, forensic reporting and intoxicating writing that makes this book special. To write it, she uprooted her life for nearly a decade. She moved to Indiana and North
Dakota. She drove across America six times. She left business cards in slot machines, at universities, at a hormone treatment group. After finding 20 women, Taddeo whittled them down to three: Sloane, Lina and Maggie. She interviewed them in person, on the phone, by text and by email, read their diaries, spoke to their friends and families, and moved to their towns so she could better understand their day-to-day lives.
She met Maggie in North Dakota, after reading about the alleged sexual relationship she’d had with her teacher and the subsequent trial. Taddeo thinks Maggie was open to sharing such intimate details because ‘she’d been so judged by people and had not been able to tell her story’. The book details Maggie’s version of events – however, in 2015, her teacher was acquitted of three of the five charges against him and reinstated at the school. Maggie’s story is so truly believable that you’ll feel outraged at the verdict. Has the teacher responded? ‘I’ve tried to contact him numerous times from the start,’ says Taddeo. ‘I would be very interested in talking to him. But I didn’t hear back.’
‘WE’RE ALL SO ALIKE AND YET WE JUDGE EACH OTHER’
It’s hard to imagine the questions Taddeo must have asked in order to get the details included in her book. In one chapter, she describes how Lina ‘fucks him from the floor upward and then downward, like a crab or an acrobat, her elbows pointed in the same direction as her knees’. Why does she think the women were willing to share? ‘[I was] something between a friend and a therapist you don’t have to pay for,’ she reasons. ‘With a therapist, when you get to the 44th minute, they’re looking at their clock. I said, “I’m here for as long as you’ve got.”’
As their narratives unfold, we discover that Lina, Maggie and Sloane have stories buried in their pasts that are steering their presents. Taddeo digs them up, showing us how all the threads of what has gone before led them to this point. ‘You have a certain vision of your parents, which is more about what they provide for you and what they taught you, but it’s the underlying parts that shape us,’ she explains.
Another fascinating theme she explores is judgement between women. Taddeo thinks ‘women can do the most harm to each other because we know what hurts’, and believes there is ‘competition at the most elemental level’. How? ‘Not necessarily for the same man or lover. I think there’s a biological competition to have children. Two sisters I know… the older had four children, then the younger one wasn’t able to have a fourth. That made her feel like less of a woman than her sister.’ It’s this competition that led women to judge Lina (when she admitted she wanted to have an affair) and Sloane (when she slept with other men). ‘Lina had two men, Sloane had her husband plus all these other men. There were women who were like, “You’re taking too many, it’s not fair.”’
At times, it’s easy to forget Three Women is non-fiction, and Taddeo admits she is ‘concerned about the women if it gets bigger’. While Maggie is comfortable to be known, Sloane asked not to be identified, so her name has been changed. Lina was happy for her name to be used but doesn’t want to read the finished book, not because she’s worried what her husband might think – they are now separated – but because ‘she doesn’t want to see herself the way she was then’.
There is a vulnerability to Taddeo, which is, I suspect, what allowed her to forge intense bonds with three strangers. She admits she has ‘a lot of anxiety with loss’ because she lost her parents at a young age, and because she was a later-in-life accidental pregnancy, she had a feeling of being unwanted. I think she cares deeply, not just about these three women, but about all women. About the lies they are sold and the inequalities that drain their lives of happiness; the options that are taken from them and the approval they are trained to crave. I ask her what truths she hopes her book will give to women who read it. She thinks for a moment, then says, ‘We’re all so alike and yet we judge each other. I think the truth of desire is that it’s universal in the way it manifests. It looks different, it has different clothes on, some of us subvert it in different ways, but it’s the same need that we are all born with. Through these three women I hope people will see bits of themselves, and understand that all of our stories of desire are equally important.’