ON THE RECORD

“There was criticism and disbelief along the way. I doubted myself, my choices and the process at every turn”

After dedicating eight years to investigating the intimate experiences and feelings of a trio of women, American writer and journalist Lisa Taddeo’s non-fiction debut, Three Women, broke conventions of literary style and delivered a raw and real exploration of female desire. Here, she unpacks the process of producing one of the decade’s most seminal works and details the impact it had on her own life.

AROUND THE TIME I began writing Three Women – about the desire and love lives of three ordinary women across the United States – my friends and I were single and dating in New York, though dating is a strong word for what happens in New York, indeed in all large cities across the world.

It was unravelling when men did not write back and then after a week texted the various iterations of: “u up?” Only slightly more than it was unravelling was how it intrigued me. Desire – our own and that of others – is at once all we think about and talk about, and also something we hold close and bury deep. I wanted to explore the nuance of that intersection. I began writing my book thinking I’d be more interested in the motivations of men. But then I wasn’t.

The throttle of male desire often ended once a conquest was achieved, whereas for the women it was the opposite. This is not to generalise. But the three individuals whose stories were the most trenchant, the most honest and open, happened to be three women. These specific three women.

I read about Maggie, a young woman who allegedly had an inappropriate relationship when she was underage, in a local newspaper story. I called her mother’s house and introduced myself, and the next day I was driving to meet her.

I found Lina, the suburban housewife who begins an all-consuming affair with her high-school boyfriend, after I’d moved to another state. Right away Lina’s story spoke to me. It was like a bell ringing.

The third woman, Sloane, I learned about after moving into an island community, which I was interested in for the way it was a coveted spot in the summer and an isolated locals-only microcosm in the winter. Several months into my moving there, I heard about this glimmering entrepreneur through the grapevine. There were two lines of gossip. The first was that she slept with other men in front of her husband. The second, which also shocked the people who whispered it to me, was that she had sex with her husband every day – willingly.

With each woman I’d like to think it was as much forging a human connection as it was finding a subject. In two of the cases, I moved a short distance from their homes for more than a year in each instance. It was in this way that I was able to most acutely experience their stories. We worked out together, had coffee, had drinks, had dinner, went shopping, went to meet the people they were seeing.

If you want to write about mid-century modern furniture reproduction, people want to talk to you. With desire, it’s different. To hear from the people with real stories I found that I had to move into a town, get to know a person, watch television with their friends and family. To learn about desire, you can’t interview. You must be present, emotionally and bodily. You eat the food they have made, shop at the same grocery store, text with them and listen when they come undone, because you’ve become something more subaqueous than a friend.

Of course, there was criticism and disbelief along the way. I doubted myself, my choices and the process at every turn. I doubted my methods. I worried I had no methods. I made many lists. I tried to schedule my days by posting signs, making phone calls, and then, in the afternoon and evenings, spending time with the various people I had already found.

About six years into the research, my editor at Esquire said: “You know, Lisa, there is a point at which you must stop reporting.” And yet somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that the stories would tell me when they were done being reported.

With Maggie, I was fairly set that her story would begin with the alleged relationship and stretch through the trial and beyond into the immediate aftermath. It had a clear beginning, middle and end. With Sloane, it was after she told me about what transpired with her brother when she was a young child, that facilitated her own reckoning. With Lina, I think I could have gone on reporting forever, but I stopped myself because it had been nearly a decade.

Of course, there was my own life with which to contend. My own loneliness and grief. Right before I started the book, I lost both my parents rather tragically; in fact, my entire family was decimated over the course of a decade. I found myself very open to hearing the stories of others. I found myself wanting to make sure others didn’t experience the same sort of loneliness, of not having a non-judgemental ear.

Over the course of the research, during one of those cross-country trips, in an RV campsite, I found out I was pregnant with the child of a man I had known for only a month. I had a painful 10-hour miscarriage that culminated in a Starbucks bathroom. The emotional wasteland of my soul was such that it was easier then to just get up and move to another state. The man I’d been seeing for a month came to meet me out there was no longer the father of my unborn child, but still he quit his job and started working at the photo department of the local K-Mart to pay for our rented home. I have been wounded by some men and allowed by other men to write, to spend all my time on my work, on listening to people for years and waiting until I’d gotten their stories right.

People ask me if I would do this again, invest that sort of time and energy [on a single project]. I now share a four-year-old child with that man who moved to be with me, and lately she has been saying things like: “I want you to just be my mummy, all day and every day.” I believe that answers the question. But then she looks out the window, at the gorgeous horse farm across the road from our tiny house and she very deliberately says: “But I also want a horse.”

As women, sometimes we want to have it both ways. And I believe that, every time, we should.

Three Women (Bloomsbury, $26) by Lisa Taddeo is out now.