Hidden lives
Lisa Taddeo’s novel of female desire and destructive relationships is unsettling and unputdownable, writes Barbara Speed
When she was a young woman, Lisa Taddeo’s mother was followed to work and back every day by a man who masturbated as he watched her. Now, after her mother’s death, Taddeo has many questions: why did she do nothing to stop it? Did it make her cry? And then, jutting out, an uncertainty most writers, let alone daughters, would never probe: “She was not the type of woman to take pleasure in this. But I can’t know for sure.”
In order to write Three Women, best described as a non-fiction novel, Taddeo, a journalist, moved around the US over the course of eight years to live near each of the three women her book is about (two of them anonymous), spending hundreds of hours with them, reading their text messages and emails and speaking to their friends and family. Taddeo
then wove their stories into a map of female, mostly heterosexual desire.
Taddeo raises uncomfortable questions around each of these stories: did Maggie, who had an affair with her high-school teacher at the age of 17, eventually report him to police because he rejected her? Does Sloane, a glamorous yet cold restaurant owner, have sex with other men in front of her husband because it pleases him – or her? And can lonely housewife Lina’s affair with a silent, brutal man be empowering?
At times, these themes do not make for easy reading. They share borders with false accusations, the grey areas of the #Metoo movement, and the notion that we can wholeheartedly desire what might damage us. There are good reasons why we don’t speculate about the desires of those who experience sexual abuse.
Another reason is that old rape myth: that any desire on the part of a woman constitutes consent, and justifies anything that happens to her. Maggie wanted a relationship with her teacher. It was still abusive for him to enter into one. In fact, Taddeo implies, her desire was the thing he betrayed most of all – by leaving little notes in her copies of the Twilight series, spending hours with her on the phone, and then cutting her out of his life. The way Maggie was hurt has no accurate expression in the legal system, nor in our social vocabulary.
In other, small ways, the book allows women to say what they would normally keep hidden. Sloane revels in how attractive and slim she knows she is: “She had never been upset by a reflection of herself.” Both Sloane and Lina have children, but they are barely sketched, forming little of the women’s inner lives.
Running through the book is the idea that other women police female desire too, perhaps as much, or even
more, than men. Lina tells a group of women at a local health clinic about her affair, and the judgement blooms most when Lina is happy. “You can all judge me,” she tells them. “But I found something to take the pain away and until you have felt my pain, you shouldn’t judge me.” When Sloane has a threesome with a colleague, his wife confronts her in the supermarket: “You’re the woman, Jenny spat. And you let this happen.”
At times, the book’s style is distracting, with no speech marks, mixed tenses, overwrought metaphors – “she feels used, like dirty underwear that no one should wear, because it hasn’t been washed” – and invented compound words – “lovecrush”.
But mostly it reads like a thriller: unputdownable because, despite its focus on white, middle-class American women, it is a story you will never have read before.