Title & author
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Synopsis
What began as an eight-year project to track the desires of men ended up the tales of Three Women, women who from a glance the reader might judge and dismiss. There’s Maggie, a young woman in the process of pressing charges against a former high school teacher for taking advantage of her as a minor; Lina, whose husband refuses to touch her; and Sloane, who, with her husband, invites other individuals into the bedroom. While these three women’s stories are connected by the theme of desire, Taddeo’s portraits are really what uphold the text.
Who should read this book
Fans of Roxane Gay, Susan Choi
What we’re thinking about
Who dictates desire?
Trigger warning(s)
Sexual violence, self-harm, sexism
What began as an eight-year project to track the desires of men ended up the tales of Three Women (Avid Reader Press, 2019), women who from a glance the reader might judge and dismiss. “When my mother was a young woman a man used to follow her to work every morning and masturbate, in step behind her,” Lisa Taddeo begins (Taddeo, 3). In a book about women and desire, why start here, focusing upon the encroaching and horrific desires of man? This is the question that lingers on every page of the text: When and where does desire become no longer our own, untied to and shaped by that of anyone else’s, particularly a man’s? There’s the ever-present double standard of women’s purity and men’s promiscuity. In twenty-first century America, some of us may be past the whole white-as-a-dove expectation for women, but just the same, many are not. Taddeo’s mom never said anything about the man out of fear, the same reason women never admit sexual desires, needs, and wants. Sex and women have a tangled, unforgiving past. Yet men can say, feel, and do as they please.
First, there’s Maggie, a young woman in the process of pressing charges against a former high school teacher for taking advantage of her as a minor. The entire town dismisses her claims by way of calling her an attention-seeker, a whore. But neither Taddeo nor Maggie shy away from the complexities of feelings Maggie faces or the tangled desire, giving the reader no choice but to go beyond that first glance. “Almost, you reach for him, as much to say you’re sorry as to beg him to take care of you,” writes Taddeo, whose use of the second person masterfully brings both Maggie’s voice and readers into the story (14). The constant conflict within her—about whether she loves him, he loves her, her status as a survivor, her self worth, her confidence, her future and past—is laid bare on the pages.
Lina’s husband refuses to touch her, breaking her, a woman who since the age of fifteen has known “more than anything else” that she wants to fall in love (23). And it is because of this reflection, of knowing when she first fell in love with Aiden back at fifteen, that she turns to him, separating from her husband and having an affair. The women in her support group critique her for her actions, a marriage therapist says her husband is in the right, but once again, on paper, there is no room for the readers to not hear her story, to try and chip away at the complexities of her life and relationships.
Sloane and her husband invite others into their bedroom, a pattern that makes it hard for her to befriend other women in their small community. And while she fantasizes about her husband with other women, just as he craves watching or knowing what she does with or without him, there is always a probe within, pushing her to determine whether she actually desires this. Is it her wish, or is it his and she just goes along with it? Sloane’s account depicts this constant feeling of how “it is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies” (53). There are moments when it is too much, when she lingers on the fact of what is happening before her, but then there are moments when she feels loved wholeheartedly, knowing her husband trusts her, wants to satisfy her.
While these three women’s stories are connected by the theme of desire, Taddeo’s portraits are really what uphold the text. Perhaps unexpected, her writing feels journalistic—you can sense her behind the pages, asking the women questions to reach in and pull out their innermost thoughts, all the while keeping a safe and unbiased distance by letting the women describe their every moment—but it is anything but academic or plain. Her writing overflows with emotion, as if spreading its arms out to gather the words before they escape, capturing them so women will see, hopefully even relate.
But is this a complete depiction of womanhood and desire? While the backgrounds of the individuals weren’t strictly revealed, it did appear that they were all middle to upper class, potentially white, women. Taddeo’s “disclaimer” in her epilogue addresses this, as she writes “Even when women are being heard, it is often only the right types of women who are actively heard. White ones. Rich ones. Pretty ones. Young ones. Best to be all those things at once,” but is this enough (299)? Carmen Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (as an example) explores sex and women, particularly the marginalized, and their desire’s and those of men. It’s received praise, but has it been anywhere near as large as that of Taddeo’s book? Is this because of her skill, or because of who is writing it?
“So now you write because you want to prove them wrong,” Taddeo relays in Maggie’s narrative (189). The text begs the question: can desire exist in women, at this point in time, without taking on at least part of the complicated, sexual history the gender has with men?
The women have spent their lives moving around men. “The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders” (165). Maggie, Sloane, and Lina begin to take control of their narrative by telling their story. There is no happy ending, because, as the reader may have to remind themselves quite often, this book is reality. The characters’ desires are dictated by the men in their lives, but Taddeo offers them a chance to finally have control, to evaluate and decide for themselves: what does my own desire look like, feel like, taste, like, when separated from his?
“I believe that their stories conjure desire as it is right now, the beast of it, the glory and the brutality. They are blood and bone and love and pain. Birth and death. Everything at once. And that, at last, is life” (306). Desire is not pretty, it is not simple, it is not separated into neat boxes. It is messy: who controls our desire, especially as women, and how are we able to take control of it ourselves?
“The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there.
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How do Sloane, Lina, and Maggie’s stories relate to one another, despite being dramatically different?
Do these women exist on their own in any way during the space of this title? If so, where? If not, why?
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