Lisa Taddeo’s debut nonfiction work, “Three Women,” follows the intriguing sexual behaviors of Maggie, a high schooler in North Dakota, Lina, a suburban housewife of rural Indiana and Sloane, a successful restaurant owner on the East Coast, in a framework that resembles fiction, though the stories are all true.
The book tells of Maggie’s relationship with her high school debate teacher, Lina’s affair with a former flame, and Sloane’s escapades in bed with others, at the request of her husband. The work Taddeo put into writing “Three Women” is impressive in the portrait of female desire that it paints, but the book can also seem flat due to its limited scope and, at times, lackluster prose. The book remains important nevertheless due to the window it provides into the minds of women, validating and highlighting their needs.
In 2012, Taddeo began working with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, which is known to be “the trusted source for scientific knowledge and research on critical issues in sexuality, gender, and reproduction.” Taddeo’s work melds a more clinical approach with an interpersonal focus on women’s desire. Though her writing reflects heavy and thorough research, it also reflects boundless compassion and the intense goal of understanding the lives of other women. The framework of “Three Women” and the thoroughness of Taddeo’s method are the most impressive elements of the book.
The scope of “Three Women” is limited. Maggie, Lina and Sloane are white, straight, American women. Their personal lives are as complex as anyone else’s, and these homogeneous aspects of their lives do not present anything new or revelatory about life or love, which is disappointing given the rave reviews the book received. Though Taddeo’s research was undoubtedly comprehensive, writing of three privileged women does not seem revolutionary.
The length Taddeo went to document the intimate details of these women’s lives is striking. She conducted her research for “Three Women” over the course of nearly a decade. She drove across the country six times, moved to the women’s respective towns, and spent “thousands of hours” interviewing and working to understand her female subjects. This extreme, admirable effort is apparent in how well Taddeo conveyed the inner-workings of Maggie, Lina and Sloane’s minds. Maggie’s chapters are told between the present, as Maggie is examined in court after coming forward with accusations against her former lover and high school teacher long after the fact, at the age of 23. Taddeo is able to aptly articulate Maggie’s evolving feelings about the situation, not once stumbling over the gap between Maggie’s life as a teenager and her life as an adult.
One shortcoming of Taddeo’s work is the way it reinforces ideas of gender-oriented dependency. Taddeo writes that, “whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning.” Regardless of whether this is true or not, Taddeo’s idea that it stands “for the whole of what longing in America looks like,” as she says, is disheartening. This disconnect in the timing of desire invalidates men almost completely, writing them off as inherently bound to solely objectify women. Additionally, the statement that heterosexuality represents all of America is jaded at best. It is surprising that an author who spent a decade taking a deep dive into the details of three lives is then denouncing complexity on a broader scale, and instead saying that three individuals represent a whole nation; it feels like a contradiction.
Taddeo’s “Three Women” should not be wholly written off, as the book provides a case study in research and execution. But the generalizations Taddeo draws from her very tailored research demand further inquiry into the objective of “Three Women” as a whole.
