Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

NIGHTSTANDS & COFFEE TABLES

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“Women shouldn’t judge one another’s lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.”

Lisa Taddeo traveled across America interviewing women about desire. The author blended into three women’s lives, learning their heartbreaks, hard decisions, and regrets. She highlights the stories of Maggie, Lina, and Sloane, names changed to preserve the women’s identities and thus ensure the gritty truth of their accounts. The stories are told in a narrative fashion, the author speaking for them, with delicious commentary about the reality of women’s lives and the often brutal consequences of their choices. Taddeo spares no salacious details, intimately describing the women’s encounters, but the most fascinating parts are the women’s thoughts, why they made certain choices, and even more telling, why they would do so again.

Maggie is a seventeen-year-old high school student being pursued by her married English teacher. Raised in a family of alcoholics and often ignored and pushed aside, the surprising attention from a superior engulfs Maggie, and she finds as much excitement from being someone’s secret as she does resentment at being hidden. When the unlawful romance inevitably ends, Maggie spirals and years later finds herself in court facing a man she suspects she may still love. She learns the hardship of accusing a man of a crime the public doesn’t want to admit he could commit.

Lina is a married mother of two with a perfect home and privileged life, but a husband who refuses to touch her. Longing for affection, and ultimately just a passionate kiss, she actively pursues an affair with an old boyfriend, one who isn’t particularly interested in who she is as much as what she can give him. Lina is uniquely aware of the reality of her affair, and yet seeks it like air, as if being desired gives her the license to be alive. Her desperation resonates, as we’ve all been on the other end of a relationship hanging by a thread, hoping we care enough to hold it all together.

Sloane is a woman with a picture-perfect past who refuses to live a picture-perfect life. She obsesses about her weight, as if being slim is the only way to stay relevant. She uses her body to attract men, even after she’s married to one who shares her unique relationship aspirations. Even in the thralls of living the way many refuse to, she confesses the uncertainty of her choices and her commitment to making them again and again. She lives openly and though not ashamed of who she is, regrets the hurt it causes people in her life. Her life is one most readers refuse to acknowledge, but can’t help wanting to know more about.

This book is for the open-minded reader. It is laced with profanity and sexual references, but its honesty and raw truths expose its core message, that while we all may live differently, we all share big beating hearts longing for something more. These women just had the audacity to say so.