First, you meet Maggie, a young woman in the midst of a highly emotional court case against a teacher who allegedly assaulted her back in high school. Next, you drop into Lina’s world, and when you do, she’s still only 15 and feeling moony and romantic about love in the way only people who haven’t experienced it yet can. Then you’re with Sloan, a beautiful woman who shares a secret sex habit with her chef husband.
The details of each of these women’s stories are tiny and beautiful and would be astonishing even if they were made up. But they aren’t. These are the true stories of three real women, written by author Lisa Taddeo in her debut book about desire called Three Women.
From the very beginning, Taddeo sets the record straight in a short author’s note: “This is a work of nonfiction.” It’s an important tip, given that the rest reads much like a novel—as if you’re inside each character’s head in their respective chapters. But when you learn that Taddeo spent eight years with Maggie, Lina, and Sloan in order to learn their stories, it all makes sense.
Taddeo’s intent with Three Women is to “convey vital truths about women and desire,” as she writes at the end of her author’s note. She does so by including the smallest of details—gems that anyone who’s ever felt horny or craved sex, love, attention, and validation can find relatable. Sometimes, these moments are lovely and nostalgic, like when Lina prepares to meet up with the boy she’s in love with by shaving her entire body. Other times, they’re painful, like when Maggie searches for any kind of acknowledgment that the alleged assault she experienced with her teacher really happened.
Three Women is true and exciting in a way that makes it impossible to put down. Here, Taddeo explains how she found these three women, decided to tell their stories, and wrote the best book you’ll read about desire all year.
Cosmopolitan: You write in the prologue that this was a project about eight years in the making. How did it start?
Lisa Taddeo: It was always a book about desire. I started out going to the porn castle in San Francisco and doing things I thought were kind of like checking off boxes so that I could know what I was doing. I thought it was going to be about sex, and it gradually became more about desire and the emotions behind the act.
Why were you more interested in desire than sex?
I lost most of my family in my 20s, and I was left with wanting. Not a sexual wanting, but wanting something that wasn’t inside me or something that I had lost. I think that’s where the core root of it came from.
I think that everything in life is sex and grief. “Death and taxes” is the more common phrase. But I think that, for me, sex and grief are basically the building blocks of what we know. I think it’s weird to not be interested in desire or greed.
How did you find the three women who are in the book?
It was a long road, and probably the longest road compared to writing about or even interviewing these women. Finding them was really hard. I drove across the country six times. I posted signs up across the county in almost every state—on gas-station windows, university billboards, barbecue restaurants, slot machines, salon parlors—literally everywhere I could think of to cut as wide a swath as I could of the population.
I moved to seven different places for 10 different people who were in those places. The first draft I sent to my editor had about 20 people in it (maybe a little less). There were men toward the end who were also in it. So it wasn’t like, Oh, I’m going to write a book about three women. By no means did I know what I was doing at any point until the end.
So how did you go from a draft with 20 people to only three women?
It was late in the game. Of the 20 stories I sent my editor, these stories were the largest, in part because they were the ones who let me into their lives in the most honest, wild ways. They let me be with them in so many different instances and told me so many different things.
Another reason: Their stories were the longest. Partly because they were the most honest; partly because they were very compelling. Because it was a trial, there was a beginning, middle, and end to Maggie’s story. When I was writing about it, Lina’s story was happening in real time, and that was so compelling to me. I was able to go with her to so many of the experiences that are in the book. Sloan had a happy marriage, and I wanted a happy relationship that wasn’t necessarily a traditional one. I was interested in Sloan because she was not like me or anyone else I knew.
The book is divided into chapters centered around each woman, and something amazing you realize as you read it is that each chapter sounds different—like it’s being written in that person’s voice. How did you do that?
I spent so much time with them—the amount of time that I think people spend with certain best friends. I also asked the same question a lot of times. I’ve always done that with nonfiction: Asking the same question over and over again, and talking about one minute in someone’s life for, like, three hours. I looked at text messages, at journal entries, Facebook—stuff like that. It wasn’t easy; it takes a lot of time. But if you spend that much time it sort of organically comes together.
Did they have any other involvement with the book as you were working on it?
Two of them have read the book, but I’m not supposed to say which two. One of them does not want to but is totally happy about it. The two who have read it were surprisingly happier and more content than...well, not more than I expected, but they felt everything I hoped for them to feel.
Early on in the book, I read the description of Lina’s assault and thought, Oh, this is going to be her story. But then, it’s not, and I was surprised by that. Why didn’t you take the direction most writers would have?
These things weigh on us a lot...and then, they also don’t. One of the things that listening to these women’s stories has done is made me think about things that have happened to me. Not necessarily awful things (although there were awful things), but everything that shaped who I am and my desire and lack of desire in certain places. When it came to Lina, she told that story very, very quickly and simply and was just like, Yeah, that happened, but I didn’t get a disease or get pregnant, so it’s fine.
When we went deeper over the years, she definitely came to feel that that wasn’t the case. That said, she also had other things going on. I didn’t want it to be a story about assault. There is assault, and it’s a huge part of a lot of people’s lives. It’s a huge part of something that shapes us. But there’s so much more that happens. I was interested in telling a whole story.
With Maggie, I dealt with something very specific: An alleged assault by a former high school teacher. I wanted to tell her most complex story, which involves the feelings she felt for the teacher and this assault that she allegedly suffered at his hands. There were a lot of complex things going on, and I think those complex things deserve to be heard. A lot of people are like, “Oh, Maggie’s a victim.” And yeah, she was allegedly a victim. But she’s also a human being who felt things and is not just a cipher of assault.
Are you at all nervous to see how people will react to the book once it’s out?
I worry that people will judge the women. And I hope people know I’m not generalizing. I’m very clear that these are three specific women’s stories. It’s not called “100 Women.” I’m not trying to say that all women are like this and all men are like this. These are three specific stories, and they speak very powerfully for themselves. Hopefully, if they aren’t judged, this will open doors for more people to tell their stories. Maggie, for example, has been judged enough for a lifetime, so I really hope it doesn’t happen with her.
What do you hope your book conveys to those who read it?
One of the commonalities about these three women is that they never judged anyone else, and people judged them. I would hope people would see the way that they have judged others and the ways others have judged them, because I think that both things happen to everybody. I hope that people will see that after reading this book and just be a little bit kinder with one another.
Interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
