The first time I read Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, I was 24 and on the Amtrak back to New York following an emotionally intense reunion with a married man I’d first slept with two years earlier. Back then, I was a 22-year-old intern at the magazine where both Taddeo and her onscreen fictionalization—played by Shailene Woodley in the STARZ adaptation that premiered last week—were frequent and esteemed contributors.
I was well aware, of course, of Three Women in the months leading up to its 2019 publication, when advanced readers’ copies filled the office in which I was a temporary guest. Esquire’s archivist would regularly greet me with photocopied printouts of the magazine’s best and brightest articles of yore, including Taddeo’s 2012 essay “Why We Cheat,” a selection that made me—a nascent homewrecker—wonder whether he could see straight through my skin. As an aspiring sex writer raised on Sex and the City reruns and dreaming of Cosmo bylines, it hadn’t occurred to me that this kind of sex writing was something you could do for a magazine—incisive, cynical, exquisitely unlikable—but I instantly knew it was the kind I wanted to write.
Despite being an avid if recent fan of Taddeo, I avoided her much-anticipated narrative nonfiction debut. Partly out of fear—I knew somewhere in my bones that Three Women would do a number on me I wasn’t ready for—and partly out of some subconscious confidence that whatever wisdom it contained was something that would find me (and gut me and see me) in its own time. Two years later, on the train home from a hotel room where I’d shed blood and tears and exchanged bodily fluids with the long-term, on/off object of my illicit infatuation, it did just that.
Flash forward another three years and I’m now a sex editor at Cosmo, writing my own sex column in the same glass tower where I first found Taddeo. Her wildly successful first book is now a TV series, one that makes a (fictionalized version) of the author a character, a fourth woman rather than a narrator whose first-person divulgences are limited to the prologue and epilogue.
Perhaps the most significant departure from the book its otherwise fairly faithful TV adaptation makes, I was as wary as I was curious to see an onscreen representation of Taddeo beyond the shadow version of myself I’d projected upon her as a reader—something it can be all too easy to do as she carves gorgeous if gutting prose out of your secret fears, least flattering beliefs, the sharpest realities of sex-having womanhood. It’s tempting to feel like you’re her shadow or her yours—just you and Taddeo in the corner, stroking your scales.
Spoiler alert, to whatever extent you consider something that occurs approximately three and a half minutes into the first episode of a show a spoiler: The TV adaptation of Three Women begins with writer Gay Talese telling Taddeo’s fictional counterpart, Gia, that she should sleep with married men. This, apparently, is the only way she can possibly finish the book she’s supposed to be writing on sex in America.
A Gia voiceover laughs this directive off to the tune of, “Lol, can you believe that guy?!” leaving the implication of potential infidelity—at least on her part—never to be mentioned again.
But while Gia may have managed to “get through the book without sleeping with anyone married,” as she puts it, Taddeo’s greater body of work suggests she herself may not have made it out quite so unscathed by the lure of an unavailable man. In “Why We Cheat,” Taddeo details an affair with a self-proclaimed “happily married” father—one who texts, “Yeah, honey, don’t worry, having a drink with Brian,” from her bed with one hand around her waist and the other sending a casual lie to his wife.
When “Why We Cheat” appeared in the April 2012 issue of Esquire, the unnamed project Taddeo was currently “embroiled in” was described in her author bio as “a book on modern sex culture in the vein of [Talese’s] Thy Neighbor’s Wife.”
Clearly, those plans changed sometime in the next seven years. It’s a shift the show swiftly glosses over—goodbye, Gay Talese; hello, Three Women—but one Taddeo alludes to in the book’s prologue, giving us a glimpse into what that original draft may have looked like.
“As I began to write this book, a book about human desire, I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men,” she writes. But eventually, these tales of male desire “began to bleed together,” always ending the same way: “in the stammering pulses of orgasm.” And where male desire ended, Taddeo found female desire was just beginning.
As a woman who spent the first three years of my career in men’s media, I also once thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Perhaps because I thought writing for them and about them and to them would be a shortcut to that thing I’d always wanted so desperately: to be seen by them. More importantly, to be desired under their gaze.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. Writing about men, telling their stories and fluffing their egos and keeping their secrets, is a shortcut to their attention—including their rage and sometimes, yes, their desire.
But to be desired by a man is rarely to be seen by one. More often, their desire functions as a blinding force that renders you nothing more than its object. Not because it is cruel but because it is crude—single-celled, one-dimensional.
Eventually, I, too, found myself disenchanted with the evanescence of male desire, the way it begins with a glance and ends with an ejaculation—a flame snuffed out in the moment of orgasm that I always seemed to be getting burned by.
In Gia, there is little of the shrewd, cynical shadow self I’d projected upon the Taddeo of “Why We Cheat,” the one who admits to feeling more comfortable “associating with the devils” and standing “crudely, smilingly on the side of the winners.”
All Shailene Woodley sunshine with a mane of blonde Carrie Bradshaw curls, Gia sometimes reads more like a rom-com heroine, laughing off the idea of married men and being pursued relentlessly by available ones who become instantly smitten with her.
I wasn’t necessarily disappointed. The truth, one that gradually started to sneak up on me in my own writing sometime after my last married man, is that I don’t recognize much of my old shadow in myself these days, either.
As the first-person narrator of your own life, you become one version of yourself forever imprisoned in any given piece of published work. But like anyone else, writers outgrow our old selves, even if we leave their corpses perfectly preserved in prose.
In 2015, three years after “Why We Cheat” and four years before Three Women was published, Taddeo wrote another essay for Esquire. In “There Are Two Kinds of Men,” we get another glimpse of Taddeo in her glamorously cynical young adulthood, letting one kind of man—available and thus inherently undesirable—boost her ego and buy her steak tartare while she pines over the other kind.
“Your destiny,” she writes, “is to walk the line between the first kind of man and the second, not to win the latter or commit to the former.”
But this time, this unflinching look into the harsh romantic reality of young womanhood turns out to be a backward glance—a reflection of the writer’s old shadow. That’s your destiny, until one day it isn’t. Because, writes a married and pregnant Taddeo, “one day you share a dog, you’re not crying about dead parents, you can’t eat raw beef because you’re building new life.”
As a 22-year-old who’d adopted “Why We Cheat” as scripture, this happy ending once struck me as something of a betrayal—the same way Gia’s scoff at the suggestion of cheating initially did. Now, however, I see it as an in medias res snapshot of the shift that occurred whenever Three Women extricated itself from the vein of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the results of which Gia is now bringing to life onscreen. Whatever may or may not have happened by the time she enters Talese’s brownstone is irrelevant; the sleeping with married men chapter is already long over.
And so is mine. Because you’re only your shadow self until you’re not. Until one day, somewhere between one essay and the next, you find you’ve slithered out of the corner, shed your snakeskin, and ditched your thorn-colored glasses.
But sometimes it still takes my eyes a second to adjust to the light.
