Lisa Taddeo | 'It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments'

All Lina ever wanted was to be desired. How did she end up in a marriage with a husband who wouldn’t touch her? All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher, and then a hated pariah in her home town? All Sloane wanted was to be admired. How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who like to watch her have sex with other people?

This is but a headline summary of the utterly compelling true-life tales which feature in Three Women, a scorching work of reportage in which prize-winning US writer and journalist Lisa Taddeo investigates desire and what it can wreak. "It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments," she writes.

The book’s slowburn force, and its naked truth, derives from the many thousands of hours, over eight years, which Taddeo spent in the company of three ordinary women: Lina, Maggie and Sloane (not their real names); talking to them on the phone, but also moving temporarily to the towns across the US where they are located to get under the skin of their daily lives and lay bare their unmet needs, their unspoken thoughts, their disappointments, hopes, and obsessions. While the book is sexually frank in places, the sex (or lack of it) is only part of the point. Ultimately it’s a stealth-bombing account of how women so often become mere passengers in their own lives; their desires somehow lost, squashed or exploited along the way.

When we meet at Bloomsbury’s office, Taddeo—who lives in Connecticut with her husband and her young daughter (to whom the book is dedicated)—is on a pre-publication trip to the UK. She tells me that the idea for the book dates back almost 10 years, when her editor read a piece she had written for New York magazine entitled "The Half Hooker Economy" which came out of the scandal surrounding Tiger Woods and his many alleged mistresses. "My editor said, I really like the way you wrote about desire, and I think you should write a book. I was very interested in the subject, and I wrote a proposal but I still didn’t know exactly how I was going to approach it."

Taddeo knew she wanted to find a cross-section of people to interview across socio-economic and racial demographics and, most importantly, from across the sweep of her country’s geography. "The United States is so divided, and every state could be its own country in a way." So for months at a time, Taddeo drove back and forth across the US in search of suitable subjects; reading local newspapers, posting notices in doctors’ surgeries, in public toilets, in casinos and on slot machines. "The notices said things like: ‘Do you have a story of unrequited love?’ and then gave my email." Taddeo subsequently talked to dozens of people of different sexual orientation; both men and women. Over time, however, Lina, Maggie and Sloane’s stories emerged "organically" as being particularly compelling but also nuanced in a way that gave scope for exploration.

An engaging read

Taddeo’s subsequent total immersion in the lives of Lina in Indiana, Maggie (and her mother, Arlene) in North Dakota, and Sloane in New England results in total immersion for the reader. "With Lina in particular it was like: let’s go to the gym, let’s go shopping. I was in the fitting room with her when she was trying on clothes. I went to the river with her and saw where she had just slept with Aidan (the man with whom Lina was having an affair). It was very immediate." The telling of these women’s stories has an immediacy, as they unfold over alternating chapters, each reading like a beautifully wrought short story. Any concerns about the book being voyeuristic or exploitative are blown away by the quality of the writing. There are no shock tactics, and Taddeo has taken great pains to give each woman her own distinctive voice. I ask her if it was hard to remain absolutely true to each woman’s story while also making this book the impressive creative enterprise that it is. "It was very difficult. The fact that these were real stories was very constraining. So I tried my best to talk about the aspects of each of them that felt the most powerful."

Three Women is a personal book too. The long process of researching and writing it caused Taddeo to reflect on how her relationship with her own mother, who was born and grew up in a small town near Bologna in Italy, might have given rise to her fascination with the subject of desire. "She was a stay-at-home mom, so I was with her every day when I was a child. I was always so fascinated with her. She was strikingly beautiful, she looked like Sophia Loren. And I would see the way men looked at her: even in her older age, they would just stare at her. I was haunted by it." Yet Taddeo’s relationship with her parents was entirely absent of conversations about sex. "They knew I had boyfriends but sex was this unspoken thing that we all felt more comfortable not talking about." After her death, Taddeo pieced together the details of a powerful and shocking story from her mother’s youth, which features in the prologue to Three Women. We could be in an Elena Ferrante novel, except that it is all true.

Going Dutch

The story behind the luscious cover design for the UK edition of Three Women is also fascinating. Greg Hamilton, assistant art director at Bloomsbury, calls it "one of the hardest projects" he has ever done, adding: "How do you convey these stories sensitively without being overly sexual or trivialising the content? I was also very conscious of my male gaze. The Dutch masters were known for hidden meanings in their paintings, and with its blue silk ribbon bow and ripe, glistening fruit, the painting on the cover seems very sexual—dressed up, even. But on closer inspection, parts of it are rotting. It’s as though this gift is being presented to the world as perfect, but underneath something is not quite right. Like the stories of the women who on the exterior are unblemished, but who are bruised and brave in their truthfulness."

While the book focuses on the lives of just three women, rare will be the reader, particularly the female, who does not find within it resonances of herself. Gillian Anderson puts it beautifully in her advance quote: "It gives us epic themes in miniature." Who would Taddeo like to read her book? "I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and my answer changes. Lately I’ve been thinking that I want my daughter to read it. When I knew I was pregnant with a girl I cried with happiness but also sadness, because it’s awful to be a woman in so many ways. I’ve felt a lot of pain from relationships, my friends have felt a lot of pain. I never want my daughter to wait around for a phone call. Everyone tells me it’s not possible, it’s part of love. But I fucking hate that part".

Book extract
I am deeply and forever indebted to the women in these pages, to Lina, Sloane, Maggie and Arlene. It was the generosity of these women that made this book possible. Without them, this book would not exist and neither would some necessary humanity. They are real people, like so few these days are. They didn’t speak to me for any gain of their own but for the idea that others might benefit from their lives. I am humbled by their truth, bravery and hope. 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.