Book Review: "Three Women"
Don’t y’all love when I post text conversations with no context to give you insight into my feelings-while-reading?
Synopsis: Desire as we’ve never seen it before: a riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.
It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and it’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written and one of the most anticipated books of the year.
We begin in suburban Indiana with Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. She passes her days cooking and cleaning for a man who refuses to kiss her on the mouth, protesting that “the sensation offends” him. To Lina’s horror, even her marriage counselor says her husband’s position is valid. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks. When she reconnects with an old flame through social media, she embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming.
In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who finds a confidant in her handsome, married English teacher. By Maggie’s account, supportive nightly texts and phone calls evolve into a clandestine physical relationship, with plans to skip school on her eighteenth birthday and make love all day; instead, he breaks up with her on the morning he turns thirty. A few years later, Maggie has no degree, no career, and no dreams to live for. When she learns that this man has been named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year, she steps forward with her story—and is met with disbelief by former schoolmates and the jury that hears her case. The trial will turn their quiet community upside down.
Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. He picks out partners for her alone or for a threesome, and she ensures that everyone’s needs are satisfied. For years, Sloane has been asking herself where her husband’s desire ends and hers begins. One day, they invite a new man into their bed—but he brings a secret with him that will finally force Sloane to confront the uneven power dynamics that fuel their lifestyle.
Based on years of immersive reporting, and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is a groundbreaking portrait of erotic longing in today’s America, exposing the fragility, complexity, and inequality of female desire with unprecedented depth and emotional power. It is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy, that introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone. - Avid Reader Press
Rating (out of 5): 2.75
Review: I am rarely as disappointed by a book as I was by this one. For weeks, I’ve been hearing (and seeing) the hype and 5 star reviews, and…I am left unfulfilled.
Over the course of a decade, Taddeo delved into the lives of three women - Lina, a bored housewife who has lost some weight and is having an affair with her emotionally-distant high school boyfriend; Sloane, a northeastern “elite” with extreme self-control and a mild tendency to BDSM with her husband Richard; and Maggie, a lost girl who has an affair with her married English teacher.
The premise of the book is that we get into their heads, and more essentially, their libidos. We hear who they are attracted to, why they are attracted, how they are feeling. Even though the author did nearly a decade of research and apparently had access to everything she wanted from these women, it all felt like a surface level exploration. I didn’t feel connected to these women, and I didn’t see myself in any of them. If this is desire in America, my story is missing.
(Note: I felt terrible and nauseated for Maggie, whose story dominated the work, as she actually reported her assaulter to the police and it went to trial).
This “exploration of female desire” focused on the illicit, the dirty: infidelity, threesomes, rape (I am not going to call it underage sex in this era of Jeffrey Epstein), mild BDSM. All that women will do to “preserve the relationship” even if it goes against their wants, their desires, and their core beliefs. All of the women are insecure, needy, and totally focused on subjugating their desire to that of their male partners — leading me to ask, how is it a book focused on female desire in 2019 still has men at the absolute epicenter?
I also found it interesting that there was nothing totally subversive in Taddeo’s work: all of these women explicitly connected sex to love, and love to sex. I’m not sure what is noteworthy about this central tenet : yes, women want to be loved, and yes, love often is accompanied by sex. Even Sloane, who is the most “out there” of the three women, sexually, only does what she does because she loves and respects her husband’s wishes. I am in no way attempting to divorce love and sex here, but this feels like a step backwards for a book that touts itself on the edge and noteworthy.
I also know that interpretation of an author’s voice is so, so subjective, but hey, you came here for a review, and I’m going to give you a complete one. This book was told in the narrative third person, in an almost stream-of-consciousness. I know that it was to get you in the head of the three characters - to learn their motivations, their wants, their voice. I found it a little jarring to read after a while, and the way that the book was structured, jumping back between all the women, made it difficult for me to actually connect to Sloane, Lina, and Maggie.
One of the things that I’ve been attempting is avoiding other people’s reviews of books I’m planning on reading for the blog — I don’t want to inadvertently steal someone’s thoughts or words, and I don’t want to color my reading of the book. So, until I finished this one over the weekend, I was afraid I was the only person in the world that didn’t love “Three Women.” However, my feeling that this was overhyped and poorly described and maybe unnecessary seems to be making the rounds through #bookstagram and is even in The New York Times. A line from that review sums it up well for me: “The result is…an excrutiating expose of the ongoing epidemic of female fragility and neediness in the romantic arena — a product of our insecurity, ignorance, and zero self-regard.”
Instead of lifting me up like I hoped, and giving me insight into modern sexuality, this book made me feel sad, a little dirty, and more than a little voyeuristic. I wish it had lived up to my expectations, and I hope that someone (one day) does this idea true service.
Trigger Warnings: Underage rape; inappropriate male behavior; infidelity; mild BDSM; pornographic language; general squeamishness
TL;DR: An intriguing idea — a book about modern female desire — that isn’t brought to climax by the author (i’m sorry, I couldn’t help it).
