Time July 8, 2019TimeOff Books
“express yourself, don’T repress yourself/
Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” The
opening lines from Madonna’s song “Human Na-
ture” are pretty simple. And yet when it was re-
leased in 1995, the song wasn’t just a song; it was
an artist’s slap back at her detractors. It was a
battle cry, a lullaby, a lyric deposition on sex and
a woman’s right to it. A J’accuse on a woman’s
right to take risks. The song was a stance against
the then socially accepted norms about women in
an era before #MeToo, before safe spaces, before
woke ness. Before all of that, there was Madonna,
providing women with one way to think about “it.”
And now, with her debut book Three Women,
journalist Lisa Taddeo offers another way. Three
Women is a battle cry too, and likewise a lullaby
and a lyric deposition on that subject usually hov-
ering right next to sex: desire. Madonna made you
want to dance. Taddeo makes you want to feel.
Inspired in part by Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s
Wife, Taddeo set out to describe current states of
American female desire. She found three women
(two of whose names she does not disclose, ex-
cept for Maggie, whose case is public record)
who allowed her into their lives. She spent eight
years searching for subjects across the country,
ultimately following Lina, in Indiana; Maggie,
in North Dakota; and Sloane, in Rhode Island.
Taddeo effectively lived with and through them,
recording their sexual secrets, hopes and fears and,
ultimately, the origins of those fears, which in all
three cases provide exceptional plot jolts.
Taddeo’s mosT obvious limiTaTion was who
would be willing to open their lives to her and to
do what for many of us is unimaginable: confess
what we really want. The three women in the book
happen to be straight, white and living above the
poverty line. Despite this, Taddeo uses their ex-
periences to raise many questions that aren’t, at
least in the abstract, confined by sexual identity,
ethnicity or socioeconomic status. Questions like,
what happens if you fall in love with a much older
person and then that person falls in love with you
too? And what if it’s your married teacher? Or what
happens when you start an affair with an old sweet-
heart because your spouse won’t kiss you? Or what
about when you have a privileged life and an envi-
able marriage—and your partner likes to watch you
have sex with other men, women and sometimes
both? And what if you like it? These are the stories
Taddeo listens to, and tries to understand.
Taddeo never judges. She doesn’t slip into
pseudo psychological frameworks for sex. She in-
habits her subjects. And if you think her topic
sounds a little louche, or isn’t quite your thing, the
true magic of this book may lie less in the subject
matter and more in the style. The illusion Taddeo
creates is that there actually is no journalist at
work here—no author, no thesis. She’s an apoliti-
cal messenger channeling her subjects’ potentially
contentious perspectives. It’s the literary brilliance
of the book that will knock you back—how she
channels these women’s voices through her own.
In many ways Taddeo’s subject isn’t sex. Or
even desire. It’s memory. “We don’t remember
what we want to remember,” she writes. “We re-
member what we can’t forget.” Memory is central
to the sexual self- discovery of all three of her sub-
jects. Until you understand your past experiences
of desire, you cannot understand yourself. Taddeo
also carefully confronts the limits of memory, most
heartbreakingly with Maggie, the woman who falls
for her older, married teacher, whose understand-
ing of herself shifts radically as she grows up and
comes to realize that what she experienced as true
love was, for her lover, not love at all. For anyone
who thinks they know what women want, this
book is an alarm, and its volume is turned all the
way up.Carpenter is the author of Red, White, BlueNONFICTION
What women
want
By Lea Carpenter
△
Taddeo drove
across the U.S.
six times in eight
years to search for
sources