DESIRE
Another fascinating theme she explores
is judgement between women. Taddeo
thinks ‘women can do the most harm to
each other because we know what hurts’,
and believes there is ‘competition at
the most elemental level’. How? ‘Not
necessarily for the same man or lover.
I think there’s a biological competition
to have children. Two sisters I know...
the older had four children, then the
younger one wasn’t able to have a fourth.
That made her feel like less of a woman
than her sister.’ It’s this competition that
led women to judge Lina (when she
admitted she wanted to have an affair)
and Sloane (when she slept with other
men). ‘Lina had two men, Sloane had
her husband plus all these other men.
There were women who were like,
“You’re taking too many, it’s not fair.”’
At times, it’s easy to forget Three Women
is non-fiction, and Taddeo admits she is
‘concerned about the women if it gets
bigger’. While Maggie is comfortable
to be known, Sloane asked not to be
identified, so her name has been changed.
Lina was happy for her name to be used
but doesn’t want to read the finished
book, not because she’s worried what her
husband might think – they are now
separated – but because ‘she doesn’t want
to see herself the way she was then’.
There is a vulnerability to Taddeo, which
is, I suspect, what allowed her to forge
intense bonds with three strangers. She
admits she has ‘a lot of anxiety with loss’
because she lost her parents at a young
age, and because she was a later-in-life
accidental pregnancy, she had a feeling of being unwanted.
I think she cares deeply, not just about these three women,
but about all women. About the lies they are sold and theinequalities that drain their lives of happiness; the options
that are taken from them and the approval they are trained
to crave. I ask her what truths she hopes her book will
give to women who read it. She thinks for a moment, then
says, ‘We’re all so alike and yet we judge each other. I think
the truth of desire is that it’s universal in the way it manifests.
It looks different, it has different clothes on, some of us
subvert it in different ways, but it’s the same need that we are
all born with. Through these three women I hope people will
see bits of themselves, and understand that all of our stories of
desire are equally important.’It’s hard to imagine the questions Taddeo must have
asked in order to get the details included in her book. In
one chapter, she describes how Lina ‘fucks him from the
floor upward and then downward,
like a crab or an acrobat, her elbows
pointed in the same direction as her
knees’. Why does she think the
women were willing to share?
‘[I was] something between a friend and a therapist you
don’t have to pay for,’ she reasons. ‘With a therapist, when
you get to the 44th minute, they’re looking at their clock.
I said, “I’m here for as long as you’ve got.”’
As their narratives unfold, we discover that Lina, Maggie
and Sloane have stories buried in their pasts that are steering
their presents. Taddeo digs them up, showing us how all the
threads of what has gone before led them to this point. ‘You
have a certain vision of your parents, which is more about
what they provide for you and what they taught you, but it’s
the underlying parts that shape us,’ she explains.‘WE’RE ALL SO ALIKE AND YET
WE JUDGE EACH OTHER’
Three Women (Bloomsbury) by Lisa Taddeo is out 9th JulyPH
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