Three Women

It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.

Three Women is an odd little book: Author Lisa Taddeo writes that she spent eight years and crossed the US six times (often temporarily living in her research subjects' hometowns for a while in order to embed herself in their daily lives) so as to write a book on human desire. While at first she was drawn to the power of men's stories, she eventually began to find them all the same (“the man's throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm”), and she switched her focus to women; and in particular, stories in which “desire was something that could not be controlled, when the object of desire dictated the narrative, that was where I found the most magnificence, the most pain.” And so, from initially casting a wide net for stories of “human desire”, Taddeo eventually settled narrowly on the experiences of three women – who, while their individual stories were quite dramatic and well told, were in the end, three very similar stories. All three women desired married men, experienced scorn for that fact from fellow women, and each of them could trace their current behaviours to childhood traumas. I suppose from the blurb I was expecting a sex-positive look at the variety of female desire, but this reads as a commentary on game-playing men, shame-throwing women, and the helpless women stuck in the middle, beholden to their desires, even to their own detriment. Odd little book. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)

The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a diner-like purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.

The three women: Maggie had an intimate relationship with one of her high school teachers, and at twenty-three, finally realised that what she thought in the moment was love, was actually a sick manipulation that had lingering psychological effects on her. Her narrative switches back and forth between the details of that relationship and the court trial in the present that she has initiated. This storyline was highly dramatic and I couldn't help but feel sorry for Maggie, watching as the teacher groomed and used her. Lina was a lonely housewife with a frigid husband who decided to add some spice into her life – contacting her high school boyfriend through Facebook and arranging to meet him for hookups. Despite him being married with young kids, Aidan meets with Lina – always on his terms and not looking like any kind of prize to the reader – and although other women tell Lina she's crazy to be involved like this, she feels fully alive for the first time in years. This story also struck me as sad – after Lina separates from her husband, I just wanted her to find someone who could be fully present for her (but then needed to self-interrogate whether what I was actually feeling was fingerwagging scorn; I don't think so.) Sloane is rich and beautiful, co-owner of a Nantucket restaurant with her talented and rugged husband – a man who likes to watch as his wife has sex with other people. Sloane also desires this lifestyle (she realises after reading Fifty Shades of Grey that she must be a submissive and following her husband's sexual orders is what most fulfills her and brings the couple closer together), and I wouldn't have been shocked by her story too much if she hadn't also involved a married father of young children. (And then when you get the complete picture of Sloane's childhood, you have to wonder how much she's a free spirit submissive or to what degree she's a damaged soul with low self-esteem; but again, who am I to know or judge?) 

So, three stories of highly manipulative men and the women who believe that they consent to their situations (except for Maggie, of course, who realises after the fact that as a minor, she didn't have the maturity or power to give consent). And throughout every narrative, there is much commentary on the persisting patriarchy:

There are men and there are women and one still rules the other in the pockets of the country that are not televised. Even when women fight back, they must do it correctly. They must cry the right amount and look pretty but not hot.

And:

One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.

And throughout, there is much commentary on the role that women play in keeping each other down; talk about the betrayal of “the sisterhood”; a heartbroken wife confronts Sloane saying, “You're the woman and you let this happen. Don't you know you're supposed to have the power?”; the author's own mother gave her this lesson at the end of her life:

Don't let them see you happy, she whispered.

Who?

Everyone, she said, wearily, as though I had already missed the point. She added, Other women, mostly.

I thought it was the other way around, I said. “Don't let the bastards get you down.”

That's wrong. They can see you down. They shouldsee you down. If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you.

Overall, I enjoyed Taddeo's writing style – the flips between the three stories and the way she narrated them – but every now and then, curious phrasing and word choices would bring me out of the narrative in a way that I didn't appreciate in a work of nonfiction: Life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery; The stone streets were naked at that hour, in the toothache of dawn; a grave is described as the cold, bucketing dark. Nitpicking about the writing aside, I suppose I wanted a wider range of stories, but evaluating what I did find here, this is like more than love.