To Feel Whole On Your Own: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
I haven’t read any reviews of Three Women by Lisa Taddeo just yet. I know they’re out there. My favorite review publication, the Women’s Review of Books, certainly has a piece because I’m pretty sure I skimmed it, passively, before I had any investment in reading the book. I’m telling you this because it’s been weeks since I finished Three Women and I just refuse to let the limitations of this book define it. That’s in part because I think it could easily be underestimated. But also, I have too much tenderness for it – for the way it made a home for me in its stories of womanhood.
Nevertheless, I have to start by listing its limitations, maybe so that folks are able to manage their expectations and let this book exist on its own terms. It’s a book about three white women, written by a white woman. That white woman comes from a background not entirely dissimilar from my own: Italian-American (though she’s first-gen American and I am not); a writer; lives in New England. Her partner, it appears, is a man. She’s swathed in privilege, though not all of her three subjects are.
She also knows how to write for her life. The three stories she tells in this book are true, in the way that any secondhand story is true: someone told her. She spent something like seven years collecting data on these stories. Her research process is adequately transparent in the preface of the book, but also satisfyingly opaque. When I start to wonder more, I also find myself backing away; it’ll ruin the magic.
This blog is all about books that put a spell on me. And then I try to tell you why, and how they work. I try to convince you that the book matters, should be read. But I don’t think it works that way. I’m not particularly successful at converting readers here, and so these sermons are for a congregation of one.
Three Women was a religious experience for me. Not only did Taddeo dignify my shame; she yanked it out of the ground by the roots. I felt loved and protected by this book, and I didn’t know it, but I really needed that. In spite of the triggering content it explores, this book is a safe space.
In spite of the triggering content it explores, this book is a safe space.
Once, someone told me to think about the soul as a tiny baby bird, and to always consider that sweet vulnerable side of oneself. But I don’t think there’s a baby bird living inside of me. I think there’s a thirteen-year-old girl. Or a ten-year-old girl. A kid. A curious, frightened kid. A savvy, sneaky kid. A hungry, angry kid. And I think everyone probably has that little person in them, too -- begging, always, to be seen. Taddeo figured that out. Her three women -- Sloane, Lina, and Maggie -- are all adults now, but Taddeo begins their stories when they are children. She lets them bring their inner child into the room alongside their adult desires and failures. She lets them be girls and women at the same time. She lets them be victims and agents, fools and sages. She lets their stories be coherent even as they are contradictory, and in so doing, gives us permission to make our own stories coherent, too.
In that sense, I don’t think these three stories would have the impact they did if I had imagined them as fictional. The genre positioning of these narratives — as some middle ground between journalism and creative non-fiction, with a dash of biography — invited me to seek out consistency and coherence in a different way. With a fictional character, I already believe — trust — that they’ll be coherent. Otherwise, it’s probably a shitty book. Or rather, if they are incoherent, it’s intentional; the author crafted an incoherent person so that I can understand incoherence in people.
But Maggie, Sloane, and Lina are coherent, not because their lives are tidy, resolved, predictable, or unified. On the contrary: Maggie barely survived the trial for the lawsuit she brought against her high school teacher, with whom she was romantically involved; Sloane barely survived an eating disorder, and her marriage barely survived a complicated threesome arrangement; and Lina barely survived an affair, whose effect on her body was something akin to amphetamines.
They’re coherent because Taddeo insists that they are; she insists on granting their arcs dignity and grace. She insists on their perspectives. And she manages not to let them become flat in their coherence. She does for them what a good therapist can do: she listens compassionately.
Maybe the power of the non-fictionality here has to do with the narrator, too, who is third-person, but also not omniscient, nor limited. Since Taddeo is a real person and her introduction a kind of frame narrative, there’s no deification of the third-person voice. Do most novels written in the third-person trick us into thinking their narrator is god? Do they, in turn, make us feel like a god?
Taddeo has her moments of sounding like the next coming of a feminist Jesus. But I think that’s why I like her. About halfway through the book is this paragraph:
“If you have a husband who barely touches you. If you have a husband who touches you too much, who grabs your hand and puts it on his penis when you’re trying to read about electric fences for golden retrievers. If you have a husband who plays video games more than he touches your arm. If you have a husband who eats the bun off your plate when you’ve left it but you aren’t one hundred percent done with it. If you don’t have a husband at all. If your husband died. If your wife died. If your wife looks at your penis like a leftover piece of meatloaf she doesn’t want to eat but also refuses to throw out. If your wife miscarried late into her term and isn’t the same person and she turns her back to you, or she turns her emails to someone else. It’s impossible to be with Lina and not think about everything in your own life that is missing, or whatever you think is missing because you don’t feel whole on your own.”
Yes, this paragraph could easily be on social media with the caption, “Tag yourself,” and there’d be an outrage. But for me, there’s something about this moment that feels less like it wants to imagine everyone as straight, and more like it’s an argument that heterosexuality is a structure, not a desire. The entire book, really, in its exploration of three women who fuck (primarily) men, is skeptical of heterosexuality, even as it takes pains to explore its vicissitudes. She’s even skeptical of the way heterosexuality, as a structure, impacts other structures, like family or friendship:
“The girls laugh, though not in a mean-spirited way. They all hate him, for her. She feels protected yet absolutely alone, because nobody made her feel protected the way he did back when he was protecting her. And the truth, Maggie knows, is that other girls can’t protect you. They will leave you the moment a man they like pulls them up, anoints them, and alchemizes them into princesses who don’t have to deal with the rabble outside the castle walls. …. The second they’re out in a bar with strung lights and loud music, they’ll forget everything about her. They’ll worry over their own lipstick and the boys they’re seeing. Maggie’s ghost story is not important to them. Her story is important to only two people. Aaron and herself.”
Here, and throughout this very intimate book, we come to see sexual and romantic relationships as dangerously private. And I don’t think that’s a straight thing. Maybe straightness invented the privatization of emotional life, but that concept has exported nicely into non-straight spaces.
All three of these women experience desire as something so very private as to be impossible to reflect upon or break free of. Indeed, Taddeo depicts sex with men as an addictive opioid: it’s ephemerally blissful, and then you’re strung out. What makes this a book about straightness, then, is less that these women fuck men and more that they think they’re the only one living in the private, hermetically-sealed pain of their desire. Taddeo liberates them from that cage with this book.
I can’t say what each of them felt with their stories out there. Maybe that’s something I’ll learn when I venture into the reviews of this book one day. For now, I’m OK with the unknown, and with the fact that I felt more whole knowing that I don’t have to suffer my shame, desire, or brokenness alone. This book is more than therapy; it’s more than a friend. It’s something like solidarity.
