Three Women
Lisa Taddeo followed three women across the country for nearly a decade to write Three Women. Maggie is a young student in North Dakota alleging that a beloved teacher groomed her as a teenager. Lina is a suburban housewife in Indiana whose passionless marriage pushes her into an affair with a high school boyfriend. Sloane is a restaurateur in Rhode Island whose husband watches her sleep with other men. Taddeo writes in close third person, staying inside each woman's perspective for long stretches, and the reporting is drawn from thousands of hours of interviews and access to journals, texts, and court records. The result is a work of nonfiction that reads like a novel and reopened conversations about how female desire is portrayed. Elizabeth Gilbert has recommended it as an unflinching look at what women actually want.
What you might want to know about Three Women
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Lisa Taddeo spent eight years reporting on the intimate lives of three American women and wrote the result as an immersive narrative about desire.
Gilbert has called Three Women one of the most honest books she has read about female desire and has recommended it in newsletters and interviews. She points to Taddeo's reporting stamina and the willingness of her subjects to be seen as its greatest strengths.
It is nonfiction, drawn from years of interviews and access to the women's lives, but Taddeo writes in a novelistic style with scenes and interior monologue that some readers find blurs the line.
Three Women was written by Lisa Taddeo, published in 2019 by Avid Reader Press.
Three Women is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Three Women takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Three Women is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
