#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 INDIE NEXT PICK Named a Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post * NPR * The Atlantic * New York Public Library * Vanity Fair * PBS * Time * Economist * Entertainment Weekly * Financial Times * Shelf Awareness * Guardian * Sunday Times * BBC * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Elle * Real Simple * And more than twenty additional outlets * BBC * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Elle * Real Simple * And more than twenty additional outlets
“Staggeringly intimate…Taddeo spent eight years reporting this groundbreaking book.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A breathtaking and important book…What a fine thing it is to be enthralled by another writer’s sentences. To be stunned by her intellect and heart.” –Cheryl Strayed
“Extraordinary…This is a nonfiction literary masterpiece…I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women.” –Elizabeth Gilbert
“A revolutionary look at women’s desire, this feat of journalism reveals three women who are carnal, brave, and beautifully flawed.” —People (Book of the Week)
A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.
Lina, a young mother in suburban Indiana whose marriage has lost its passion, reconnects with an old flame through social media and embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student in North Dakota, allegedly engages in a relationship with her married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial turns their quiet community upside down. Sloane, a successful restaurant owner in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.
Hailed as “a dazzling achievement” (Los Angeles Times) and “a riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance” (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics–and topped bestseller lists–worldwide. Based on eight years of immersive research, it is “an astonishing work of literary reportage” (The Atlantic) that introduces us to three unforgettable women–and one remarkable writer–whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.
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This book — challenging and heartbreaking — will stay with me. An extraordinary, documentary deep dive into the psychology of women and sex and the stories we tell ourselves. Three Women is as unputdownable as the most page-turning fiction.
I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women. Lisa Taddeo is a tireless reporter, a brilliant writer, and a storyteller possessed of almost supernatural humanity. As far as I’m concerned, this is a nonfiction literary masterpiece at the same level as In Cold Blood — and just as suspenseful, bone-chilling, and harrowing, in its own way. I know already that I will never stop thinking about the women profiled in this story — about their sexual desire, their emotional pain, their strength, their losses. I saw myself in all of them. Truly, Three Women is an extraordinary offering.
Three Women is a book that is keenly aware of the times in which it was written. Even though it’s nonfiction, it reads like a story — a story we’re all familiar with on some level: a story of love and desire, not the sterile, cinematic, Disney version, but the messy and unbridled sort, the kind of passion that will send you soaring skyward one moment, only to bring you crashing into the reality of our society, with all of its biases and constraints, its written and unwritten rules.
The book tackles the Gordian knot that is female desire, and particularly the ways in which it is bound up in the shaming and silencing of women and the ways that pleasure is tied to a kind of pain, whether emotional or physical. There are many issues that Three Women examines, but one of them is this: Women are not permitted to talk about, ask for, and even demand sex in the way that men often are, and that societal norm is bound up in power dynamics — dynamics that Taddeo highlights in the stories of three American women: Lina, Maggie, and Sloane.
As a reader, all three of these stories struck an emotional chord at one point or another, and all three challenged my existing biases about infidelity, consent, marriage, and kink. I experienced moments of recognition, moments where I felt deep-seated anger or frustration, and moments where I felt the urge to comfort or console.
SO good. The premise, of course, is intriguing. But what really makes this book a 5-star read for me is the writing. Taddeo is scary good at placing you in these women’s heads.
This is one of the most riveting, assured, and scorchingly original debuts I’ve ever read. Taddeo’s beautifully written and unflinching portraits of desire allow her protagonists to be wholly human and wholly, blessedly complex. I can’t imagine a scenario where this isn’t one of the more important — and breathlessly debated — books of the year.
Three Women offers a fascinating excavation of the intricacies of love and desire, where they conspire and where they conflict. Read this book. You will forever rethink the erotics of women.
This was an excellent work of journalism. A front row seat to three women’s lives and where their journey through sexuality leads them. If you think because the subject of sex is involved that this would be a simple and predictable book then you are sorely mistaken. It is complex in every sense of the word. Multifaceted, validating, uncomfortable, and loud enough to leave a lasting impression. I loved it.
I cannot say enough wonderful things about this book. Beautifully written, heartfelt, tragic, inspirational, I will be thinking about these women’s stories for a very long time. Highly recommended.
One of the best books I’ve read all year. It tackles female power, desire, and sexuality in a way that I have never read about before. Each of the three women’s stories is not only incredibly interesting, but also relatable and powerful.
I loved this book in its beautiful portrayal of three women, who in the hands of a less gifted and insightful writer, might have come off as stereotypical. I could identify with each of these women in some way and felt true empathy for them. Taddeo has the ability to distill ages and ages of female experience into concise phrases and descriptions. She gives poetic voice to what others may have written as tawdry or crude. This is book is mainly about female desire, but also about body image and self worth. And heartbreakingly, it is about the female friends and acquaintances who are often times the first to bring you down.
WOAH. Three Women absolutely blew me away. The stories of the women in this nonfiction book (that reads like the best-written fiction) are unbelievably powerful, brutally honest, hauntingly memorable — and most affecting of all, unbearably relatable. As each woman shares her forays into the complexities of love and relationships, you can’t help but feel that this should be required reading for everyone, men and women alike.
At some point, we have all felt what these women so effectively describe: first overwhelming love, biting jealously, loss of self, and the basic (and often repressed) desire to be wanted and accepted by both the men and the other women in our lives. WOW! A must-read.
I literally could not put it down. An unflinching dissection of female desire so poetically described, I forgot it was nonfiction. Lisa Taddeo makes a gorgeous, unabashed debut. Wow.
Three Women is the new required reading for women and any person who wants to know them. Taddeo has given these women’s testimonies of desire, love, and trauma a brilliance and dignity that is nothing short of revolutionary.
A breathtaking and important book… What a fine thing it is to be enthralled by another writer’s sentences. To be stunned by her intellect and heart.
A tour de force. It took me a while to figure out what this nonfiction book was up to, and I wasn’t always ready to switch from one story to the other and thus read a few chapters out of order, mostly because Maggie took a while to become sympathetic for me. But Taddeo is on to something profound about the balance of power between men and women and also between women and other women, and her writing is gorgeous and lush (but not annoyingly so) and so inventive and BRAVE, as are the women who shared their stories with her.
My personal favorite passage is one about a husband who can be counted on, if he takes on, say, 30% of his wife’s long to-do list, to get exactly half of it wrong. But of course he must not be told that — must instead be thanked for doing these things that he firmly believes he would have done without being asked but in fact would not have. Oh my God have I been there. Thankfully without the request to also sleep with other people because he’s really turned on by that.
Anyway, if any of this resonates for you, and if you’re not horrified at the idea of women wanting to have sex and wanting to be desired, chances are you’ll enjoy this book, and possibly even be moved by it. As a reader and a novelist, I feel like I’ve just discovered a more talented kindred spirit.
Three Women is painstaking, painful, unblinking, unsentimental, and utterly unapologetic. Lisa Taddeo comes scarily close to proving the truth of a line uttered by a character in an Antonya Nelson story: “Love is sadness.”
Reviewed for The Washington Post, in print July 9, 2019. An intense look at three women, their desires, and their disappointments. Will make for interesting book club discussions.
Somewhat typical stories dealing with female relationship challenges. Wasn’t exciting enough, just a story.
Not what it was built up to be.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading about these 3 womens sex life/history. Very eye opening and voyeristic. Great read.