‘THREE WOMEN’ BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW: THREE WOMEN BY LISA TADDEO THREE WOMEN BY LISA TADDEO

Words by Ngoc Lan Tran

Maggie, Lina, and Sloane all had something in common: A secret. All of them had illicit affairs with men with whom they were not supposed to be involved, and all of them had to live with the aftermath in secrecy and shame.

Stepping into the lives of these three women, Lisa Taddeo paints a complex picture of taboo and desire, shame and pleasure, secrecy and liberation. The author writes about these women but in fact is commenting on our society’s flare to quickly punish female individuals for liberating and authentically living by their passions and desires without considering the intricacies of their lives.

Even when these intricacies have come to light, we still have a tendency to strongly judge these women and label them as deviants. Reading about Maggie, an underaged high school student having anillicit affair with her teacher, some may immediately think that her relationship was too romanticised. When telling Lina’s story of getting back

together with an old fling before falling in love too quickly, it was easy to think that she was “asking for it.” Sloane, who developed an appetite in female masochism through her husband, could be read as exploited; if it hadn’t been for her husband, Sloane wouldn’t be into BDSM.

Yet, even when readers were complicit with stereotyping Maggie, Lina, and Sloane’s affairs, Taddeo is determined to make absolutely no judgement about them. She deliberately casts aside all social norms and taboos, contending that sex and desire is not necessarily exploitation and suffering. When it comes to moments that require honesty and vulnerability, sex is all about compassion and liberation.

Taddeo’s legitimisation of sex and women’s desires could be radical, but much is to be questioned on whether it was meaningful. As the conflict between the women’s sexual desires and social stigmatisation unfolds, the book slowly reveals its biggest challenge: managing the controversy of legitimising sex and desire in a vacuum. If women’s desires were indeed just and true, then why did these women have to be punished for them? Taddeo tries to rectify this dilemma by occasionally touching on the problems of gender inequality and social power, but in the end she does nothing with them; she attributes these social problems neither to the nature nor consequences of these women’s desires. Thus the social backdrop of Three Women becomes pitifully frivolous and reads more like novelisation of real-life accounts. This would confuse readers had they skipped Taddeo’s introduction, where the author claims that the book is a work of non-fiction.

If one takes a leap of faith to cast aside preconceptions and judgements of what a book should be, these blurred lines could be argued as genre-breaking; although it is not clear whether this was Taddeo’s intention or not. But in the slight chance that this was all planned out, the breaking of genres would not be for the purpose of creating anew genre, but rather for social critique. The fiction and non-fiction duality draws a perfect parallel to how society images the intimate lives of women. Taddeo lets us have a glimpse of these women’s romantic and sexual lives, granting us an attempt to understand their motivations and actions… but it will always be just that: a glimpse, an attempt; making the best way to capture it in our imagination is to novelise it. This hints at how much of a defect we have as a society, ruled by the patriarchy where there is virtually no room for women to express themselves, and run by capitalism where women are sexualised and turned into commodities for profit gain. It is only in the fictional, the fictional-adjacent, and the virtual “reality”, that our society would allow space where female sensuality is not persecuted as dirty, shameful, and perverse. Otherwise, the punishment of bringing the personal to the public for women is to be labelled as deviants, witches, whores and sluts. Does this mean that our society does not know and will never know what it is like to be women and to love and desire as women?

What is it like to be women and to love and desire as women? Some critics point out that the book also does not do well in answering this pressing question, and it has everything to do with the subjects of the book: Maggie, Lina, and Sloane are attractive white ciswomen; Taddeo has admitted in the epilogue that their stories are not representative. But to me, this is not good enough. Haven’t we gone passed the point of merely acknowledging the heterowhiteness elephant in the room and instead taking tangible effort to be inclusive and truly representative? Taddeo has full right to write about Maggie, Lina, and Sloane, but as long as society still holds the tendency to normalise hetero-whiteness as the default representive for all people including queer women and women of color, the author should not have waited until the epilogue to make this disclaimer. Three Women is a careful study of the sex and love lives of women, but unfortunately that is its only redeeming grace. Only time can tell whether Taddeo has penned a revolutionary account of women’s sexual liberation, or just a raw conformist take on carnal pleasure for the sake of it. Until then, it will be endlessly controversial.