Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Book Summary:

Desire as we’ve never seen it before: a riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and it’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written and one of the most anticipated books of the year.

Based on years of immersive reporting, and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is a groundbreaking portrait of erotic longing in today’s America, exposing the fragility, complexity, and inequality of female desire with unprecedented depth and emotional power. It is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy, that introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.”

Publication Date:

July 9th, 2019

My Rating:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫⁣

My Review:

Three Women is the heartwrenching nonfiction book written by author and journalist Lisa Taddeo. Taddeo followed three specific women and their lives over 10 years through texts, notes, and in-depth conversations. This intimate collaboration allowed her to share their stories in a vivid, honest and excruciatingly detailed manner.

Three Women was not always easy to read but it is a book that will stick with me forever. The stories are raw and it is amazing to me that Taddeo was able to write this book in the third person because her word choices and the stories she shared were so deeply personal.

I found myself lost in this book while reading it. I initially thought these stories would be a peek into the sex lives of three American women but it was so much more than that. Taddeo shared the desires and sometimes haunting true narratives of these three individuals.

While all their experiences and lives were very different, they all centered around one common theme, power. Who had it, who didn’t and the outcomes because of it. Many of the choices these women make, whether you agree with them or not, came from a lack of power as well as being rooted in experiences sometimes years prior. As a reader, you don’t have to understand or connect with something completely for it to move you and this book really drove that point home for me.

Taddeo is skilled at sharing these stories without being subjective or judgemental which is one of the reasons this book felt so compelling and personal. I highly recommend Three Women and I can’t wait to see the response when it is released in July.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster for an advanced copy of this book.