I read something recently—actually in relation to rejections from literary agents (but that’s another tale)—that gave me pause. The sentence was this: “Think about all the books you’ve read in the past year. How many blew you away so much that you had to call a friend and tell them all about the story?”
Now I don’t know exactly how many books I’ve read this year but trust me when I say I have a fairly sizeable habit. And on the whole I’m a chainsmoker-type reader—no sooner is one book finished then I start the next—and while I hope that I’m thoughtful, that I give each book I read due consideration and head space, to actually call someone: to stare at someone else reading it on a train, jealous, jealous, that they are getting to read it for the first time, that all its delights are still ahead for them?
There has been just one book like that. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. That book—her book—blew me away. And while it’s often fairly easy to say why you didn’t like something, why it “failed” for you on some fundamental level, I think it’s generally more tricky to dig down into why you fell in love. To do the difficult work of finding words beyond the gushing —brilliant, amazing, and the emphatic “I just loved it.”
It’s a useful exercise though—and a worthy one. How much better for one’s soul—for everyone’s soul—to restrict yourself to the positive. To comment only when you think that someone has done well, nay, excelled themselves. When you simply want to say to someone “I tip my hat to you madame.” Imagine, for example, what a different place Twitter would be.
I’m not advocating letting anyone off the hook here. I’m not saying we should say things are good when we feel the reverse (no one loves the letters page of the LRB more than me). No. What I’m suggesting is that it might be better, in these dark times, to write in a haze of love and joy and sheer gladness that something exists.
And boy am I glad that Three Women exists. That Lisa Taddeo managed to pitch this one successfully (“um, it’s about the sex lives of three women”) and find a way to fund the extensive fieldwork that it involved and—above all—kept the faith, kept on keeping on, that here was a story (or stories) worth telling.
First we meet Maggie, who ended up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court. Next Lina, who is conducting an affair with a man she knew from high school. And finally Sloane, whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other people, experiences she likens to being “the only player on a badminton court, trying to keep the shuttlecock on both sides of the net”. These are our three women. And while they cannot ever be “everywomen” (if I take anything from this book it is that female desire is multifaceted and complicated) I found a deep and sometimes uncomfortable resonance in each of their stories.
Like Maggie I have felt, in the throes of lust and love, small (“His superpower is that he can make her feel very stupid very fast” ) and unsure (“Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or just to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk”). Like Lina I have been reckless, hooked, “speeding, going eighty, ninety … the elation […] like a gushing feeling of wellness.” And like Sloane I’ve found that the emotional work of being a woman, “the tasks of the day unfurl[ing] themselves before her like a roll of celluloid […] Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper …” leaves me too drained for much of a fantasy life.
The particularities of each story, the power dynamics at play, are specific and compelling, but there are also intriguing commonalities: obsession; blindness (itself part of a delicious kind of oblivion); and the ability, perhaps peculiar to women, to contain both the fantasy and the reality of any given situation. Witness Lina, “Aidan is not the same in sex as he is in real life. He can be an asshole in life, a loser, but in bed he becomes something else entirely. A lord.” And Maggie’s mixed feelings about her first sexual encounter with her teacher: “It feels awkward, not entirely magical. […] Something about the orgasm made her feel cold, like something was taken from her.”
And then there is the delight of Taddeo’s prose, which is both graceful and muscular. “Even in love,” she writes, with characteristic insight, “ […] there is competition—a frantic need to be the one who will hurt less than the other.”
But for me the most unsettling resonance of all was each woman’s difficulty in owning her desires; their (our) tendency to pretend to “want things we don’t want so no one can see us not getting what we need.”
Maggie feels that her “stock” has risen simply by being chosen, deemed worthy. “She tries to figure out if she really loves [her teacher] or if her feelings are utterly reactionary … she feels that he cares more than he does and it freaks her out. It makes her feel sad for him and it makes her feel she will suffocate under the pressure to reciprocate.”
We see the same absentism in Sloane, who “knows how to perform oral sex as if it’s an Olympic sport … She knows what to wear to every kind of dinner … It’s not about being sexy. It’s about being everything before the man thinks of what he wants.” Sloane’s husband likes “to watch her get fucked by other men [and] … he chose [such men] for a variety of reasons that, maybe, had nothing to do with what Sloane liked or wanted or needed.” Sloane goes along with it because she loves him, because she likes sex, because she is, mostly, happy. But you sense that this sex, like the clothes she wears, is not actually for her.
In her interview with Elizabeth Day for the latter’s excellent podcast How to Fail, Taddeo talks about ”the tiny little rapes” that women experience on a daily basis. A statement that had me reflecting on all the tiny little rapes of my own life—the train conductor who abandoned his quest for tickets so he could sit beside the thirteen year old me and ask whether my boyfriend was a good kisser; the frequent bus-user whose schtick it was to press his leg against yours and then get off at your stop and follow you home. The (bigger, more awful) incidents that have happened to friends. The knowledge—the knowing—that every single woman I know, and every single woman they know, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, has at least half a dozen or so (maybe more) of these sorts of stories and “anecdotes”, which we have so totally absorbed and normalised that we don’t give them air time. The hundred and one cat calls. The honks from white van drivers—and the rest.
But what, I hear you ask, have these “tiny little rapes” got to do with women and desire? Well, in such a climate, is it any wonder that assessing one’s own wants and fantasies, owning them, isn’t easy? When you can be told, nay, instructed, that you wanted something that you didn’t by virtue of the clothes you were wearing, or the amount of drink in your glass. Isn’t it just bloody exhausting being on the defensive all the time: having to concentrate on what you don’t want rather than what you do? And all the while men’s desires, their fantasies, are still very much the loudest conversation in any room. Even with #MeToo we’re still, to a greater or lesser degree, talking and thinking about men: the problem of male desire or, perhaps more accurately, the problem of male power. Male misogyny. What men want and how they get it. What women want defined only in relation to that.
So here is a book that is about women and what they want. A book in which women and their desire and their power (or lack thereof) are centre stage. In the twenty-first century this ought not to be such a game-changer. And yet it is. Because it is so rare. Because we have been trophies, prizes, because we have been shouted down and made to feel small (which are not so very different scenarios when you think about it, being at their heart, not about you at all). Because we have been told what we want, what we need, but we have not been asked. No one has taken the time.
And is there any bigger indication of how insidiously patriarchal our society is than the fact that when asked, when forced, as I was over and over reading this book, to consider these questions, I found myself surprised to be asked at all? And after that, beneath the gratitude, a shameful sort of panic, because I didn’t know the answer, I didn’t know my answers to these important and deeply personal questions. There seemed, deep inside myself only to be a sort of silence (a protective silence), as thick and heavy as cream. Wouldn’t it be great if that weren’t so? If talking about women and desire wasn’t such a big deal. If, as Taddeo posits, it wasn’t true that “With desire, nobody wanted anyone else, particularly a woman, to feel it.”
For this reason Lina’s story was my favourite. Because she is so joyful, so unashamedly happy about getting to have sex with Aidan, her highschool sweetheart, again. Beyond the sense that she is reconnecting with her teenage age self, with a young, hopeful woman who could do anything and be anything, experiencing, for the first time, the rush, the dizzy all consuming rush, that is first love, there is this joy she takes in having sex, in performing sex acts, in being sexual, which is infectious. Which feels new and welcome. And a little bit revolutionary.
For there is joy in desire expressed simply and without fear. In knowing what you want and saying it out loud. The same kind of joy to be found in reading a book that you love very much. I am reminded of a man (whom I very much wanted) for whom the happiness of finding a book that you love and a person that you desire were synonymous. “Oh to be reading Dombey and Son for the first time,” he said, when I told him I was busy with Dickens. “Or in bed with you.”