Lisa Taddeo

So much of what I liked about Three Women is bound up in recognising aspects of my own life in those depicted. Lisa Taddeo articulated some things that in almost 50 years of living, I've never found words for. A terrible unifying thread across the three women's stories was the myriad betrayals of trust, big and small, all of them endured. And yet there is great joy in their stories. The incandescent joy of being given the gift of pleasure. The painful joy of loving. The big problem I have with this book is its lack of diversity. The women are all cis, white, able-bodied and (mostly) straight. There are some queer elements with one woman engaging in sex with other women as well as men, but those occasions felt performative. That woman presents outwardly as straight, she doesn't really inhabit a bi identity. So it was all very hetero-normative for me. Overall, I think it's an important contemporary portrait of female desire, but readers should bear in mind that three women cannot ever be truly representative of half of the planet.… (more)