Lisa Taddeo’s Brutally Honest Look at Our Complicated Relationship With Sex
When you're talking about sex, you're never really just talking about sex—you're actually talking about the sum of every romantic encounter you’ve had, your childhood traumas, your relationship to your physical body, your deepest insecurities. It’s all-encompassing in a way that few other subjects are. That’s why Lisa Taddeo, even before working on Three Women, was writing and reporting about sex. “People would always ask me, ‘Why are you so interested in it?’ I was like, I'm interested in sex and death because they're the things that make us tick,” Taddeo said. “I always found that question odd.” But how do you write a book about something so big and so messy? It can be done, but it might take you eight years.
After driving across the country six times, interviewing hundreds of people, and writing some 800,000 words, Taddeo whittled her material down to highlight the poignant stories of—you guessed it—Three Women. The result is a remarkable nonfiction book that takes you on a journey that is so deeply personal, so intimate, it’s occasionally jarring to remember that she’s writing from the perspective of actual, living-breathing women and not fictionalized characters who exist as extensions of her own consciousness.
There’s Maggie, a teenager who finds herself mixed up in an illicit relationship with her high school’s all-star teacher. Then we’re introduced to Lina, a traditionally Catholic, midwestern woman whose husband refuses to kiss her on the mouth—the one display of affection she craves more than anything else—right as she’s reconnecting with her high school sweetheart who’s happy to oblige her. Finally we meet Sloane, who owns a restaurant in a tiny, rumor-mill-of-a-town with her husband, who selects other men and women for them to have sex with. Through Taddeo’s conversations with them, she’s able to paint a hyper-realistic, often heart-wrenching, portrait of the constant push and pull of our relationship to our own sexuality.
In late May over breakfast empanadas, Taddeo and I talked about what she set out to accomplish with Three Women, and how she was able to pull it off.
GQ: How did you get the idea for the book?
Taddeo: My editor had seen a piece that I wrote for New York magazine about the halfway hooker economy, about bottle girls in New York and Vegas and LA. At the time, I was writing fiction mainly, so he sent me a bunch of nonfiction books. One of the books he sent me was Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, which is about sex in the 70s and 80s. I was really interested in it, but I was also taken by how very narrow the perspective was. He’d immersed himself in the material by having sex with women outside of his marriage. He moved to a swinger's community —I actually ended up living there for one of the people I was researching, interesting confluence. Anyway, the thing I admired most about the book was how immersive it was, and I knew I wanted to do that.
How did you meet the main three women—Lina, Sloane, and Maggie?
I drove across the country six times, posting signs in bathrooms, talking to people. The signs were very low budget. Like, I made them in a Staples in Santa Barbara. Of people I spoke to from signs, there were maybe five that ended up in the first draft of the book, but none of them were the final three. After driving across the country, I realized that New York City, although compelling in itself, was the antithesis of what I was looking for. I was also too immersed in my own life here, you know, to immerse myself in something else. So I moved to Indiana to be near the Kinsey Institute, but also because this doctor whom I'd started talking to was doing hormone treatments for women who were losing weight and newly feeling [sexy]. That's how I met Lina—by moving to Indiana, starting a discussion group, and finding her.
What kind of attendance did you have at the discussion group?
It was all women, even though it was open to men. They were all various ages. Various everything—married, not married; gay, not gay. But Lina, right away, she was in the middle of thinking about leaving her husband, in the middle of starting an affair. The immediacy of her story was compelling, and she wanted to talk to somebody. She wasn't looking to have her ego stroked, like a lot of men and other people just wanting to hear their stories bounce off someone else. But Lina had no one to talk to and grew up in a very traditional Catholic community. And I was this person, listening, who wasn't charging her money (granted I was writing a book, but that was far away at the time). It just felt like I was hanging out with somebody.
Lina's story was really interesting to me because for her, community played a really big part in how she felt about everything and what she allowed herself to want and feel. Do you think that's true, and do you think it was as much of a factor for the other women?
I think for Lina it was probably the most impactful, but I think for all of them, to an extent, that was what attracted me to those women in particular. Sloane came from this very New York, very open-minded background. The first time someone told me about her was not even the swinging rumor. It was just: you have to meet Sloane. She's absolutely gorgeous. She and her husband own this restaurant and here's the crazy part: He wants to have sex with her every day. And here's the even crazier part: She likes it. She doesn’t just tolerate it. I was confused, because I was like, that seems like a good problem to have. It was weird to me. So it wasn't even so much the idea of Sloane the person, but the way this community of women were awed by her.
The other two women, part of the issue was that they had to go against their community.
While reading, it was wild to occasionally remember that this book was... journalism. The majority of it felt like reading straight up inner monologue. How were you able to do that?
I love fiction. People can be more raw because it's not real. When it's real, it's difficult for people to be, which is why these women were so amazing. The thing I did the most—besides living among them—I would ask them the sorts of questions that I felt like I would only get by reading fiction. I would also ask the same question like a thousand times. I wanted to make sure it was the truth—not that I thought that they were ever lying—but like for Lina, there was a lot of denial going on.
Lina also struck me as an idealist. Like she's clearly a person who loves love and wasn't getting it, but believed it was out there. And Aiden—the man with whom she has the affair —is not exactly a knight in shining armor, but he was an improvement.
It was a huge improvement. But also, you know when you have chemistry with a person, and your friends are telling you, “You know, that woman or that man is not treating you well”? But you have this amazing chemistry, and you don't want to let that go because it's kind of a biological need. Lina was very in touch with that even though she’d never had it. She'd been raped as a young woman and that colored the years to come and [led to] her choice of choosing a man who, one day, would not kiss her on the mouth because he wasn't that interested in sex, at least not in the way she wanted him to be. But I think that she did that because she was afraid of that [hyper lustful] energy from another man. I don't think she was totally cognizant of that then. By the time she started seeing Aiden again, she was like, “Oh my god. I've missed this. Even though I know this is not right for all these reasons, I don't want to give that up. It's taken me 30 years to get this.”
The women you ended up focusing on, they all had some kind of traumatic experience in their late teen years. Do you think those events set the whole structure for their relationships in the years following?
Every single person that I interviewed, without exception, had something—either one giant thing or 75 small things. With each story, I was always trying to figure out what the most formative thing was. With Lina, it wasn't immediately obvious. She told that story of the three boys fairly early in the discussion group, not even privately to me. But she said, and I think I used the quote in the book, "Well I never got a disease from it, or got pregnant, so it's fine." It's not that she forgot it, but she buried it to an extent.
I remember being in Puerto Rico as an 11 year-old, like pre-puberty, and I was there with my parents, and they were super overprotective, and I wanted to take a walk on the beach alone. They were like, no, no, no. And I'm like, I'm just gonna go there and come back. So I went down the beach with a bottle of baby oil and Stephen King's The Stand and laid down on the beach. I was wearing this black bikini, it was like a kid's tank bikini with neon butterflies on it. I fell asleep on the beach and two things happened. I woke up with this tremendously terrible sunburn, like second degree burns because it was baby oil in the hot Puerto Rican sun. And the second thing was that I woke up because this older man was licking my shoulder. Up and down. And it was shocking. And you know, I'll say, nothing “happened.” I went back to my parents, and I didn't tell them for two reasons. One, I didn't want them to never let me out of their sight again which was a total possibility. And two, [I was worried] they would think I was a slut. I also had this awful sunburn with water blisters all over my body. And I was popping them, because I wanted it to go away, with a safety pin that I put under my parents cigarette lighter. I think back now and I'm like, I don't know if it was self-harm. I don't know what it was. I didn't do that again, but I just felt like, marked, you know? After that I had lots of experiences like that where I let things be done to me because of a million different reasons. And every single person I went deep with had something like that. Men and women.
The first time Sloane and her husband have a threesome, she has this out of body experience while watching her husband have sex with the other woman. She says she felt her “soul melt out” of her body. Her worst fears are confirmed, but she doesn’t ask to stop—she goes along with it anyway. Later though, she doesn’t seem to regret it, either.
Exactly. That complexity was what was so striking about her. I talked to a lot of people who had threesomes, because I was intrigued by it, by people who could do it. A lot of the people I spoke to would be like, “We're just sex positive.” “I really trust them.” “We set our boundaries.” And I'm like, okay, but come on. Maybe these people are telling the truth, but I wanted to find someone who had a reaction to it like what I would imagine I would have. I love Esther Perel, and I’m extrapolating here, but she says women, if they’re in a very safe relationship, actually crave not being safe in a sexual manner. Even though we all go after safety, there's a point at which having all this safety is boring. She said a lot of women she’s spoken to have to imagine their lovers having sex with someone else. I think that's so interesting, and I think that Sloane saw that happen and was aware enough of her own sexuality to go, “All right, yeah, I felt bad, but I think I'm into this too.” And she thought about it later, before they did it again, to orgasm. So the complexity of that, the pain that it caused, and then the fact that she absorbed it in this way that ended up being helpful was super interesting to me.
Yeah, we tend to categorize all pain and discomfort regarding our relationships as unequivocally negative, but you wouldn't necessarily say that about a career. Like, everybody says to do what you're afraid of and that you have push through it to grow.
I see that all the time. You can move across the country for a job, and everyone's like, good for you; you went to Colorado, whatever it is. But if you move across the country for a partner, especially one that's not fully solidified, you're just reviled, or pitied. And it's like, yeah, the person might leave you, but the job could fire you.
You've been doing this for a decade. What do you feel like you learned about desire, about men and women, about marriage?
I think the biggest takeaway I've had is that we're all united by desire, or by fear of losing desire, or losing a person. And Lina said it to all those women in the discussion group, she was like: "Don't judge me if you haven't walked in my shoes." Which is obviously something that's been said for centuries, but she said it in relation to her desire. And that was remarkable to me. We just judge each other. Men and women do it. Across all sexual predilections. [Especially in] these small communities, there's so much judgment. The times where we call other people pathetic, we’re just projecting our pasts and our fears onto them. But nobody’s pathetic.
*This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Originally Appeared on GQ
