Her Kind: A Reaction to Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women

I finished reading Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, set it down, and looked at my fiancé. On the baby monitor my son slept. I’m safe, I reminded myself.

The book had stirred up some dormant feeling in me that I didn’t want to wake. A tremor. Deep-seated, familiar, titillating. Three Women—strictly speaking, a work of nonfiction, although it pushes the boundaries of the genre as Taddeo explores the inner lives of three individuals—is going to be called a book about women and desire. That’s the beginning of it, but far from the end. Its subject is also sexual trauma, in its micro and macro forms, and how some women have tried to define themselves through sex. Its main characters are women who mistook Thanatos for Eros, whose stories are a mixture of success, failure, and punishment. Reading it, I was constantly reminded of Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,haunting black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitchover the plain houses, light by light:lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite. The spaces in which women exist have always been strictly delineated (the domestic, the maternal), their behavior circumscribed (mannered, likeable): Sexton knows that to step out of bounds is to risk ostracism or even exile from womankind. Taddeo’s three subjects are Maggie, Lina, and Sloane. Maggie: the girl-woman, a high school student, pursued by her teacher into a sexual relationship, the victim and prey, the heartbroken. Lina: the adulteress, the dissatisfied suburban wife, out of her mind with loneliness and sexual neglect. Sloane: thin, nonchalant and elegant, the restaurateur wife and submissive. I have been her kind. And by that I mean all three of them.

Three Women unfolds as a series of interwoven narratives. Sloane, whose story is perhaps the most alluring, is given the least amount of real estate—was she, perhaps, the most reticent?—while Maggie and Lina dominate the book. It’s as propulsive as any literary hybrid thriller, by a writer who exhibits a nearly supernatural and supremely novelistic capacity to inhabit her subjects’ consciousnesses—I started to recall things about my girlhood I hadn’t thought about in decades. There was a feeling—as Maggie isolated herself from family and friends with her secret, or as Sloane mastered removing herself from her feelings, or as Lina frantically replayed each conversation looking for one kind word from her lover—of communion and contamination. As I looked up from its pages to consider my fiancé, I realized that he was not, to use Sexton’s formulation, her kind. And not because of his gender but rather this: he didn’t know the first thing about stringing himself up for love. He hadn’t felt his mind like quicksand, or risked his life for a desire that can only express itself in darkness. I think, suddenly, that in addition to all the things we don’t have in common, this one might be the most threatening to the moment of domestic bliss we’ve landed on. Those women are still in me and could reclaim me at any moment.

He looks up. What?

Nothing, I say.

________

I first encountered Taddeo through her short story “Beautiful People,” published in the summer 2018 issue of this magazine. The piece made me uncomfortable in the most stimulating sense—that is, in the fashion of all great art. The female narrator, Jane, a prop master on a feature film set, is ugly, not physically but spiritually—completely broken by a culture that prioritizes beauty over virtue. What is remarkable about the character is how Taddeo nails a greedy, greasy female lust that feels daring. Here is Jane after she finally beds the movie star she’s been stalking on social media and on set for months:

In the morning, the men at work were back at work...