Scan barcode
betttyy8's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
2.5
I'm just not entirely sure what the point of this was in the end. I liked the women's stories and thought they were nuanced and some complicated parts of my own experience were articulated by them. However, I feel like making this a nonfiction book and suggesting there's something in here about female desire and sexuality and patriarchy meant I was kind of expecting more reflection/engagement/analysis from the author. I appreciate presenting these women without judgement, that's fundamental and important, but it almost feels like this ends up extending to any meaningful thought about the wider implications that the book wants to be engaging with. I don't know. I liked the women's stories I was just not sure what the author wanted me to know about them and ultimately I feel let down by it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Car accident, Fatphobia, Suicide, Sexual violence, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Toxic relationship, Sexual content, Alcoholism, Self harm, and Eating disorder
Moderate: Rape
Minor: Incest
maggie_bahnson's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content, Sexual violence, Sexual assault, and Sexual harassment
kelshef's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
3.0
This was a complicated reading experience. I listened to the audiobook, and received a lot of feedback about the book from people I know who have read it. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had I read it - the explicit and harrowing descriptions of violent and sexual experiences were extremely difficult to listen to at times. However, it was a well-produced audiobook, and I appreciated each of the women having their own narrator and voice.
The question I thought of most while listening was “Why?” I started listening because I was interested in reviews that were published when the book came out, so I had some understanding of the author’s process, but I still feel like there are unsatisfying gaps in my understanding of why this book was written, and why it was written in the way it was.
While fairly engrossing, the character’s stories are told from a distance. This distance, which i’d anticipate would be almost impossible to avoid, given that the author is not the women themselves, is dissonant with the extremely personal descriptions of sex, shame, body image, and relationships. Denied their own interiority by the author’s decisions about organization and narrative consistency, the characters came across as flat and devoid of consistent motivation.
I would anticipate that the author’s motivation in writing this is to give women the stories and understanding
that they’re frequently denied in literature and media written by men, to show that every woman has complexity and nuance to her experiences with sex and desire. However, I came away feeling that each woman’s story was sensationalized and denied nuance, by being forced into a disconnected narrative. Each story is heartbreaking, interesting, and mundane, but together, the reader is left again questioning what the purpose is to put them together in this way.
Many have noted the lack of racial and sexuality diversity in these stories. I can understand why the author, a white woman, would have had an easier time persuading other white women to give her as much of their stories and interior lives as these women did, and I appreciate the importance of diverse people having the ability to tell their own stories. However, I found the throwaway reference to a Black woman the author tried to work with for the book to be trite, with little consideration for why the woman would have decided not to let the author into her life.
I personally found this book alternately compelling and excruciating. There were several points where the writing felt like pointless explicit exploitation, and I almost gave up. But, by the end, I needed to know what happened. I have read a fair amount of creative non-fiction, so felt prepared for the narrative style, but ended up finding the writing to be unable to stand up to the gravity of the women’s stories. The decision to write these non-fiction stories like a novel fails to account for the fact that the characters are real people, whose stories won’t fit into a neat narrative box. When these narrative gaps or moments of dissonance happened, I believe that the book would have benefitted from some authorial intervention to explain more of the information-gathering and writing process.
The question I thought of most while listening was “Why?” I started listening because I was interested in reviews that were published when the book came out, so I had some understanding of the author’s process, but I still feel like there are unsatisfying gaps in my understanding of why this book was written, and why it was written in the way it was.
While fairly engrossing, the character’s stories are told from a distance. This distance, which i’d anticipate would be almost impossible to avoid, given that the author is not the women themselves, is dissonant with the extremely personal descriptions of sex, shame, body image, and relationships. Denied their own interiority by the author’s decisions about organization and narrative consistency, the characters came across as flat and devoid of consistent motivation.
I would anticipate that the author’s motivation in writing this is to give women the stories and understanding
that they’re frequently denied in literature and media written by men, to show that every woman has complexity and nuance to her experiences with sex and desire. However, I came away feeling that each woman’s story was sensationalized and denied nuance, by being forced into a disconnected narrative. Each story is heartbreaking, interesting, and mundane, but together, the reader is left again questioning what the purpose is to put them together in this way.
Many have noted the lack of racial and sexuality diversity in these stories. I can understand why the author, a white woman, would have had an easier time persuading other white women to give her as much of their stories and interior lives as these women did, and I appreciate the importance of diverse people having the ability to tell their own stories. However, I found the throwaway reference to a Black woman the author tried to work with for the book to be trite, with little consideration for why the woman would have decided not to let the author into her life.
I personally found this book alternately compelling and excruciating. There were several points where the writing felt like pointless explicit exploitation, and I almost gave up. But, by the end, I needed to know what happened. I have read a fair amount of creative non-fiction, so felt prepared for the narrative style, but ended up finding the writing to be unable to stand up to the gravity of the women’s stories. The decision to write these non-fiction stories like a novel fails to account for the fact that the characters are real people, whose stories won’t fit into a neat narrative box. When these narrative gaps or moments of dissonance happened, I believe that the book would have benefitted from some authorial intervention to explain more of the information-gathering and writing process.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Eating disorder, and Sexual content
kassy182's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
all i have to say is that men are awful and time and again they prove how awful they can be and often innately are. women that support awful men with the knowledge of the extent of their awfulness are just as bad if not worse.
women deserve more. women have never been given what they deserve and they deserve so much more than a man can even conceive.
women deserve more. women have never been given what they deserve and they deserve so much more than a man can even conceive.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Misogyny, Gaslighting, Emotional abuse, Eating disorder, Car accident, Body shaming, Fatphobia, Adult/minor relationship, Toxic relationship, Suicide, Sexual harassment, Sexism, Rape, and Pedophilia
quills4days's review against another edition
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Infidelity, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Bullying, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Sexual violence, Cursing, Death of parent, Eating disorder, Grief, Rape, Suicide, and Toxic relationship
giulia_bis's review
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Death of parent, Sexual violence, Vomit, Car accident, Emotional abuse, Rape, and Sexual content
Moderate: Sexism
Minor: Alcoholism, Cancer, Misogyny, and Religious bigotry
sauvageloup's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
Rating this book for how much I liked it, versus how well I thought it achieved its purpose, feel like totally different things.
Pros:
- Taddeo definitely has a pretty way with words. Sometimes it hit exactly right and was very astute and/or moving. She weaves the stories together really well and collected all the threads into one big carpet of 'desire in women' which I know from trying to bring fiction plots together AND bringing university essays into a neat but inpactful conclusion is really hard.
- it was definitely thought-provoking. When i couldn't sleep because of my cold, I thought about this book and the women in it, trying to puzzle them out at the same time as my reaction to it, and how it related to my life, my gender.
- I liked very much that Taddeo acknowledged that Black and poor (and other maginalised) women have it much harder. The book wants women to go after their desires without being limited by society, or men, or other women, or shame, or the law. But it does admit this is far easier for some than others, and the women it focuses on in the book are all (to my knowledge) white.
- Some of the parts on desire did ring true to me. Women shamed for wanting sex, or wanting part but not all of it, of the word 'slut' hanging in the air even when it's not said, of being terrified of sex but desperate to abate the loneliness at the same time. Somewhere in there, it did hit a chord at times.
Cons:
- Primarily, I found it hard to relate? or objectively view? this book because of my own feeling around woman-ness. I'm non-binary, I've deliberately rejected being called a 'woman' in whichever places I feel comfortable enough to come out. But in society at large and my own home with my parents, I'm still considered, against my will, to be a woman. I feel so strongly about not being a woman that I've gone out of my way and caused myself pain trying to figure this truth out inside me, and yet I was brought up as one, are viewed as one 90% of the time, and have the body parts of one. So that alone makes any book trying to "cut to the heart" of being a woman very difficult.
- That said, I didn't feel like i could relate to much of what the women were feeling or doing, either in what I'd observed in women around me or in the feminine parts of myself. How much of that is down to my own denial, me not being a woman, me not being observant or experienced or cynical enough, or even me being British not American, I don't know. I had a visceral rejection to many things in each of the women's story's that just said 'that doesn't feel True'. Not the events, of course, I don't doubt the trauma and the awfulness the women went through, but how they reacted to men and the cruelty between women didn't feel true to me. I haven't met women so consumed by men, or women being so cruel. Maybe I'm naive. (but then there's all the reviewers saying that the book 'gets to the heart of who we are' and i'm just like ????
- I also felt that the book was trying to be brand new and yet didn't feel that original at all. It said here, look at these women's pain and feel shocked and angry on their behalf. I've read other books that talk brutally about rape and abuse (Notes to self by Emilie Pine and Escape by Carolyn Jessop) in real life as well as the struggles of parents who didn't do right, who didn't protect their daughters. I suppose the fact that Maggie wasn't believed in her rape trial shows that these stories need to be out there, but I feel it's preaching to the choir sometimes. But I don't know how much is me trying to be like, I'm different, I wouldn't act like that, I would believe the women and support them and be happy for their successes and I know the world is complicated and wouldn't judge them for having an affair, or being too brash, and goddammit i'd say something if someone got an eating disorder. But there's always the doubt of, would I actually?
- Sometimes the flowery writing was just A Bit Much, and sometimes it was painfully blunt. Both of which I could more used to as the book went on, but it felt like unnecessary excess at times, in crudity and in flowery-ness. (But I think maybe Taddeo was aiming for that - to try to capture something bigger than the literal, and to be brutally honest. So here's where what i like and can manage to read splits away from reviewing whether or not Taddeo wrote a good book.)
- There was also the problem of the assumption that to be a woman you must experience sexual desire. That they all do. That it's normal. Impying that it's not normal if you don't. If you're asexual for example. I don't know, perhaps I'm expecting too much. I know this focuses on three allosexual women who like men, but when a book is claiming to be trying to include the whole of female desire, i felt it could have at least touched on women who don't want sex, or on women who have a penis. (also the implication that men are wrong if they don't want sex?? Lina's damp-fish of a husband, who's described as 'smirking' after the therapist validifies his desire not to want to kiss. Like, he *is* valid. He's just wrong for Lina, as she's wrong for him.)
- Finally, I feel uneasily like Taddeo might be the type to be a terf. I can't find anything that suggests so, but the literal one mention of queer people in her book (a gay man) is followed immediately by him acting badly. There's no discussion of gender beyond the binary, and Sloane's experiences as a queer woman seem primarily to be at her husband's bequest and not hers. Taddeo talks about women's desire, but never about women's desire for other women.
So yeah. Complicated.
Pros:
- Taddeo definitely has a pretty way with words. Sometimes it hit exactly right and was very astute and/or moving. She weaves the stories together really well and collected all the threads into one big carpet of 'desire in women' which I know from trying to bring fiction plots together AND bringing university essays into a neat but inpactful conclusion is really hard.
- it was definitely thought-provoking. When i couldn't sleep because of my cold, I thought about this book and the women in it, trying to puzzle them out at the same time as my reaction to it, and how it related to my life, my gender.
- I liked very much that Taddeo acknowledged that Black and poor (and other maginalised) women have it much harder. The book wants women to go after their desires without being limited by society, or men, or other women, or shame, or the law. But it does admit this is far easier for some than others, and the women it focuses on in the book are all (to my knowledge) white.
- Some of the parts on desire did ring true to me. Women shamed for wanting sex, or wanting part but not all of it, of the word 'slut' hanging in the air even when it's not said, of being terrified of sex but desperate to abate the loneliness at the same time. Somewhere in there, it did hit a chord at times.
Cons:
- Primarily, I found it hard to relate? or objectively view? this book because of my own feeling around woman-ness. I'm non-binary, I've deliberately rejected being called a 'woman' in whichever places I feel comfortable enough to come out. But in society at large and my own home with my parents, I'm still considered, against my will, to be a woman. I feel so strongly about not being a woman that I've gone out of my way and caused myself pain trying to figure this truth out inside me, and yet I was brought up as one, are viewed as one 90% of the time, and have the body parts of one. So that alone makes any book trying to "cut to the heart" of being a woman very difficult.
- That said, I didn't feel like i could relate to much of what the women were feeling or doing, either in what I'd observed in women around me or in the feminine parts of myself. How much of that is down to my own denial, me not being a woman, me not being observant or experienced or cynical enough, or even me being British not American, I don't know. I had a visceral rejection to many things in each of the women's story's that just said 'that doesn't feel True'. Not the events, of course, I don't doubt the trauma and the awfulness the women went through, but how they reacted to men and the cruelty between women didn't feel true to me. I haven't met women so consumed by men, or women being so cruel. Maybe I'm naive. (but then there's all the reviewers saying that the book 'gets to the heart of who we are' and i'm just like ????
- I also felt that the book was trying to be brand new and yet didn't feel that original at all. It said here, look at these women's pain and feel shocked and angry on their behalf. I've read other books that talk brutally about rape and abuse (Notes to self by Emilie Pine and Escape by Carolyn Jessop) in real life as well as the struggles of parents who didn't do right, who didn't protect their daughters. I suppose the fact that Maggie wasn't believed in her rape trial shows that these stories need to be out there, but I feel it's preaching to the choir sometimes. But I don't know how much is me trying to be like, I'm different, I wouldn't act like that, I would believe the women and support them and be happy for their successes and I know the world is complicated and wouldn't judge them for having an affair, or being too brash, and goddammit i'd say something if someone got an eating disorder. But there's always the doubt of, would I actually?
- Sometimes the flowery writing was just A Bit Much, and sometimes it was painfully blunt. Both of which I could more used to as the book went on, but it felt like unnecessary excess at times, in crudity and in flowery-ness. (But I think maybe Taddeo was aiming for that - to try to capture something bigger than the literal, and to be brutally honest. So here's where what i like and can manage to read splits away from reviewing whether or not Taddeo wrote a good book.)
- There was also the problem of the assumption that to be a woman you must experience sexual desire. That they all do. That it's normal. Impying that it's not normal if you don't. If you're asexual for example. I don't know, perhaps I'm expecting too much. I know this focuses on three allosexual women who like men, but when a book is claiming to be trying to include the whole of female desire, i felt it could have at least touched on women who don't want sex, or on women who have a penis. (also the implication that men are wrong if they don't want sex?? Lina's damp-fish of a husband, who's described as 'smirking' after the therapist validifies his desire not to want to kiss. Like, he *is* valid. He's just wrong for Lina, as she's wrong for him.)
- Finally, I feel uneasily like Taddeo might be the type to be a terf. I can't find anything that suggests so, but the literal one mention of queer people in her book (a gay man) is followed immediately by him acting badly. There's no discussion of gender beyond the binary, and Sloane's experiences as a queer woman seem primarily to be at her husband's bequest and not hers. Taddeo talks about women's desire, but never about women's desire for other women.
So yeah. Complicated.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Sexual violence, Body shaming, Eating disorder, Adult/minor relationship, Cursing, Gaslighting, Grief, Panic attacks/disorders, Toxic relationship, Suicide, Sexual content, Sexual assault, Rape, Death, Death of parent, Bullying, Car accident, and Sexual harassment
Moderate: Emotional abuse and Alcoholism
Minor: Biphobia, Incest, Mental illness, and Acephobia/Arophobia
riley_reeves's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
It was lovely to get a glimpse into other women's lives, but it was sad at the same time. It honestly read like literature, not like nonfiction. I felt a little bit bad for the other women because their lives were on display, but overall I'm glad to have read this. Eye-opening and engaging. It honestly did feel male-centric, too. I was hopeful for an informative experience about the female desire-- something that would be empowering. It was less about female desire and more about females getting suppressed by male desire. Taddeo couldn't highlight their own sexuality and power a little more?
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship and Eating disorder
Moderate: Sexual violence
jenniferpalmblad's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Death of parent, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, and Suicidal thoughts
marlzipan's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
A journalist with a gift for searing and beautiful prose commits to the page what she found during 8 years of deep diving into women's relationship with desire in modern America. A challenging, memorable and entirely necessary book
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Infidelity, Sexual content, Sexual violence, and Suicide