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A review by kelshef
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
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