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A review by mrs_bonaventure
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
5.0
This was gripping. I heard about it on the Cup of Jo blog, read the first few pages in my local bookshop and was hooked.
It’s about three (completely separate) women’s sex lives, but that’s a clinical reduction - it’s actually about their whole lives, their growing up, aspirations, wants and ways of being, what drives them in life and what shatters them.
The author describes it as a book about desire and it is certainly that - but I think it is also a book about power. About who can have what and why, about the choices women are allowed to make in their communities, about what lives they are eventually allowed to live. Time after time it was obvious where the patriarchy limits free will and choice, and their sex lives were in a way a microcosm of where they self-actualised as people, often the most accessible or only way they could in fact express their whole personality and being. There is a lot of explicit sex but crucially it’s written very much from the woman’s point of view and I believe in a way most women would strongly identify with, because it includes all the emotions, wishes, memories and fears that go with and are triggered by the physical acts.
I felt there was a bit missing at the end. Perhaps the author feels it’s powerful enough to stand alone and certainly when you step back and get perspective again, it’s damning. I would have welcomed a longer Afterword though, to draw some more conclusions.
It’s about three (completely separate) women’s sex lives, but that’s a clinical reduction - it’s actually about their whole lives, their growing up, aspirations, wants and ways of being, what drives them in life and what shatters them.
The author describes it as a book about desire and it is certainly that - but I think it is also a book about power. About who can have what and why, about the choices women are allowed to make in their communities, about what lives they are eventually allowed to live. Time after time it was obvious where the patriarchy limits free will and choice, and their sex lives were in a way a microcosm of where they self-actualised as people, often the most accessible or only way they could in fact express their whole personality and being. There is a lot of explicit sex but crucially it’s written very much from the woman’s point of view and I believe in a way most women would strongly identify with, because it includes all the emotions, wishes, memories and fears that go with and are triggered by the physical acts.
I felt there was a bit missing at the end. Perhaps the author feels it’s powerful enough to stand alone and certainly when you step back and get perspective again, it’s damning. I would have welcomed a longer Afterword though, to draw some more conclusions.