Lisa Taddeo

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 INDIE NEXT PICK A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post * NPR * The Atlantic * New York Public Library * Vanity Fair * PBS * Time * Economist * Entertainment Weekly * Financial Times * Shelf Awareness * Guardian * Sunday Times * BBC * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Elle * Real Simple “THIS IS THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR. This is it. This is the one...It blew the top of my head off and I haven’t been able to stop thinking or talking about it since.” —Elizabeth Gilbert “Taddeo spent eight years reporting this groundbreaking book...Breathtaking...Staggeringly intimate.” —Entertainment Weekly “A breathtaking and important book…What a fine thing it is to be enthralled by another writer’s sentences. To be stunned by her intellect and heart.” —Cheryl Strayed A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting. Hailed as “a dazzling achievement” (Los Angeles Times) and “riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance” (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics—and topped bestseller lists—worldwide. In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.

Three Women

Nina

Kristina Bonitz

Sloane, on the other hand, long-haired, yogic, fearsome, had ever more layers. Eventually any man in the world would go to her and stay there.

Laura Gill

Sometimes when Lina is in the big empty house she imagines a chasm inside her, a black space between one set of organs and the next. She frels she exists in that space, mindless, flavorless, unseen.

And her whole thinner body becomes a long ticking pendulum inside a clock. So that

On a yellow notepad, the man takes down her words. The past yawns at her, stretching itself, like a cat.

Her hormone doctor has told her what he believes her problem is. He has said, Lina, you come from a place where women are taught that their only real value is what they can do for someone else. 

But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.

She may have felt, the way we always seem to remember feeling in the moments before devastation, a sort of divine providence. Look at my long, tan legs. My soft blond hair. My body, which has finally been filled to all of its edges with blood and shape.

She thought for a moment. Her answer was not wrong but the world, she knew, was too oblivious to the trajectory of womanly pain to fully understand it without demeaning her. Even women would have trouble. Or women would be the ones to have the most trouble.

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