Name: Three Women
Rating: 4.1 (57 reviews)
Author: Lisa Taddeo

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Delve into the rich world of female desire.

When author Lisa Taddeo set out to write Three Women over a decade ago, she didn’t plan on writing about female desire. Instead, she wanted to write about the desire of men. She was fascinated by the force and violence of men’s sexual longing, and how they would risk families, jobs and reputations for a chance to fulfill it.

But after interviewing men for a while, Taddeo found that, in most cases, their overpowering feelings would dissipate shortly after they achieved orgasm with the person they desired. Meanwhile, the stories of the women she talked to seemed to begin just at that point. These women’s hopes, needs and obsessions tended to play out quietly, over the course of many years, and their feelings seemed deeper, darker and more complex than those of the men she interviewed.

So Taddeo chose three of the women she interviewed and followed their lives over the course of eight years. She even moved to the towns where two of the women lived in order to understand them better. Their stories, reconstructed from interviews, diaries and legal documents, not only hold essential truths about female desire, they also show how that desire is thwarted, ignored and misconstrued by the outside world.

In these blinks, you will get to know

Sloane, whose husband likes to watch her sleep with other men;
Maggie, who was broken by an improper relationship with her high school teacher; and
Lina, who flees from a loveless marriage into the arms of her highschool sweetheart.

Key idea 1 of 8

Cast out by family and friends, Maggie was drawn into an improper relationship with her high school teacher.

For teens, it’s often normal to feel lonely and misunderstood. But some teens have it worse than others. And for some, like Maggie, the helping hand that extends to pull them out of their misery only pulls them deeper into the abyss.

Maggie Wilken was raised by loving parents in Fargo, a conservative small town in North Dakota. Her dad was a big man who gave the best hugs in the world, and her mom was quiet and caring. Maggie’s troubles began when she had sex for the first time. The man she slept with was Mateo, a 31-year-old army buddy of her brother-in-law whom she’d met while visiting her sister’s family in Hawaii. Maggie was only sixteen at the time. When they found out, her Catholic family didn’t take it well. They made her get a pregnancy test and even took her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed Maggie all kinds of drugs.

But the worst was yet to come. In school, a friend of Maggie’s told their classmates what had happened. The rumors spread quickly, and slurs soon began to be hurled her way. People called Maggie things like “whore,” and even her friends began avoiding her. She felt dirty and alone.

Only one person still seemed to care about Maggie: her favorite teacher, Mr. Knodel. Aaron Knodel was a handsome, popular young English teacher. He was married, with two kids, and had an honest passion for his job. He would often stay after class to talk with Maggie, and she trusted him. In a letter, she told him about what had happened in Hawaii and the abuse she had suffered since. Mr. Knodel consoled her, telling her that she had done nothing wrong.

After the talk, Knodel followed up by sending Maggie text messages, and she felt that there was finally someone who understood and cared for her. She felt flattered by the increasingly affectionate attention she received from Knodel, too. But as the text messages continued during winter break, she also sensed that their relationship was beginning to cross normal teacher-student boundaries.

Key idea 2 of 8

The abrupt end of her secret relationship with Mr. Knodel left Maggie devastated.

The text messages that Mr. Knodel sent Maggie over winter break were innocuous at first, simply asking how she was doing. But soon the messages got more personal – he asked whether she was seeing anyone, or had anyone to kiss on New Year’s Eve. Soon, there were up to 30 texts a day, often late at night. Maggie wasn’t sure where it was all leading, but she couldn’t help but feel excited that a handsome older man was taking so much interest in her.

When school resumed in the new year, Maggie and Mr. Knodel started meeting secretly, in his classroom or her car. They talked about their feelings for one another, and Mr. Knodel told Maggie that he was falling in love with her.

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Key idea 3 of 8

Maggie tried to make Mr. Knodel accountable for his crime, only to experience more loss in her life.

When her relationship with Mr. Knodel ended, Maggie became anxious and depressed. She graduated from high school and then tried to go to college, but dropped out. Then she went back, only to drop out again. When she was twenty, she finally had the heart to tell some girlfriends about Mr. Knodel. She felt validated by their compassionate reactions but also concerned. One girl told Maggie that Mr. Knodel was probably doing to other girls what he had done to her.

Then something happened that added insult to injury: Aaron Knodel won North Dakota’s “Teacher of the Year” award.

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Key idea 4 of 8

After a car accident, Sloane decided to be perfect in every regard — and developed an eating disorder.

Sloane Ford was born in Pound Ridge, New York, to wealthy parents who were kind, but also distant. When Sloane was in fourth grade, her mother thought she was looking a little pudgy. So she took her to a doctor, who prescribed diet pills. Sloane started taking these in secret before lunch at school.

When Sloane was a teen, though, even her mother agreed that she was beautiful. She worked hard at being perceived as fun and cool, too. She became one of the popular girls, hanging out at senior parties and enjoying the attention she got from the boys there.

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Key idea 5 of 8

When Sloane and her husband ruin a lover’s marriage, she takes all the blame.

Even when she wasn’t worrying about food, Sloane’s life revolved around it. At fifteen, she took her first job as a waitress, and worked in restaurants from then on. She liked serving people, and watching them enjoy food she would never allow herself to eat.

Working at a fancy restaurant in New York, Sloane met her husband, Richard. He was the chef there, a quiet, confident man. Sloane was a hostess as well as manager. After dating for a few years, the couple decided to take a big step, opening a restaurant together in Newport, Rhode Island, where Sloane’s family had a vacation home. He would be the chef and she would be the manager. The business went well, and the two soon got married and had two kids.

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Key idea 6 of 8

Despite her terrible experiences with men, Lina loves nothing more than love, but ended up in a marriage devoid of it.

Your first kiss can be exciting, gross or completely awkward. For Lina, it was the most magical experience of her life and it happened when she was fifteen. Lina had a huge crush on Aidan, a handsome boy in her grade, but she felt that she wasn’t pretty enough for him.

So, when her friend asked her on a double-date with her boyfriend and Aidan, Lina couldn’t believe it. Her anxieties were calmed, though, when they were all at the movies together watching Seven – when she decided to leave the theater because she found the movie too gruesome, Aidan ran after her. In the lobby, he pulled her toward him and gave her the best first kiss in the world.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Lina fled her marriage into the arms of her first love, only to experience a different kind of heartache.

Lina waited eleven years for Ed to show her the affection she craved, but it never manifested. At one point, she lost weight, felt beautiful and sexy, and wanted her husband to touch and kiss her. But Ed was as uninterested as ever. She even took him to a couple’s therapist, but the therapist told her it was perfectly normal for her husband to not to want to kiss her.

Lina grew increasingly depressed and started experiencing panic attacks, where she felt that her heart was about to stop. And these were in addition to her fibromyalgia, which caused a vague but chronic pain in her joints and muscles.

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Key idea 8 of 8

Female desire is rich and complex but often discounted and misunderstood.

Women experience sex, love and romance in unique ways that share common threads. Female desire is often deeper, longer-lasting and more complex than that of men, and finely woven through the fabric of women’s lives. This is why Maggie wonders, through all the pain, whether Aaron Knodel still has feelings for her. It’s why Sloane lets her husband watch her with other men, and takes on all the shame that comes with it. And it’s why Lina is willing to keep waiting for a man who only calls her when he’s in the mood.

Women are often ridiculed for having feelings that are deep, complex, and sometimes hard to name. They are shamed for how much they want from men, and have learned it is best not to talk about it. But often, what they want from men is really what they want from themselves, and the other women in their lives. They want to like themselves, and to feel loved and appreciated.

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Three Women summary