Three women

Lisa Taddeo

Large print - 2019

An account based on nearly a decade of reporting examines the sex lives of three American women, exploring the complexity and fragility of female desire.

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Subjects
Genres
Case studies
Published
Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Lisa Taddeo (author)
Edition
Large print edition
Physical Description
507 pages (large print) ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781432871222
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THIS ONE IS FOR THE LADIES. I have a small tray decorated with two gorgeous, red-lipped glamour girls, poised for the good life in front of a lush bush of bright pink flowers. Splashed across their image is this aphorism: "I believe we have an opportunity to make some extremely poor choices." This is one of women's abiding truths when it comes to their love lives. "Falling in love" frequently produces the curious inclination in a woman to abdicate her sovereignty and seat a man on her own throne. But then love for women has a long history as slavery. Sacrilege as it may be to say, "falling in love" remains criminally oversold to girls in our culture. From their earliest fairy tales, it is the Great Event. A man has always been a woman's best excuse to avoid her destiny; that a man is her destiny is one of patriarchy's most pernicious tenets. What a scam. And often we leap into our "poor choices" with the operatic flourish of Juliet, Madama Butterfly or Tosca - all dead by suicide at show's end. Yet most of us survive our grand passions - the truly great ones break you so as to remake you. These are what we will remember on our deathbeds as the moments when we were most alive. Deep eros plunges one face to face with death, here, now. But is the price we pay worth it? Enter a new treatise on the subject. Lisa Taddeo's "Three Women" is an excavation of three American women's love lives. All are white and (mostly) heterosexual, and they range in age from 16 to early 40s: a highly limited, though serviceable, group. Taddeo's subjects allowed her to observe them intimately over a number of years. She explains in an author's note that she spent countless hours with these women in person, on the phone and over text message and email, while following their social media accounts. She read their diaries, interviewed their friends and family and relied on their memories. Taddeo's intent - and her publisher's hope - is to reveal what "female desire" looks like today. Despite the glut in our society of anything and everything sexual, very little approaches the shocking, truly revolutionary, revelations in the sexual fantasies of hundreds of women that Nancy Friday collected in the 1970s. The stunning variety and lasciviousness of female perversions detailed in Friday's anthologies knocked our madonna off her altar into the gutter - but, under threat of anarchy, our loosened whore is always, soon again, chastened. The result of Taddeo's investigation, however, is not a book about the vast terra infirma of female desire, but, rather, an excruciating exposé of the ongoing epidemic of female fragility and neediness in the romantic arena - a product of our insecurity, ignorance and zero self-regard. Taddeo's sad, searing, sometimes unbearably painful tales of bad decisions, agonies and humiliations at the shrine of "love" show us that, in spite of 10 to 15 minutes here and there of truly hot sex, a woman "in love" is frequently a basket case. The stories of Taddeo's subjects, Sloane, Lina and Maggie, all feature the illicit - threesomes, dominance and submission, underage sex - and each includes a hefty dose of good old-fashioned adultery. Maggie Wilken's story dominates the book and for good reason: It ended up in court. Maggie, who lives in Fargo, N.D., had a relationship for approximately one year, starting when she was 16, with Aaron Knodel, her 29-yearold high school English teacher, who was married with two young children. Maggie confides in a letter to Knodel her big secret: She has recently lost her virginity to a military man, 15 years her senior, while vacationing in Hawaii, and found it exciting. Knodel suggests they speak. So it begins. Hundreds of texts, covert meetings and numerous hours of late-night phone calls ensue, Lisa and for the first time in her short life Maggie feels seen, loved, "like a supermodel." (I am not sure when being a "supermodel" became the ultimate aim for a girl, but here we are.) Maggie does everything she can to "preserve the relationship," not reminding him she is underage, not mentioning his wife and kids. Soon he texts her: "I think I am falling in love with you." He reads Maggie's copy of "Twilight," returning it doused in his cologne, with masses of yellow Post-it Note annotations. "I am your vampire lover," he writes, "and you are my forbidden fruit." She sleeps with the book. On his 30th birthday, Maggie texts him around 7 a.m. "Happy Birthday!!!" By 8 a.m. his wife has seen the message, and the affair is over. Boom. When Knodel is named "North Dakota's Teacher of the Year" in 2014, Maggie breaks her five years of silence and despair and tells her parents about the relationship. She goes to the police. Six months later her father slits his wrists and dies. In court Knodel fingers a rosary and claims not to remember Maggie much during the year of their affair, but does recall that she was "needy" and had "issues." He is acquitted on three of five charges of corrupting a minor. A mistrial is declared on the other two charges - owing to a juror's sudden mysterious illness - alleging oral and digital penetration. Knodel was reinstated with back pay and is currently teaching and coaching in the North Dakota public school system. Maggie, meanwhile, gains 30 pounds, survives on a cocktail of five drugs, drops out of college, plans her suicide by hanging, and waits tables. Despite everything, Maggie still loves her high school teacher. Cue Tammy Wynette. It is Taddeo's victory that we see Maggie's tragedy: Knodel gave this girl the validation, the attention, that no one else ever had - or perhaps ever will. Her blessing, her curse. This is Taddeo's first book, but she has garnered two Pushcart Prizes for her dense, disturbing short stories about women. Here, but for a few quoted conversations, she writes her narratives in the third person, in her own dramatic, often overreaching, staccato prose. While the complex feelings of the women conveyed may well be true, the voice is categorically Taddeo's, not theirs. Nevertheless, the result is effective and affecting. Strangely, she has elected to draw no conclusions. So here are a few of mine. mother nature has heavily handicapped women. From age 15 to 50 our brains are a swamp of hormones - you know, the ones that make us the origin of the human race. A female orgasm releases a tsunami of neurochemicals, suctioning us to that fallible Joe who happens to be in the vicinity, every climax another knot in our involuntary bondage. And so we continue, despite more than 200 years of feminism culminating in Andrea Dworkin's glorious rage, to be inept voyagers in search of "love," repeatedly abandoning our own ship to board some dude's dinghy. Why does the femme fatale - who wields her unyielding power with charm - in our culture have no traction as an actual role model? Where is Barbara Stanwyck when we need her? Extraordinary erotic longing rarely survives stabilization, and Taddeo reveals an avalanche of evidence, as if we needed more, that the cozy comforts of marriage and its defining, confining attribute, monogamy, provide the perfect petri dish for combustible sex - with someone other than your spouse. Taddeo's book features one unethical, horny, entitled guy after another, but what else is new? Our current discourse is filled, rightly, with women's #MeToo revelations about loathsome male misbehavior and worse, while we simultaneously reassert our roles as their victims, confirming, with our nagging, weeping and public shaming, our complicity on the patriarchal merry-go-round. But patriarchy cannot change patriarchy, as a leopard cannot change his spots. The time is up, the clock has run out: Men no longer deserve our understanding or tears or time. Until women realize our pre-eminence, and act accordingly, with its inherent responsibilities, we will never get a grip on our own happiness. Might we shift our thinking, reorder our priorities and discipline our minds in our affairs with men? Can we change ourselves? If we did the world would change too. Taddeo's investigation yields an excruciating exposé of female fragility and neediness. TONl bentley, a Guggenheim fellow, danced with New York City Ballet for 10 years and is the author of five books, including "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

For her first book, journalist Taddeo ""set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn."" She spent years following many women's stories, but ultimately focuses on three. Lina, a midwestern stay-at-home mom, finds the romantic kiss (and more) that her husband refuses her when she reconnects with her high-school sweetheart. East Coast restaurateur Sloane is thrilled by her husband's request that she sleep with other people, though it can get socially complicated. North Dakota teenager Maggie, whose story is likely to hit readers hardest, falls in devastating love with her high-school teacher a matter of public record following a 2015 trial. Taddeo braids together the women's narratives, which adds both suspense and heft as their desire-biographies echo and diverge. Her distinct proximity to her subjects shows in the intimate fantasies, scorching encounters, and profound pains they relate through her, but, the power resting fully with them, this never becomes voyeuristic. Instead, she allows them to be defined not by their jobs, kids, or, significantly, the men in their lives, but by a deep and essential part of themselves. Readers will almost certainly fly through this, and want to talk about it.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her ambitious, if flawed, debut, journalist Taddeo reports on the risks women take to fulfill their sexual desires. The result of eight years and thousands of hours of interviews, the book describes how each of her three subjects is undone by an intimate relationship that eventually damaged her. Maggie, a troubled 23-year-old in Fargo, N.Dak., recalls how her high school English teacher seduced her at 17 after learning she'd slept with a man twice her age. When he's named statewide teacher of the year five years later, she reports their affair to the police; townspeople quickly label her "a freaky slut." Indiana wife and mother Lina, married to a man who refuses to kiss her, reconnects on Facebook with high school crush Aidan. Their affair, perfunctory on his end, is played out in parked cars while she becomes "a tangle of need and anxiety." Forty-something Sloane, "beautiful and skinny," runs a successful Newport, R.I., restaurant with her chef husband who chooses her sexual partners and watches them have sex. Sloane believes her marriage to be secure yet had to "constantly reassess what kind of woman she was." Unfortunately, all three feel underdeveloped, with no real insight into them or their lives outside of their sexual histories, and with little connective tissue between their stories. Taddeo's immersive narrative is intense, but more voyeuristic than thoughtful. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Based on eight years of reporting and thousands of hours of interaction, a journalist chronicles the inner worlds of three women's erotic desires.In her dramatic debut about "what longing in America looks like," Taddeo, who has contributed to Esquire, Elle, and other publications, follows the sex lives of three American women. On the surface, each woman's story could be a soap opera. There's Maggie, a teenager engaged in a secret relationship with her high school teacher; Lina, a housewife consumed by a torrid affair with an old flame; and Sloane, a wealthy restaurateur encouraged by her husband to sleep with other people while he watches. Instead of sensationalizing, the author illuminates Maggie's, Lina's, and Sloane's erotic experiences in the context of their human complexities and personal histories, revealing deeper wounds and emotional yearnings. Lina's infidelity was driven by a decade of her husband's romantic and sexual refusal despite marriage counseling and Lina's pleading. Sloane's Fifty Shades of Grey-like lifestyle seems far less exotic when readers learn that she has felt pressured to perform for her husband's pleasure. Taddeo's coverage is at its most nuanced when she chronicles Maggie's decision to go to the authorities a few years after her traumatic tryst. Recounting the subsequent trial against Maggie's abuser, the author honors the triumph of Maggie's courageous vulnerability as well as the devastating ramifications of her community's disbelief. Unfortunately, this book on "female desire" conspicuously omits any meaningful discussion of social identities beyond gender and class; only in the epilogue does Taddeo mention race and its impacts on women's experiences with sex and longing. Such oversight brings a palpable white gaze to the narrative. Compounded by the author's occasionally lackluster prose, the book's flaws compete with its meaningful contribution to #MeToo-era reporting.Dramatic, immersive, and wantingmuch like desire itself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue prologue When my mother was a young woman a man used to follow her to work every morning and masturbate, in step behind her. My mother had only a fifth-grade education and a dowry of medium-grade linen dish towels, but she was beautiful. It's still the first way I think of to describe her. Her hair was the color of the chocolates you get in the Tirolean Alps and she always wore it the same way--short curls piled high. Her skin was not olive like her family's but something all its own, the light rose of inexpensive gold. Her eyes were sarcastic, flirtatious, brown. She worked as the main cashier at a fruit and vegetable stand in the center of Bologna. This was on the Via San Felice, a long thoroughfare in the fashion district. There were many shoe stores, goldsmiths, perfumeries, tobacconists, and clothing stores for women who did not work. My mother would pass these boutiques on the way to her job. She would look into the windows at the fine leather of the boots and the burnished necklaces. But before she came into this commercial zone she would have a quiet walk from her apartment, down little carless streets and alleys, past the locksmith and the goat butcher, through lonely porticoes filled with the high scent of urine and the dark scent of old water pooling in stone. It was through these streets that the man followed her. Where had he first seen her? I imagine it was at the fruit stand. This beautiful woman surrounded by a cornucopia of fresh produce--plump figs, hills of horse chestnuts, sunny peaches, bright white heads of fennel, green cauliflower, tomatoes on the vine and still dusty from the ground, pyramids of deep purple eggplant, small but glorious strawberries, glistening cherries, wine grapes, persimmons--plus a random selection of grains and breads, taralli, friselle , baguettes, some copper pots for sale, bars of cooking chocolate. He was in his sixties, large-nosed and balding, with a white pepper growth across his sunken cheeks. He wore a newsboy cap like all the other old men who walked the streets with their canes on their daily camminata. One day he must have followed her home because on a clear morning in May my mother walked out the heavy door of her apartment building from darkness into sudden light--in Italy nearly every apartment house has dark hallways, the lights dimmed and timed to cut costs, the sun blocked by the thick, cool stone walls--and there was this old man she had never seen, waiting for her. He smiled and she smiled back. Then she began her walk to work, carrying an inexpensive handbag and wearing a calf-length skirt. Her legs, even in her old age, were absurdly feminine. I can imagine being inside this man's head and seeing my mother's legs and following them. One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would. She could sense his presence behind her for many blocks, past the olive seller and the purveyor of ports and sherries. But he didn't merely follow. At a certain corner, when she turned, she caught a movement out of the side of her eye. The stone streets were naked at that hour, in the toothache of dawn, and she turned to see he had his penis, long, thin, and erect, out of his pants, and that he was rapidly exercising it, up and down, with his eyes on her in such a steady manner that it seemed possible that what was happening below his waist was managed by an entirely different brain. She was frightened then, but years after the fact the fear of that first morning was bleached into sardonic amusement. For the months that followed, he would appear outside her apartment several mornings a week, and eventually he began to accompany her from the stand back to her home as well. At the height of their relationship, he was coming twice a day behind her. My mother is dead now, so I can't ask her why she allowed it, day after day. I asked my older brother, instead, why she didn't do something, tell someone. It was Italy, the 1960s. The police officers would have said, Ma lascialo perdere, è un povero vecchio. È una meraviglia che ha il cazzo duro a sua età. Leave it alone, he's a poor old man. It's a miracle he can get it up at his age. My mother let this man masturbate to her body, her face, on her walk to work and on her walk back. She was not the type of woman to take pleasure in this. But I can't know for sure. My mother never spoke about what she wanted. About what turned her on or off. Sometimes it seemed that she didn't have any desires of her own. That her sexuality was merely a trail in the woods, the unmarked kind that is made by boots trampling tall grass. And the boots belonged to my father. My father loved women in a way that used to be considered charming. He was a doctor who called the nurses sugar if he liked them and sweetheart if he did not. Above all, he loved my mother. His attraction to her was evident in a way that still makes me uncomfortable to recall. While I never had occasion to wonder about my father's desire, something in the force of it, in the force of all male desire, captivated me. Men did not merely want. Men needed. The man who followed my mother to and from work every day needed to do so. Presidents forfeit glory for blow jobs. Everything a man takes a lifetime to build he may gamble for a moment. I have never entirely subscribed to the theory that powerful men have such outsize egos that they cannot suppose they will ever be caught; rather, I think that the desire is so strong in the instant that everything else--family, home, career--melts down into a little liquid cooler and thinner than semen. Into nothing. As I began to write this book, a book about human desire, I thought I'd be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee. So I began by talking to men: to a philosopher in Los Angeles, a schoolteacher in New Jersey, a politician in Washington, D.C. I was indeed drawn to their stories the way one is drawn to order the same entrée from a Chinese restaurant menu again and again. The philosopher's story, which began as the story of a good-looking man whose less beautiful wife did not want to sleep with him, with all the attendant miserly agonies of dwindling passion and love, turned into the story of a man who wanted to sleep with the tattooed masseuse he saw for his back pain. She says she wants to run away with me to Big Sur, he texted early one bright morning. The next time we met I sat across from him at a coffee shop as he described the hips of the masseuse. His passion didn't seem dignified in the wake of what he had lost in his marriage; rather, it seemed perfunctory. The men's stories began to bleed together. In some cases, there was prolonged courting; sometimes the courting was closer to grooming; but mostly, the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man's throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman's was often just beginning. There was complexity and beauty and violence, even, in the way the women experienced the same event. In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like. Of course, female desire can be just as bullish as male desire, and when desire was propulsive, when it was looking for an end it could control, my interest waned. But the stories wherein desire was something that could not be controlled, when the object of desire dictated the narrative, that was where I found the most magnificence, the most pain. It resembled pedaling a bicycle backward, the agony and futility and, finally, the entry into another world altogether. To find these stories, I drove across the country six times. I loosely plotted my stops. Mostly I would land somewhere like Medora, North Dakota. I would order toast and coffee and read the local paper. I found Maggie this way. A young woman being called whore and fat cunt by women even younger than herself. There had been an alleged relationship with her married high school teacher. The fascinating thing, in her account, was the absence of intercourse. As she related it, he'd performed oral sex on her and didn't let her unzip his jeans. But he'd placed manila-yellow Post-it notes in her favorite book, Twilight. Next to passages about an enduring bond between two star-crossed lovers, he'd drawn parallels to their own relationship. What moved this young woman, what made her feel exalted, was the sheer number of the notes and how detailed they were. She could hardly believe that the teacher she so deeply admired had read the whole book, let alone taken the time to write such insightful commentary, as though he were conducting an advanced placement class on vampire lovers. He had, too, she recounted, sprayed the pages with his cologne, knowing she loved the way he smelled. To receive such notes, to experience such a relationship, and then to have it abruptly end: I could easily imagine the gaping hole that would leave. I came across Maggie's story when things were going from bad to worse. She struck me as a woman whose sexuality and sexual experiences were being denied in a horrific way. I will be telling the narrative as seen through her eyes; meanwhile a version of this story was put before a jury who saw it very differently. Part of her narrative poses for the reader the all-too-familiar question of when and why and by whom women's stories are believed--and when and why and by whom they are not. Throughout history, men have broken women's hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I'm sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I'd forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I've spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn't disappear, everything I felt didn't just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me. Maggie was, by her account, ruined by her teacher's alleged crime, but she had something that the women who are left rarely have. A certain power, dictated by her age and her former lover's occupation. Maggie's power, she believed, was ordained by the law of the land. Ultimately, however, it wasn't. Some women wait because if they don't, there's a threat of evanescence. He is the only one, in the moment, whom she believes she will ever desire. The problem can be economic. Revolutions take a long time to reach places where people share more Country Living recipes than articles about ending female subjugation. Lina, a housewife in Indiana who hadn't been kissed in years, waited to leave her husband because she didn't have the money to exist apart from him. The spousal support laws in Indiana were not a reality that was available to her. Then she waited for another man to leave his wife. Then she waited some more. The way the wind blows in our country can make us question who we are in our own lives. Often the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves. Sloane, a poised restaurant owner, lets her husband watch her fuck other men. Occasionally there are two couples on a bed, but mostly it's him watching her, on video or in person, with another man. Sloane is beautiful. While her husband watches her fuck other men, a coveted stretch of ocean froths outside the bedroom window. Down the road, Cotswold sheep the color of oatmeal roam. A friend of mine who thought ménage à trois squalid and nearly despicable in the context of a group of swingers I met in Cleveland found Sloane's story illuminating, raw, relatable. And it's relatability that moves us to empathize. I think about the fact that I come from a mother who let a man masturbate to her daily, and I think about all the things I have allowed to be done to me, not quite so egregious, perhaps, but not so different in the grand scheme. Then I think about how much I have wanted from men. How much of that wanting was what I wanted from myself, from other women, even; how much of what I thought I wanted from a lover came from what I needed from my own mother. Because it's women, in many of the stories I've heard, who have greater hold over other women than men have. We can make each other feel dowdy, whorish, unclean, unloved, not beautiful. In the end, it all comes down to fear. Men can frighten us, other women can frighten us, and sometimes we worry so much about what frightens us that we wait to have an orgasm until we are alone. We pretend to want things we don't want so nobody can see us not getting what we need. Men did not frighten my mother. Poverty did. She told me another story; though I don't recall the precise circumstances of the telling, I know she didn't sit me down. The story wasn't dispensed over water crackers and rosé. More likely it was Marlboros at the kitchen table, zero windows open, the dog blinking through the smoke at our knees. She would have been Windexing the glass table. The story was about a cruel man she was seeing right before she met my father. My mother had a number of words that intrigued and scared me. Cruel was among them. She grew up very poor, peeing in pots, dotting her freckles with the urine because it was said to diminish the pigment. There was a single room for her, two sisters, and their parents. Rainwater came through the ceiling and dripped onto her face as she slept. She spent nearly two years in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. Nobody visited her, because no one could afford to make the trip. Her father was an alcoholic who worked in the vineyards. A baby brother died before his first birthday. She eventually got out, made it to the city, but just before she did, in the maw of February, her mother fell ill. Stomach cancer. She was admitted to the local hospital, from which there was no coming back. One night there was a snowstorm, sleet smashing against cobblestones, and my mother was with this cruel man when she got word that her mother was dying and would be gone by morning. The cruel man was driving my mother to the hospital through the storm when they got into a terrible fight. My mother didn't provide details but said it ended with her on the gravel shoulder, in the heavy snow and darkening night. She watched the taillights disappear, no other cars on the frozen road. She didn't get to be with her mother at the end. To this day I'm not sure what cruel meant, in that context. I don't know if the man beat my mother, if he sexually assaulted her. I've always assumed that cruelty, in her world, involved some sexual threat. In my most gothic imaginings, I picture him trying to get laid the night that her mother was dying. I picture him trying to take a bite out of her side. But it was the fear of poverty and not the cruel man that stayed with her. That she could not call a taxi to get to the hospital. That she lacked agency. Lacked her own means. A year or so after my father died, when we could get through a day without crying, she asked me to show her how to use the internet. She'd never used a computer in her life. Typing one sentence took a painful few minutes. Just tell me what you want, I said, at the end of a day spent in front of the screen. We were both frustrated. I can't, she said. It's something I need to do alone. What? I asked. I'd seen everything of hers, all her bills, notes, even the handwritten one she meant for me to find in the event of her sudden death. I want to see about a man, she said quietly. A man I knew before your father. I was stunned, and even hurt. I wanted my mother to be my father's widow for all time. I wanted the notion of my parents to remain intact, even after death, even at the cost of my mother's own happiness. I didn't want to know about my mother's desire. This third man, the owner of a vast jewelry empire, loved her so much he'd gone to the church to try to stop my parents' wedding while it was under way. A long time ago, she'd given me a ruby-and-diamond necklace, something she seemed to be giving away to belie how much it was cherished. I told her she could try to figure the computer out herself, but before she could, she got sick. I think about my mother's sexuality and how she occasionally used it. The little things, the way she made her face up before she left the house or opened the door. To me, it always seemed a strength or a weakness, but never its own pounding heart. How wrong I was. Still, I wonder how a woman could have let a man masturbate behind her back for so many days. I wonder if she cried at night. Perhaps she even cried for the lonely old man. It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women. Excerpted from Three Women by Lisa Taddeo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.