BooksJanuary 5, 2020

Three Women: The astonishing study of female desire that has everyone talking

Contributing writer

Summer reissue: Three Women is a fervent, scrupulous qualitative review of female desire. It’s also a lesson in commitment – and the powerful act of paying attention.

First published 8 July, 2019.

Imagine a pole vaulter strolling into the Olympics, eyeing the bar – the women’s world record is 5.06m – and casually hitching it like a metre higher. Then fucking nailing the jump. That’s what American journalist Lisa Taddeo has just done for longform journalism.

She wallops you with her excellence right there in the first paragraph, an author’s note which begins:

“This is a work of non-fiction. Over the course of eight years I have spent thousands of hours with the women in this book – in person, on the phone, by text message and email. I moved to the towns where they lived and settled in as a resident so I could better understand their day-to-day lives…”

Eight years. Eight years, Taddeo subjugated herself to her sources, to their stories, knowing they could bail at any time. And she hung in there, even as several women did bail, halfway through the project.

The women that remain are ordinary but in completely knowing them, in inhabiting them, Taddeo makes them more. She knows it, too. False modesty and impostor syndrome – those plagues of professional women – be damned: “I am confident that these stories convey vital truths about women and desire,” she winds up her author’s note.

A cover blurb (from a dude, weirdly) promising this book will be “breathlessly debated” misses the point. Taddeo’s not out to stir debate or call women to arms: what she’s done is more simple and also much, much harder. What she’s done is listen.

“It is these three women who are in charge of their narratives,” she writes. “There are many sides to all stories, but this is theirs.”

Taddeo writes about Maggie, ruined by a sexual relationship with her teacher, watching that formative affair picked over by the courts. Watching power play out. She writes about Sloane, a vibrant, self-assured restaurateur who discovers, to her surprise, that she enjoys sleeping with other men while her husband watches, that she enjoys the role of submissive. And she writes about Lina, an Indiana housewife who spends her days cajoling her kids into eating chicken nuggets and harbours a craving to be properly kissed.

The women who dropped out are there in the background, too: never explicitly referred to, but a chorus that informs Taddeo’s brio and tone of authority. When she makes a sweeping statement she does so with come-at-me confidence. (I’m quoting her at length because what would you have me cut from this paragraph?)

“Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love 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 less 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… 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.”

Aside from the prologue and author’s note, Taddeo has scrubbed all traces of herself from the scene. She has asked so many questions of her three women, listened so carefully to the answers, that she recounts each of their stories with a sort of one-person omniscience. It’s like she climbed into their heads and downloaded each woman’s lived experience, in full, straight onto the page. You forget there’s a mediator between the three women and Three Women. Taddeo writes as if she is them. To read is to be convinced.

To tell Maggie’s story, for example, Taddeo naturally drops into portmanteaus – driftlove, shamehot, fearquick – that I bet were pulled from Maggie’s teen diaries, but could equally have been pulled from mine, back when I felt like my feelings were bigger than anyone else’s, bigger than boring, grown-up words. And just like that, Taddeo reeled me in: reading Maggie, I was right there with her, an insufferable adolescent all over again.

At other times, reading this book felt like watching Planet Earth – the exquisite footage; the trusted, deeply good narrator; the weight of patience and observation stitched into every frame.

Not like Planet Earth: there is sex, lots of sex. I’ve never seen it written about like this, completely without blushes and excuses: just desire, desire, desire, and then the act itself, broken down to its carnal, animal bones. Who was it said women only want sex as a means to obtain intimacy? Taddeo’s three women do want intimacy but they also want thrusting, French-kissing. They want men who taste sweet and talk dirty and are DTF when a woman’s got her period. They want.

Often there is so much detail and interiority you forget you’re reading non-fiction. In one scene Sloane recounts the first time she cooked with the man she would marry. Taddeo drills down to the pattern on the rug Sloane was standing on – and then pushes several strata further, into Sloane’s mind, noting that the triangles “made her think of pyramids in sandy countries she’d never seen”.

“Awareness,” she writes, again as Sloane. “You may think you understand the word, but you have to absorb the word. Your husband must be aware of you as though he is in your brain.”

As though he is in your brain.

Taddeo writes short fiction that has been hung about with prizes. And she has been writing shorter, brilliant non-fiction for years. In 2008, she wrote for Esquire about the last days of Heath Ledger; in 2010 the magazine published her extraordinary piece on LeBron James (“To watch LeBron James play is to know that you are not a superstar… he is this game’s animal, a beast made of pistons, a dark gazelle”). Here’s how she intro’ed a 2014 profile on Obama’s campaign manager:

“When you have been to the moon, you can’t come back to Earth and stand in line at Starbucks. You can’t order a coffee, and pay for it, and drink it beside someone wearing Sarah Palin glasses and a cruise visor. The regression to mediocrity is stunning and sapping. You would die inside.”

Deliciously, it was another feature, in which Rachel Uchitel sets out the women’s version of the Tiger Woods scandal, that landed Taddeo the deal for Three Women. Oh, I just love it: it was Woods and his ego, his gobbling, that sparked this extraordinary, revolutionary book on female desire, female ego. (Even better, you’d never know Woods played that bit part unless you read an interview with Taddeo, like this one.)

A note on the journalism side of things. Compared to what Taddeo’s pulled off here, the feature pieces I’ve worked on (even those that took months and months and felt like they sucked the life from me) are piffling, laughable. But what I’m sure holds for both is it’s not the note taking, the research, that saps your energy. It’s the emotional investment. First you lay yourself down in front of a person and ask them to trust you. Then you draw out a story from them and you must tend to it, too. In idle moments you come at the piece from every which-way. Big stories – the ones a writer cares about, invests in – wriggle their way into the subconscious. Every journalist I know, when they’re at the writing stage, dreams about their intro. And I’m talking about stories that take six months max from whoa to go. Two weeks, more often.

There’s also a stage where you completely freak out, overwhelmed by how much material you’ve pulled together, despairing of ever finding a way through. Perhaps Taddeo’s greatest accomplishment here is in boiling down her insane marathon of reportage into a narrative that feels sharp, acute.

This is all the more impressive given that the story she tells – the story she chose, above all others, to spend her time on – is a nebulous one. It could so easily have bloated and stalled.

Stack on top of that the years and years of research, the weight of obligation she must have felt toward her sources, and you’d be forgiven for anticipating something excruciating, overstuffed, earnest, careful. A book to smother the reader in granular detail.

But Taddeo writes like it’s all brand new. Like she’s high, perfectly high, punching out twitchy, cutting sentences in the wee hours. She writes like she’s elated to be writing. Like it’s easy. Like she’s electrified by it.

Here she is on the lead-in to a threesome:

“A husband who makes the first move. A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third woman who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops. It is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies.”

On Sloane’s youth:

“For most of her two decades she’d been a ghost in light linen, drinking orange juice at elegant tables, being exquisite on Easter.”

On Maggie, discovering the teacher she says went down on her in his basement has just been named teacher of the year:

“For a long time Maggie stands in the eel dark watching the great trees rise into the blackness. Diligently she smokes half a pack of cigarettes, one after the other.”

Every sentence is like that, just about. It’s exhilarating to read, as it clearly was to write. I suspect that after eight years of research – of run-up – it was a relief for Taddeo to hurl herself, finally, at the high bar of writing.

For Three Women, her debut, she was paid seven figures for the US rights alone. Her website promises another book next year, and a third the year after that.

I picture her eyeing the bar, hitching it higher. I picture her fucking nailing it.

Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $34.99) is available at Unity Books.

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BooksJanuary 4, 2020

‘I am leaving you’: Michelle Langstone writes her heart out to Haruki Murakami

Michelle Langstone

Contributing writer

Summer reissue: Tired of his tropes and infatuations, Michelle Langstone writes about her waning love for the writings of Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

First published 29 July 2019.

I left you behind with a note that said “Free to a good home. No longer wanted.” Blunt, perhaps, but that’s how it is when love runs out. There isn’t room for sensitivity when it’s an acrimonious separation after many years of infatuation. The afternoon heat in Vietnam brought rain. The windows were blurred with it, and the flashing of red brake lights from taxis and scooters on the street beyond where I left you made it seem like I was walking away from the scene of an accident.

You wrote something once. Well, you wrote a lot of things, but you wrote something about love and you nestled it like a treasure to be found and thieved and coveted; read again and again in the pages of a book you called Kafka on the Shore. The words were monuments to love, and I built a city around them, dragging stone and glass and timber like a faithful labourer.

“Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.”

I think it was the last time you showed your heart to me like that. Your love came in hot in your early works, you were giddy with the intensity of feeling you had to share. All your early words carried the mysteries of connection. Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood – they were drenched in it. And then you became busier with strange towns and jazz and cats; women wanted you, or they wanted something else, or they couldn’t speak about their longing but you sensed it. Sad women and students divorced from themselves. Pale women with dark hair occupied you. I wore my hair like a curtain and wondered if you’d like it.

I once lay in bed with a man who was listening to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle on audiobook. He lived with his mother, and she had gone to work on a night shift, so we lay in the cheap sheets in the dark, listening to the story I’d read so often, narrated in an accent that was not American nor British, but existed in a strange vacuum of indistinguishable origins. After the part where you made yourself a simple meal and poured a small glass of beer, you masturbated. I think you’d visited the mysterious well in the neighbouring prefecture, and were at sea in your apartment again. I think that was the order of things. I’ve lost count of those simple constructions, and where they belong, but you were always thoughtful over a meal. We listened to the narrator tell us that you gave yourself a methodically restrained and efficient handjob, and then we had sex. I remember thinking there was some kind of power in that, that I was somehow linked to you forever, by virtue of sexual gratification. I say you because it is you, isn’t it? I go looking for you in every book and I find you instantly. You’re there in a simple meal of grilled chicken and rice with spring onions, you’re there in a lazily-spinning record in a room high in a house, you’re there with your hand on it after a perplexing incident. You gave it a tug more times than I can count, and I wonder if you ever considered restraint.

You always had a thing for breasts. It’s impossible for you not to comment on them, and I forgave you at first because I was young and I loved the thrill of thinking breasts were worthy of such attention that they made it into nearly every single one of your books. I suppose I thought it was part of what made your writing so alluring — that unashamed gaze on the female. Once I even justified it was a link to your jazz records, to the round shape of them, some kind of motif, something you’d done intentionally to imprint the shape of your world. Honestly, I cringe that I indulged you.

It grew tired. By the time 1Q84 came around to bludgeon us with its weight and girth, your women were practically sex dolls, and I could trace their outline in the air, even if I’d never know what they were thinking or feeling, or what their heart was like, or if they’d had dreams, once. I left you behind in the height of this breast mania, in Killing Commendatore, where you’d often contemplate your sister’s growing bosom with the lofty musings of a philosopher. She was dying of some kind of affliction that apparently would beset you with psychological issues for the rest of your adult life, but don’t let that stop you describing their budding form, buddy.

Here’s something, Haruki. You changed translator with your book Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I don’t know why you did that, but I felt it immediately, and it didn’t sit well on me. It was like pulling last winter’s trousers from the cupboard and finding them suddenly ill-fitting, as if they had been made for someone who had no bottom, no curves to speak of. Your voice was lost to me, held just back, as if you existed through a thick pane of glass and I could still see you, but no longer hear you. You always had an elegant way of tangling feeling with practicality, and it was dazzling because you brought Japan with you in your coat pockets, and showed it to me, this formal, structured existence filled with intense and secret passion.

I think that’s where it all unravelled. You changed, or perhaps I did. Your coat got baggy, and you let the fabric stretch and become misshapen. Nobody stopped you. I remember being excited that Kafka on the Shore was a bit heftier than usual, because it meant more time in your company. When 1Q84 arrived you were a companion I enjoyed in more measured doses. It was fantastic, and fantastical, but it was flabby. Colourless Tsukuru was, well, pale. It was pasty and cumbersome and I didn’t know what the hell was going on, even though I still loved you. There were strains of Norwegian Wood that I’d let out a breath for, when I encountered them, and feel relieved you were still there, before I began to drown in the swathes of vague words again.

I picked up Killing Commendatore from the bookshop, where I’d reserved a copy, and I felt tired just looking at it. I put you on a shelf intending to read you, and I picked you up and put you down many times and I felt irritated that you asked so much from me. I chose you to come with me to Vietnam because I thought being farther away would help me to connect with you again. I thought we’d have a nice holiday together and remember why we loved each other. You put me over my hand luggage weight allowance. You hurt my shoulder, jammed in my handbag like that. My wrist ached from holding you up, like I’d given myself too many post-meal handjobs. You went on and on about your sister’s breasts and you were blank-eyed and bloodless about your casual lovers and the perfunctory sex you were having. There was the mystery of a painting in an attic, there was a strange cairn of stones and a ringing bell in the night and a man with white hair. Someone made a bingo card of your ‘youness’, did you know that? Every box, something we’d come to know and expect from you. I think I collected the set before I was halfway through the damn thing, it was so full of your tropes. You made ham sandwiches this time, and while I applaud you broadening the scope of your simple meals, the only time ham sandwiches sound appealing is when Enid Blyton writes about them. Look her up – she can give you a good adventure without causing RSI.

I don’t really want to read about two men listening to classical music for a hundred pages. I don’t really think you can justify a 700-page book, even if you are a legend. Remember when you came to the Auckland Writers Festival and the event sold out and we were giddy for you? Remember when that audience member asked the best question ever recorded in the notoriously fraught ‘question time’, which was approximately “Do you think cats really have magical powers?” and you smiled benignly and said “It is just a cat” and we all applauded and laughed and glowed with your pragmatism, even as we secretly hoped you’d have said yes. Even as we recalled how many times we’d looked carefully at our own moggies, hoping they might say something.

Even though you can describe the stillness of a scene like you paused the world just to show me, even though your love of running reminds me of my dad, even though your devotion to music is so deep that it creates a soundtrack for every sentence you write, and even though the way you write about longing is as if you have drawn blood from me and examined it under a microscope, I am leaving you. Think of it as a cooling-off period, and a chance for us both to come back to ourselves. Perhaps, down the line, we might make another go of it, but I won’t promise you that.

As much as it hurts, I think it’s better if we don’t have any contact, so I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear from you for a while. I’d prefer it if you didn’t write.

Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami, is available at Unity Books (and, if you’re lucky, the foyer of the Hotel Grand Saigon).