Three Women (book)

The book covers the sexuality of three women: Lina, a suburban Indiana mother whose teenage rape disrupts the course of her life; Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student in North Dakota who becomes entangled in an illegal affair with her married English teacher; and Sloane, a successful restaurant owner in the Northeast whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. Taddeo spent the past eight years writing the book, driving across the country six times to embed herself in the lives of the three women.[2]

Three Women was published on July 9, 2019, by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.[2]

Three Women debuted at number one on The New York Times Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction best-sellers list on July 28, 2019.[3] It spent eleven weeks on the list.[4]

The book also debuted at number two on The New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction best-sellers list on July 28, 2019.[5] It spent eleven weeks on the list.[6]

At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the book received a cumulative "Positive" rating based on 29 reviews: 12 "Rave" reviews, 6 "Positive" reviews, 9 "Mixed" reviews, and 2 "Pan" reviews.[7]

Publishers Weekly gave the book a mixed review, writing, "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."[8]

Kate Tuttle of NPR gave the book a rave review, writing, "Its prose is gorgeous, nearly lyrical as it describes the longings and frustrations that propel these ordinary women. Blending the skills of an ethnographer and a poet, Taddeo renders them extraordinary."[9]

Parul Sehgal of The New York Times praised the book's "boldness" but largely criticized Taddeo's style calling it "faux-literary," writing, "To see language treated so shabbily shakes the reader's confidence; if a writer can't work her way around a sentence or land a metaphor, what assurance have we that she can parse her subjects' traumas, their complex, sometimes inchoate yearnings?"[10]

While The Times' Christina Patterson praised Taddeo's prose writing: "In weaving these stories together, Taddeo paints an electrifying picture of female desire, and of the pain men casually inflict in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. She writes in searing prose that seems to capture every nuance."[11]

Luara Miller of Slate wrote that "What makes Three Women so remarkable and indelible, and also so refreshingly out-of-step with the tenor of the present moment, is Taddeo’s refusal to judge these 'characters.'"[12]

Writing for The New Yorker, Lauren Oyler felt that Taddeo's writing style created "moral ambiguity at the level of the book's form rather than its content", undermining Taddeo's claim that "these three specific women who are in charge of their narratives."[13]

Elizabeth Flock of The Washington Post gave the book a rave review, calling it "exhaustively reported and as elegantly written as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family."[14]

In June 2020 it won the narrative non-fiction book of the year at the British Book Awards.[15]