Sunday 6 September 2020

'Three Women' by Lisa Taddeo - absorbing, very sad, very familiar


 

SPOILERS!!!

This had much hype, which didn’t affect my enjoyment, but from reading the comments on the book itself and the comments of those in the BTM reading group, this book was very mixed in reception.  I found it very sad, and very true and oddly silent in places. 

Lina was gang-raped while still in school after being drugged, and seemed to idolise and stay stuck on an earlier crush from that era when she grew up, becoming obsessed with the perfect sexual experience and it’s meaning emotionally filling her life, for her to not be ‘disgusting’ , to be loved and seen – sex and desire were all mixed up with identity and absence.  She has an affair that becomes far more transactional than she can see it to be, with that same man, when they are both married to other people later.  He…treats her as a pet, an afterthought.  I wanted her to do better, but she was so obsessed with how he made her feel – I worried how she would feel when the affair eventually stopped – what scaffolding would support all the outward need she had to feel then? She had no good mirror reflecting back at her what was her own strength, only refractions of the past she played out in lurid emotion.  I really felt her.

Maggie had alcoholic parents and an early sexual experience that she was crucified in school about, followed by an affair with a teacher - at which point she got totally stuck and could not move on: it had been so intense and real and unfinished and then it was a court case and no one believed her [except a little old man, and a reporter, but after the fact].  We see her lose hope near the end, and her father has also killed himself; but not about this…that is a big silence in the book – Maggie’s reaction to her father’s death.  I hope she does ok.

And Sloane.  A rich girl who knew how it all should look on the outside and went to great lengths to make it look right, swinging when suggested by her husband, being the right level of agreeable – ‘optimal’ as the protagonist of Harrow Lake would have said.  An eating disorder to be prettily slender.  In many ways her story was the least interesting because we got to hear the least of it, and because she had/has perfected outward appearance – she’s preserved in amber for however long: the thinnest, prettiest, most agreeable wife sexually.  I felt Sloane needed friends. That you don’t compete with; just friends.

The book was supposed to be about the desires of women, how we feel it and what it does in our lives.  What I read, more than anything, was how empty we seem to be, how small and delicate our sense of self-worth, how we constantly seek to optimise, change, manipulate it for love and a sense of wellness or joy of LIFE of being AWAKE AND HERE!  It was very very sad, to read so many different lives and to see them all come down to the same basic thing: we feel unloved or unheard or unworthy, we are never enough, we must always change for others, our self is always mirrored from without, never self-sustaining.  We’re fossil fuel; we need to get renewable!

All the women seemed totally formed by the school age years and in Sloane’s case, a bit before, regarding sexual experience as formative for personality.  The early years are so important; so many of us get stuck with the identity we feel then, and subsequent change or layering is very much from that point, it felt. We don’t seem to realise we are stuck with the teen or tween we were, and a lot of our thinking about love and sex comes direct from feelings and experience of that era, not now. Stunted growth; sometimes poison, tumourous growth around incidents that happened then. Arrested emotional development.

This is only one of many facets of women’s lives.  You don’t worry about emotional voids when you’re trying to pay the rent or you just lost your job, or your living situation is unsafe…But these are portrayals of states of mind and resulting actions that made sense, and felt familiar; done some, seen some. It makes me want, more than ever, to be more self-sustaining myself. The weird thing is, you ask people who are, and they can’t explain to you how it’s done, they just do it.  I’m not sure how much of the changing behaviour can be learned from books either.  But I keep looking.  


 Lisa Taddeo

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