Three Women author Lisa Taddeo: ‘Thinking about those women has kept me awake at night’

Lisa Taddeo recalls the editor of her internationally bestselling book debut Three Women telling her, “‘Books either sell a lot or win a lot of awards and never the twain shall meet’.”

So it’s been a “huge thrill” to Taddeo, 40, to learn yesterday (via a virtual ceremony) that Three Women has been awarded Best Non-Fiction Narrative Book at the British Book Awards, widely regarded as the Baftas of the book trade. “I’m like, ‘Did they get the name correct?’” she says, laughing.

It comes at the end of a year in which Taddeo has seen Three Women – a lyrical and pacey account of how passion altered three very different women’s lives –  hit the top of both the UK and US bestseller lists. It had sold more than 250,000 copies in the UK alone, where it’s been reprinted 39 times.

“It’s all been quite shocking,” says Taddeo, who comes across as lively and empathetic, speaking from the Connecticut home she shares with her screenwriter husband and five-year-old daughter. Realistically, she’d assumed the book would sell “maybe two copies. I’d had a decade working on it, with people thinking I hadn’t been doing anything and – depressingly, because it’s a very female way of thinking – worrying I’d disappoint the people who’d given me this opportunity to write it and the many women I’d spent hours talking to.’”

The daughter of an Italian-American doctor from New Jersey and a former journalist for magazines such as Esquire, in 2010 an editor – impressed by a profile she’d written of Tiger Woods’s former mistress, Rachel Uchitel – commissioned her to write an updated version of Thy Neighbour's Wife, Gay Talese's 1980 study of the sexual revolution in America.

Taddeo spent the following eight years criss-crossing the US, approaching “friendly-looking” strangers, initially both male and female, often in bars, asking if they would open up about their darkest desires.

Weren’t they horrified? “Some people looked a bit quizzical, but I often had my baby strapped to my chest, which made it easier to communicate: ‘Look, I really am writing a book, I’m not just a creep.’”

If someone wanted to talk, Taddeo and her family would settle in their town for weeks or months. Eventually, she whittled her focus onto three women. The first was Maggie Wilken, a (now) 29-year-old from North Dakota whose schoolgirl affair with a teacher resulted in a trial where he was acquitted and she was subsequently vilified as a slut and homewrecker.

The second was Indiana housewife “Lina”, who rekindled an affair with her high-school boyfriend; the third was “Sloane”, a glamorous East Coast restaurateur, whose husband enjoyed watching her have sex with other people.

It was Sloane, says Taddeo (who keeps in touch with all three) who was most nonplussed by the book’s success, since she was easily recognisable in her community. “She wanted anonymity. If she or I had known how things were going to turn out, we probably would not have continued.”

In contrast, Maggie was delighted to have her side of the story told. “Women from across the world have been in touch with supportive messages. It’s given her closure.”

The book’s popularity was almost certainly helped by how publication coincided with the explosion of the MeToo movement. “MeToo definitely made people readier to hear these stories about desire but at the same time I was shocked to keep hearing, ‘People didn’t want to hear women’s stories but your book changed all that.’

“I had never thought some people might not want to hear other people’s stories. I just wanted to tell stories that were interesting to me.”

Such an assertion does appear baffling, given that surveys suggest women make up 80 per cent of sales in UK, US and Canadian fiction markets (and Three Women reads like fiction). I tell Taddeo that the first black female winner of the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo, recently said that publishing views its core audience as a “50-something middle-class to upper-middle-class white woman.”

“Oh, so much!” Taddeo cries. “I didn’t realise that until I saw all the middle-aged white women at book events like readings. Perhaps it was part of my white privilege that I didn’t know before – perhaps because it was because I hadn’t published a book.

“But I don’t think these women don’t want to read about other women. It’s more, perhaps, that there might be a patriarchal hangover where women have been made to feel like they weren’t important, and therefore their stories are not important. I think there’s a lot of that going on with women in this country who voted for Trump.”

Inevitably, in the current “woke” climate, accusations were raised that Taddeo’s protagonists were all white and all straight (although Sloane occasionally has sex with women). The writer explains calmly that she spent six months talking to a bisexual black woman of Dominican origin, who then asked not to be included.

“It was very difficult, because her story was one of the best. Then I had a gay, young man who wanted me to strike out a whole bunch of things that were just too important, so I had to leave that as well.”

In total, about 20 people dropped out, seven of whom Taddeo had spent at least six months with. “In the end, these three women gave me the most. Perhaps that was because they were white and felt comfortable talking to me as another white woman, although I didn’t feel that, to be honest.

“I think what happened with a lot with people is they were afraid of having your story out in the world, because they lacked self confidence. And it’s hard for a lot of people, specifically women, to say: ‘I matter enough to tell my story.’”

Yet while many were too frightened to share their stories, others were “bummed” not to be included in the final draft. “My brother was just one example. His wife had left him for a younger man, he had three children and was willing to talk to me, but ultimately I stopped talking to him for the book, and that was really difficult for him. Even today he hasn’t got over it, and he wants to tell me things in detail.”

Taddeo’s writing was propelled by a hope that her daughter’s generation might learn to value themselves more than their predecessors.  “I want [my daughter] to be aware that she should not be searching for what she thinks might be missing in herself from other people – to have the idea that you matter, and you should not be looking at yourself through a male gaze.”

In general, she’s impressed that younger women seem less reliant on external approval than her generation. “But at the same time, there is huge pressure on them to keep up with everyone on Instagram in a way my generation didn’t have. We weren’t constantly comparing ourselves with others, and feeling jealous and not good enough.”

The book’s success means Taddeo has been in constant demand – even in lockdown – on the speaker and podcast circuit. “I am grateful, but I am exhausted.” An idea is percolating for another non-fiction book, but for now she’s working on a TV adaptation of Three Women for Showtime, while a novel will be published next year.

The switch to fiction has been a huge “relief”, she says. “Thinking about these women has kept me awake at night.”

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is the winner of the Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year, supported by The Telegraph, at the British Book Awards. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop