{"id":2452943,"date":"2020-01-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=318644"},"modified":"2020-01-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T07:00:00","slug":"aspen-winter-words-author-lisa-taddeo-on-how-she-wrote-the-immersive-three-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-winter-words-author-lisa-taddeo-on-how-she-wrote-the-immersive-three-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Winter Words: Author Lisa Taddeo on how she wrote the immersive \u2018Three Women\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Lisa Taddeo<\/strong>
J, Waite<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Lisa Taddeo\u2019s nonfiction book debut, \u201cThree Women,\u201d<\/a> has gotten a lot of hype. A No. 1 New York Times bestseller, this in-depth exploration of three women\u2019s lives that have been upended by desire also landed on multiple best-books-of-2019 lists and has even been praised as the best nonfiction title since \u201cIn Cold Blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

And for good reason.<\/p>\n

Taddeo, who kicks off Aspen Words\u2019 Winter Words author series<\/a> Tuesday, spent nearly a decade working on \u201cThree Women,\u201d including six cross-country trips in search of subjects who\u2019d be willing to have the details of their innermost lives and deepest vulnerabilities published. Taddeo spent about two years \u2014 including moving to their communities \u2014 with each of the three final subjects: Lina, a housewife and mother in a sexless marriage who reconnects with a high school boyfriend; Maggie, who takes her high school English teacher to court for seducing her when she was his student; and Sloane, a beautiful, polished restaurant owner whose husband enjoys watching her have sex with other men and women.<\/p>\n

Fully immersing herself in her subjects\u2019 lives was just one way Taddeo was able to reach such emotional depths in telling their stories, which were happening \u201cin real time\u201d when she was with them \u2014 so memories were fresh and feelings still raw. They also wanted to talk about their feelings, Taddeo said, and had both a high level of emotional intelligence and no other outlets for sharing experiences and emotions that are generally frowned upon by society.<\/p>\n

And then there were all the emails and texts and Facebook messages that Taddeo exchanged with the women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith writing, it\u2019s really easy to see personality come out,\u201d she said in a recent phone interview. \u201cMost often it\u2019s nonwriters that express themselves the best in email and text writing. They\u2019re not necessarily thinking about appropriate writing or how they should sound or convey what they\u2019re trying to say. For me, getting their voices in that way was helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the at-times astonishing level of detail \u2014 the exact color of the bedsheets, the smell of the car \u2014 Taddeo approached this very deliberately. Knowing what she wanted to write about in each chapter, she wrote paragraphs that were somewhat like Mad Libs, the fill-in-the-blank word game, then asked them to fill in the blanks of the details, and afterward went back through it all with them to make sure it was accurate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this level of detail, both descriptive and emotional, that makes \u201cThree Women\u201d so immersive \u2014 as a reader you feel like you\u2019re not only in the room but in the women\u2019s heads and hearts. And that leads to a certain level of understanding, empathy and relatability \u2014 even if the actions themselves aren\u2019t relatable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think everyone\u2019s done foolish things for love, and if they haven\u2019t, judging their stories is not cool,\u201d said Taddeo, who along with writing for magazines like New York and Esquire is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, now editing her first novel.<\/p>\n

Since the book\u2019s publication in July, Taddeo has received plenty of positive reaction from readers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost women have said it\u2019s made them feel seen, and that they want to tell their stories,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A little more surprising was the reaction from men, which has come mostly in the past month (presumably as word of the book took longer to trickle down to men or as wives and girlfriends handed their copies down).<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom men, it\u2019s like, \u2018Thank you, what else can you tell me?\u2019\u201d Taddeo said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fear and confusion from men who want to change from the sphere of what they\u2019ve done in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Taddeo is cautious about how to think about the book in the era of #MeToo \u2014 which is not about what women want but what they don\u2019t want.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want empowering stories about women, but some are not empowered,\u201d she said, noting that in many places she traveled, people (including Lina) had not heard of #MeToo as the movement took hold during the tail end of Taddeo\u2019s reporting in 2017. \u201cSo to leave these people in the dust and to say we\u2019ve moved on, that\u2019s part of the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say, however, that the women\u2019s stories are simply about being led on by men\u2019s desires \u2014 Taddeo was quick to disabuse that interpretation. At the core, they\u2019re about the depth and complexity of women\u2019s desire, how desire intertwines with love, and how it all ultimately reflects back on oneself.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s not a connection or a commitment on both parts, it\u2019s mainly about what you\u2019re looking for in yourself or what you\u2019re missing,\u201d Taddeo said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s a man or woman is interchangeable.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa TaddeoJ, Waite Lisa Taddeo\u2019s nonfiction book debut, \u201cThree Women,\u201d has gotten a lot of hype. A No. 1 New York Times bestseller, this in-depth exploration of three women\u2019s lives that have been upended by desire also landed on multiple best-books-of-2019 lists and has even been praised as the best nonfiction title since \u201cIn Cold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2452943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 22:22:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2452943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2452943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2452943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2452943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}