What we have instead is something much more modest - an immersive look at a particular story of female sexuality, albeit refracted three ways. To unfairly and unnecessarily elevate this book gives it so far to fall.

Anthony Lukas, Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, giants of narrative journalism. “Three Women” arrives on gusts of fulsome blurbs and comparisons, by its publisher, to the works of J. She even tailed Lina on assignations with her married lover: “After they left, I would go to exactly where they’d been to take in the scenery and the smells and the sounds.”

Taddeo spent “thousands of hours” with the women, crisscrossing the country six times, moving to their towns for years on end. The journalist Lisa Taddeo has produced something of the sort in “Three Women,” a vexed, nearly decade-long investigation into the sex lives and desires of three American women: Maggie, a North Dakota teenager in a clandestine relationship with her English teacher Lina, a married homemaker in Indiana having an affair with her high school boyfriend and lovely, aloof Sloane, from Newport, R.I., whose husband likes watching her with other men. Imagine a biography that only charted the secret life. Each of us possesses three lives, Gabriel García Márquez told his biographer Gerald Martin: a public life, a private life and a secret life.

Three women disappear book