Mia Levitin

Sex and the married woman

Lisa Taddeo’s exploration of the ‘heat and sting of female want’ was hotly anticipated, but leaves something to be desired

issue 10 August 2019

The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.’ Inspired by Gay Talese’s 1980 reportage on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Lisa Taddeo, a journalist and Pushcart prize-winning short story writer, peered into the windows of three ‘ordinary’ American women to illustrate their ‘erotic lives and longings’.

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