From The Last Days of Heath Ledger to Lebron James to the title characters of THREE WOMEN, writer Lisa Taddeo’s words have captured her subjects in extraordinary and enlightening ways.
From The Last Days of Heath Ledger to Lebron James to the title characters of THREE WOMEN, writer Lisa Taddeo’s words have captured her subjects in extraordinary and enlightening ways.
Lisa Taddeo:
What she said to me was, “Hey, you know what? Yeah, he likes to watch me have sex with other people, but he does a lot for me, and so what?” And it makes her feel weird, but if she at any point said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he wouldn’t leave her or get angry. Because part of her likes it too.
Speaker 2:
This is Design Matters, with Debbie Millman. For 15 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Debbie talks with writer Lisa Taddeo about sex and desire.
Lisa Taddeo:
That’s how sex differs from desire. With desire you fall in love with yourself in a way as opposed to just having this physical feeling.
Speaker 2:
Here’s Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Lisa Taddeo, a two-time Pushcart Prize-winning author, wanted to write a book about desire, but quickly decided she didn’t want to write about men’s desires. Instead, she wanted to write solely about women’s desires, and she ended up focusing on three women. She spent countless hours with them. She even moved into their towns where she took in the scenery and the smells and the sounds of their intimate lives. About a decade later, she came out with her book titled simply Three Women. It has gotten a lot of attention, topped the New York Times Bestseller List, has started many conversations about female desire, some of which we’re going to talk about today.
Debbie Millman:
Lisa Taddeo, welcome to Design Matters.
Lisa Taddeo:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Lisa, I understand you hate going to the beach.
Lisa Taddeo:
I do.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that?
Lisa Taddeo:
I feel like it’s very sandy. I just, I like when water is super warm and still, like a bath, and most oceans aren’t like that. So yeah, I just prefer a pool.
Debbie Millman:
I don’t like sand either, and I also like to be able to see the bottom.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I feel somehow unprotected when it’s just this limitless, black pool. But I actually thought you were going to tell us that the reason you didn’t like going to the beach was because of what happened when you went to a Puerto Rico beach with your parents when you were a little girl.
Lisa Taddeo:
Oh. It’s left a mark in different ways.
Debbie Millman:
Do you want to share that story?
Lisa Taddeo:
Sure. When I was about 11, my friend and I were supposed to go to Florida with her family, and my parents decided somewhat at the last minute that they didn’t want me to go, and I was, as 11-year-olds tend to be, I didn’t exactly take it well. So they said, “Let’s go to Puerto Rico.” While we were there, we were on the beach, and my parents were helicopter parents before that was a thing. They didn’t let me do anything, so I was like, “Can I take a walk on the beach?” They finally said sure.
Lisa Taddeo:
So I took a walk on the beach. I took my copy of Stephen King’s The Stand because I’ve always been a rather depressive… Would you believe it at 11? I fell asleep on the beach slathered in baby oil because I wanted to get a tan. I woke up to a man probably in his 40s or so licking my shoulder and neck area. I was definitely frightened, but what was weirder about my reaction was that I didn’t really freak out. I didn’t want, I don’t know if the word “upset him” is correct, but I don’t know. I just know that it was not something I handled with, you know, I didn’t scream and run. I felt like it was the right thing to just move away slowly.
Lisa Taddeo:
So I went back to my parents and I didn’t tell them. That night I had this terrible sunburn. It was like a second degree, like I had blisters. I just felt guilty about the sunburn and guilty about what had happened with the man as though my falling asleep on a beach wearing a bikini was my fault. So yeah. No, I don’t hate beaches because of that.
Debbie Millman:
But you could. I mean-
Lisa Taddeo:
I could, yes.
Debbie Millman:
… that would be a good enough reason.
Lisa Taddeo:
It’s true.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad grew up in New Jersey and went to medical school in Bologna, Italy. While there he met your mom, who was a fruit stand cashier. Is it true your dad serenaded your mom outside her window with an old radio?
Lisa Taddeo:
How did you know that? Yes, it is.
Debbie Millman:
Very Say Anything. I sort of had that John Cusack-
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… In Your Eyes thing.
Lisa Taddeo:
That’s how I picture it too. I know that he did that. I don’t know if it was above his head. Yeah, I always think that’s so, it’s incredibly romantic. Yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents love to read. I know that before you learned to read, you’d tell stories with your dad’s Stephen King books to a rapt audience of stuffed animals. I can really see that. It’s so vivid. So you made up your own stories.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes, and not only my own stories, but because I’m so neurotic and Capricorn-y, for every word there was on the John Grisham page or the Stephen King page or whatever my father was reading, I would put one of my own words. So if it was and, I would try to find a short word. Because I didn’t know how to read, and my stuffed animals, they didn’t care if it was exact, but I did.
Debbie Millman:
I love how creative that is. Did you take a liking to writing early? Was that something that you identified as a talent or an aspiration when you were very young?
Lisa Taddeo:
I mean, it was definitely something I’ve always, from as long as I can remember. I was writing poetry too. It was terrible, obviously, but-
Debbie Millman:
No, it wasn’t. You won an award.
Lisa Taddeo:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
You won an award-
Lisa Taddeo:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
… when you were 11 or 12.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You won a $1,000 grand prize from the National Library of Poetry.
Lisa Taddeo:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
And you think it was a bad poem.
Lisa Taddeo:
It was.
Debbie Millman:
What was the poem about, and can you recite any part of it for us?
Lisa Taddeo:
I can’t. I can remember it. I can remember the first line, but [crosstalk 00:06:10].
Debbie Millman:
What was the first line?
Lisa Taddeo:
I can’t, I can’t.
Debbie Millman:
You can’t? Oh.
Lisa Taddeo:
There was the word ringmaster was in it. Something about a ringmaster taming the wind. I can’t even. Like I just get so squeamish even thinking about it.
Debbie Millman:
A couple of years later, you banged out a 350-page novel on a typewriter about a group of conservationist high schoolers in the Congo, and you said that you were a depressed kid and writing about a world you could only dream of and research in an encyclopedia, and that’s what made you happy.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Were you depressed? Were you a sad child?
Lisa Taddeo:
I had a happy family life, but my mom was depressed. Not like in a traditional way. She wasn’t sitting in bed and not getting up, but she would say in a very Italian way, “I’m so depressed.” It wasn’t like I saw it outwardly, but I took in a lot of that, I think. There’s a lot of, I don’t know, it’s an Italian sort of… There’s a lot of Elena Ferrante stuff like that. There’s a sort of deep, you just feel all these things deeply when you have a mom who, she talked to me like I was 40 years old.
Debbie Millman:
You write about her so vividly in Three Women that I almost feel like I could see her, and I envision her as a Sofia Lauren type.
Lisa Taddeo:
She did look almost exactly… I mean, there’s a picture of her in Elle Magazine because I wrote a brief essay about her two years ago or so, and there’s a picture in there. All of her younger pictures were the big, curly, brown hair. Yes. She’s quite much like that.
Debbie Millman:
You went to New York University to study dramatic writing and ultimate transferred to Rutgers in New Jersey. Why Rutgers?
Lisa Taddeo:
My ex-boyfriend was there. My parents would not let me go to see him. They kept track of me.
Debbie Millman:
They really were helicopter parents.
Lisa Taddeo:
Oh yeah, it was wild. I also in NYU, I felt very, it was a little too much for me at first. I was living in Washington Square Park. It was kind of a dream. I had almost a full scholarship. The fact that I transferred to Rutgers with my parents [inaudible 00:08:24] paying money for me to go to school-
Debbie Millman:
I’m surprised they let you.
Lisa Taddeo:
Well, I told them that they didn’t have the classes I wanted at NYU. Meanwhile I was in a seven-person Virginia Wolfe class. I mean, I think about it at least once a week. It’s absolutely haunting that I did that.
Debbie Millman:
What career were you envisioning for yourself at that time? Were you thinking that you wanted to be a writer?
Lisa Taddeo:
I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I actually truly like short stories above everything. What I always envisioned myself doing was writing short stories in rural England, like the Cotswolds or something less touristy, and working at Bathe University and teaching short stories.
Debbie Millman:
So very Jane Austen, Virginia Wolfe.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes, and then yet transferring to [inaudible 00:09:11]. So you know, there’s a complexity there.
Debbie Millman:
Your father, Peter, was killed in a car accident in 2003 when you were in your early 20s. I understand that at that time you did have dreams to be a writer, but everything ended up taking a backseat to your grieving. How did you manage to recover?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, I don’t know. It was very brutal for a long time. I mean, it’s still brutal, but it’s changed. They say it does change. It was about two years where I was able to live in any kind of normal way again. Then my mom got sick. So once I kind of felt somewhat normal again, I then had to do that. Then my dog and my grandparents-
Debbie Millman:
Oh god.
Lisa Taddeo:
… and my aunt and uncle. Yeah, my 20s were kind of-
Debbie Millman:
Oh my god.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes, yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you’re still standing.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, no. I know. It’s weird.
Debbie Millman:
You eventually got an entry level editorial job at Gold Magazine. How did that come about? Are you a golfer?
Lisa Taddeo:
No, no. I’m still not.
Debbie Millman:
That was a fast no.
Lisa Taddeo:
I met someone. I was emailing people, editors at different places, because I wanted to be an editorial assistant. I didn’t think to get an MFA until two years ago. I was the oldest person in my class. But, yeah, I didn’t know the right path. I thought editing would be a good way to get into the world. I emailed a few people, and someone introduced me to someone who told me that this job had happened up. I said I didn’t know anything about golf, but that I was willing to learn, and I was. So that’s how it worked.
Debbie Millman:
You were freelancing at the same time, and David Granger, Esquire’s former long-term editor has said the following about you. “I met Lisa after I got a call from a friend who she’d worked for. I had breakfast with her, and started looking for ways to work with her. When Heath Ledger died in 2008, I was baffled by the outpouring of emotion. I called Lisa and asked her to report as much as she could on it in a week. Five days later, I had the first draft of a story, and I thought it was good, but it just wasn’t there. One of my editors called her and told her we couldn’t use it. The next morning, eight hours later, we had a completely rewritten story in our inboxes. It was in first person, and we called it reported fiction. It was both funny and profound, and we published it.”
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do that?
Lisa Taddeo:
I had always wanted to be in Esquire. I’d always wanted to write fiction in Esquire. There’s a number of magazines that I had, and that was one of them, and I just want to keep checking them off until I get them all. But with that in particular, my father had passed away recently, and I needed something, you know. I knew I needed something [inaudible 00:12:24] to get by, and I got that call and I was crushed. They were like, “Maybe we can run it online.” Back then online, it just wasn’t what it is now. I was crushed, and I said, “Okay.” I hung up, and I cried for about two hours, and I smoked about 50 cigarettes with my mother across the table just crying. She was like, “What do you care of a short story? I don’t get…” They never understood what short stories were, like why would you read them? Why would you write them?
Lisa Taddeo:
Then I went to my computer and I just wrote something. I sent it to them at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, and I said… and I meant this. I was just like, “You guys don’t even have to read this. I just wanted to do it. If you want to read it, read it.” And then two hours later I got the call saying they loved it. It was one of the happiest… For someone who’s never happy, it was a happy experience.
Debbie Millman:
Why are you never happy, Lisa?
Lisa Taddeo:
I am just incredibly anxious.
Debbie Millman:
But that’s different than unhappy.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes, I’m not unhappy. I’m just scared all the time, so I can’t live in the moment. So I’m happy in retrospect.
Debbie Millman:
What are you scared of?
Lisa Taddeo:
Well, after a dad car accident, mom cancer, everything else in the world, I just constantly think of all of those things on a probably minute-by-minute basis. PTSD.
Debbie Millman:
[crosstalk 00:13:44] loss.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Loss and abandonment.
Lisa Taddeo:
And disease and accident.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. No, it’s interesting how death gives you a perspective of vulnerability unlike anything else, and I feel the same way too. My surrogate mother just died of pancreatic cancer, and now I’m really affected that I’m dying of cancer. I don’t know if it’s survivor’s guilt or if it’s just something that means I’m insane, but-
Lisa Taddeo:
No, it’s not [crosstalk 00:14:10].
Debbie Millman:
… I’ve been struggling with that too.
Debbie Millman:
The story that you wrote about Heath Ledger, I hadn’t read it at the time. I read it in preparation for our interview today. It was mesmerizing. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. I think it’s one of the best things you’ve written along with the book. I was completely taken by its originality. And prior to reading it, I had never actually heard the term reported fiction. Was that something that was around? Did you just create that genre?
Lisa Taddeo:
What happened, it was really David Granger who said, “Report on this for a week, and then whatever facts you don’t have, like what he actually did at the time that he died, then just fill it in with your imagination.”
Debbie Millman:
What was different about what you originally sent them and what eventually was printed?
Lisa Taddeo:
The first one was multi-voices, Mary Kate and Ashley Olson were talking. There was a lot going on. I thought it was experimental and cool, but ultimately it didn’t have a pulse. I didn’t know that when I handed it… It’s like the kind of thing like you always know, or at least when an editor comes back to me and says basically you can do better, and not in so many words, although I have heard that in those many words. You go, “Okay, you’re right. I can.” So I knew it. When I got it back I was like, “Yeah, that’s wrong.”
Debbie Millman:
How would you describe that piece for somebody that hadn’t read it?
Lisa Taddeo:
One of the best things David Granger said, which literally it’s something I keep in mind every time I write, he said, “It should be funny, it should be X, it should be Y, but because this is a human life that we’re talking about, it should above all be beautiful.” That has been in the back of my head about everything I write. Not in terms of beautifully written, but in terms of having real respect for the person that you’re writing about even if it’s fiction. So I would say that, I would describe it as being kind of wanting to both honor someone’s demise while at the same time being as honest as possible about what might have happened. Because I think honesty is so important across desire, across grief. We kind of button a lot of things up because we’re afraid. I’m afraid of a million things, but I’m not afraid of talking about things.
Debbie Millman:
You mention your mom being diagnosed with cancer right after your father died. One of the last things your mother told you before she passed away was, “Don’t let them see you happy.” I can’t stop thinking about that. I think we’re much more used to hearing things like, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” She then went on to say, “If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you.” What did you make of that?
Lisa Taddeo:
To be perfectly honest, I spoke to hundreds of people for this book, and specific I spoke to women about desire and about why they didn’t talk about it. There’s a quote by a female author that’s like “a woman who is unhappy can not truly be happy for another woman.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that in what I saw from people, and it’s very quiet, and it’s not something that you can see. I think it’s a lot more so 30s and up. I think that younger people, they don’t have that as much, especially these younger people and like right now. I think there’s a lot more openness because they’re growing up in this culture where it’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to be transgender. There’s just so much openness that people older than that didn’t really have.
Lisa Taddeo:
But what I saw with women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, there’s a lot of “why does she think she deserves that?” I mean, there’s plenty of friends of mine. I have a friend who left her husband and started dating her personal trainer, and there were women who said, “She had enough.” There’s always that “she had enough.” It’s like, “Well, it’s none of your business if she wanted more as long as the personal trainer wasn’t your husband.” But there’s always that. I’ve heard that from so many people about so many different things. Lena, the-
Debbie Millman:
I was going to say.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I have the quote right here. Some of the women expressed frustration that Lena had a home, a husband who provided for her, and healthy children. They were angry that she wanted more. I guess this is a good time for us to go right into the book, but I love that one, and I felt that line both as Lena and as the person looking at Lena. Especially when you don’t feel good enough about yourself and then you get jealous that somebody else has more somehow.
Debbie Millman:
Your book, Three Women, has come out. It has created a tsunami of conversations and debates and analysis. Can you share with us how a New York Magazine profile of Rachel Uchitel essentially led to this book?
Lisa Taddeo:
I was supposed to write about Tiger Woods and the alleged affair he had with Rachel Uchitel, who was ambassador of the bottle girl industry, which they bring the bottles of expensive champagne and vodka to the tables where people are paying $10,000 and up to sit at.
Lisa Taddeo:
I found the women surrounding Rachel Uchitel and what she had been before she became promoted to an ambassador as opposed to one of the bottle girls. I found them so interesting because they weren’t prostituting themselves, but they were going to Miami and they were going to Cabo. They were going to different places with the men that they served at night, and they would get fancy shoes and they would get cool dresses and handbags, and they didn’t have to have sex with the men. It wasn’t even like The Girlfriend Experience. It was more like I’m going to take 10 women out on my boat. If you’re 23 and someone’s like, “Hey, come to Miami,” it’s like, “All right.”
Debbie Millman:
Sounds like the Fyre Festival.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, exactly. So I started talking to them. I kind of embedded myself with those women, and I wrote the story that was predominantly about them, and Rachel Uchitel and Tiger were sort of this underlying part of it. This editor, he was at Grove at the time, and now he’s got his own imprint at Simon & Schuster called Avid Reader, Jofie Ferrari-Adler. He took me out to lunch and he said he wanted me to write a book. He kind of said, “You can write about anything you want.” He sent me a number of nonfiction books that he admired: Joan Didion essays, Janet Malcolm, Tracy Kidder, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
Lisa Taddeo:
I read all of them, and reading Thy Neighbor’s Wife, which is about sexual desire. He’d spent about a decade researching desire in the country, and he embedded himself in a swinger’s colony in California. He operated a massage parlor that gave happy endings, and he participated in all these acts to better write about them. While I very much admired that immersion, I did feel like it was a little bit too much. I also thought it’s great, but I thought it was written from such a male perspective. I wondered what a tale of desire would look like told from a female one. So that was kind of my starting point, and I floated that idea. Jofie really liked it, and that’s where it began. It was very floaty at the time.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true that Gay Talese suggested that you sleep with married men for research?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes, it is.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my goodness.
Lisa Taddeo:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
I was a little bit shocked and hoped that wasn’t true.
Lisa Taddeo:
No, it’s true.
Debbie Millman:
What did you think of that?
Lisa Taddeo:
Well, I hadn’t read his books, but I had read Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, which is one of the most famous magazine stories. It’s one of the best, it’s beautiful. He couldn’t essentially talk to Sinatra, so he just spent a month longer following him around from afar talking to the person who brought his toupee around, et cetera. I just admired it, so I admired him. I thought he was an excellent reporter. I didn’t consider myself a reporter that much. I had done the same sort of thing just because it kind of made sense to me, but I felt like he was the consummate reporter.
Lisa Taddeo:
So when he said that to me, I felt like I’m not going to do that, but is that what a reported would do? That’s literally how I felt. I didn’t go, “Oh my god, what is he talk…” It was like, I’m not going to do this, but somebody else should was kind of the feeling I had. Then I thought a lot about that part in Mall Rats?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Taddeo:
I don’t know if you… Where the young woman is being intimate with men while taking notes on them. So that’s what I pictured. I’m like, “Well, that’s already been done anyways.”
Debbie Millman:
Right. You said that desire is one of the things we think about the most, and it’s also our biggest secret. How do you define desire?
Lisa Taddeo:
I was writing about sex to start, and I very quickly got bored. I went to the-
Debbie Millman:
Why? Why?
Lisa Taddeo:
Because it’s like a Real Sex episode. If you watch one, you’re like, “Oh, that’s cool.” If you watch a marathon, after the 10th one you’re like, “All right.” You just feel a little bit whatever.
Lisa Taddeo:
One of the first things I did was to go to the Porn Castle in San Francisco, which much like the National Library of Poetry is no longer there.
Debbie Millman:
Great bastions of our time.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes. I watched a lot of things there. I spent a good deal of time watching women having sex with machines. There was an enema room. There were lots of things that were interesting. The main thing I was doing was profiling this young woman who was I think 19, and she was having sex with men on camera, and her girlfriend was the director.
Debbie Millman:
Her girlfriend as in partner?
Lisa Taddeo:
Correct. And I was very intrigued by that, and I wanted to know how it felt to watch. Did it not feel bad because it was men and not women? Did it feel worse because of that? I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. I think… Not I think. What they told me time and again was that it was just a job, and I believed that because I saw it. While that is great and I applaud the fact that someone’s able to separate that, but it wasn’t compelling after a couple of chapters of writing about it. And the rest of the Porn Castle was, after a week or two, I would go home and write and I’d be like, “I don’t know how to make this interesting.”
Lisa Taddeo:
Sorry, that was a long-winded answer to basically desire for me and what I found was the passion that lies beneath sex, the emotions that are beneath it that people don’t talk about that much that led Lena, for example, in Indiana to drive for this man four hours, her old high school lover. Yes, it was for the sex, but what the sex was making her feel was this rebirth, this reawakening, and she was in love with herself for the first time. So I think that’s how sex differs from desire. With desire you fall in love with yourself in a way as opposed to just having this physical feeling that does not really move much outside of the moment.
Debbie Millman:
I want to read a brief excerpt from your introduction about the choice to investigate women’s desire versus men’s. You write, “In some cases, there was prolonged courting. Sometimes the courting was closer to grooming, but mostly the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning. There was complexity and beauty and violence even in the way the women experienced the same event. In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like.”
Debbie Millman:
What does longing in America look like?
Lisa Taddeo:
I think it looks like something we still can’t talk about, and that’s one of the reasons I thought that I found women more interesting because we’ve been okay with male desire for centuries. Even if a politician wrecks his whole life over something, we still go, “Well, you know. It’s terrible that he did that, but, duh. That happens.” With women there’s a lot people, including other women, don’t want to hear about other women’s desire.
Lisa Taddeo:
I think that one of the things that I noticed so much specifically towards the end of my reporting, and most of my reporting was done prior to Me Too, but what I noticed towards the end that we’ve been able to talk very loudly about what we don’t want as women, but we’re still not talking about what we do want. I think that if anything, that’s only gotten worse as the other side has gotten better not because one is going up and the other one’s going down in concatenation, but because of the media, because of social media. The second you say something, if it’s not the right thing, you need to be on one extreme or the other. If you’re in the middle, you’re not in the club.
Lisa Taddeo:
What I saw with desire was that when women want the wrong thing, whether it’s the wrong man, the wrong woman, the wrong job, there’s an instant “you can’t want that. That’s not right.” That’s why with Lena, with Maggie, with Sloan, each of them wanted something “wrong.” Lena wanted a man who was married, who did not love her back. She was going after him, she was dropping off her kids for him. He was not going to ever be there for her, but so what? is my point. Like why judge her? What I thought was vital about telling her story was the fact that it was so, so raw and the need for him, this man… She had been raped as a young woman. She had been completely and bodily abandoned by her husband from about a decade, and this was the first time she was feeling passion, love, like she was inside her own body. She had had endometriosis and fibromyalgia. She was literally losing the pain, and for people to say that that was pathetic, I found to be horrifying.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve been lauded quite a lot for being able to write about these women in a way that was completely nonjudgmental. Did you ever have your own judgments as you were witnessing and observing? I mean, it was in some ways almost like ethnographic research, what you were doing. You were living with these women.
Lisa Taddeo:
I never judged them. I’m not a judgmental person. That’s one of the only strengths I have in terms of emotional… I judge in my household, I judge my husband, I judge myself. I don’t judge other people because it’s not my life. For me, it’s like the same way that I don’t think men and politicians should not make our choices for our bodies in terms of abortion or not. I think that the same is true of any kind of sexuality, any kind of thing that you want. It’s not my place. There were a bunch of reasons why I didn’t judge, but I didn’t.
Debbie Millman:
To find subjects for the book, you started with Craigslist. You crisscrossed the country six times. You went everywhere from the swinger’s club to gas stations where you’d paste flyers up. It seems like that had to be an insanely, incredibly frustrating part of the project to find the right subjects.
Lisa Taddeo:
It was the only part that was impossible. What was difficult was people who would stop talking to me.
Debbie Millman:
Because you had about 20 women that were in contention for being in the book, right?
Lisa Taddeo:
Women and men, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, men as well.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, not as many. Maybe like five. But, yes. That was difficult after talking to somebody for six months. In two cases I had moved into their communities.
Debbie Millman:
Did they just ghost you, or did they end up-
Lisa Taddeo:
No.
Debbie Millman:
… saying, “Sorry, Lisa. I don’t want to be part of this”?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah. I said to everybody before we started talking… It was hard to get people to talk to me, first of all, about desire. I would say, “Look, let’s talk. At any point if you want to stop talking, you can just tell me. If any point you say, ‘I want X, Y, Z stricken from the record,’ then we’ll do that.” So a lot of people took me up on that. People are excited to talk about themselves, and they’ll do it for months on end, and I’ll just listen and tape record and take notes. They’re like, “Oh.” They love hearing their stories. They love the idea that someone’s sitting there listening, recording it for posterity.
Lisa Taddeo:
But then it’s like, okay. The idea of being with your therapist and telling them everything and then your therapist saying, “Okay, this is going to be Barnes & Noble tomorrow. Cool?” And I would say, because I would remind them. I’d be like, “This is a book, so-“
Debbie Millman:
How did you survive financially?
Lisa Taddeo:
I was given an advance that was healthy. It was for two years. It was considered a healthy advance for two years. It was not a healthy advance for eight years. I lived in an RV for a while. Living in Indiana’s inexpensive. I wasn’t living in New York City anymore, which was part of the reason that I could do it.
Debbie Millman:
From a broad perspective, can you tell us why Lena, Maggie, and Sloan form this compelling trio for you?
Lisa Taddeo:
The main reason that it’s those three is because those three gave me the absolutely most. I spent the most time with them, they let me spend the most time with them. They were honest, they were willing. So that’s the main thing. The other thing is one of the reasons I think that they spoke to me is because they had some sad, scary and/or highly passionate things going on. And in the end as a trio, I think what binds them besides the fact that they gave me so much is the way that judgment of other women and of other people was so much a part of their lives.
Debbie Millman:
The three women are quite different in their class backgrounds, but they do share some commonalities. I realized towards the end of book in one point in all of their lives they were all sexually assaulted. Did you know about that early on, or was something that took time to reveal?
Lisa Taddeo:
Maggie was statutory-
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Lisa Taddeo:
… rape. Lena I found out about right away. I think it was one of the first or second times that we met after the discussion group that she said that to me. Sloan, was the last thing I found out about her, and it wasn’t assault so much as something a little bit stranger.
Lisa Taddeo:
But it’s funny because I’ve heard a lot of people say that there’s assault in all three of them, but I just saw it this morning, this study just came out that I think it’s…
Debbie Millman:
One in three.
Lisa Taddeo:
It just came out, is that the one you’re talking about?
Debbie Millman:
No, I just do so much work with the Joyful Heart Foundation-
Lisa Taddeo:
Oh, okay.
Debbie Millman:
… and trying to eradicate social assault and domestic violence that it’s a stat that I just know by heart.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah. So that’s the thing. People have been like, “Well, why are they [inaudible 00:34:23]?” It’s like, “Because that’s what it is.”
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Lisa Taddeo:
I think if you talk to anyone for longer than a week, a month, you’ll hear that. I heard that probably 80% of the time. It doesn’t have to be a full on stranger rape, but it’s all different kinds. It’s also all the little kinds that add up, like that man in Puerto Rico for me. You can multiply that by 50, and that’s what I’ve had. I just write a story for Playboy about a gynecologist of mine who I… Long story, but it’s in Playboy. It’s a long [crosstalk 00:35:00].
Debbie Millman:
Is it in the current issue?
Lisa Taddeo:
It’s in the fall issue, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Lisa Taddeo:
I was doing a story for Ashley Madison about married men, so I was going on dates with them. I was not sleeping with them. But one of the men that I was talking to, we never met in person, we moved over to Gmail. His Gmail was his name, like when you hover above the handle. I was like, “What kind of an idiot who’s cheating does that?” Anyway, but beyond that, the name was the name of my gynecologist. I know.
Debbie Millman:
Was it the same man?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my goodness.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my god.
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah, and he was a bad guy. Not just because of the cheating, which is its own thing. He did a lot of bad things. I stopped seeing him as a gynecologist. But anyway, that happened. A lot of things happened to me, and it’s not about telling the stories of sexual assault so much as that’s part of the makeup for what we become and for what we allow and for what we don’t allow as much as passionate things and loving things are. It’s just a part of the human experience.
Debbie Millman:
One of the other commonalities that I felt among the three women was a pervasive sadness. They all have a very deep sense of almost defeat. Would you say that that’s correct?
Lisa Taddeo:
No. I mean, Lena’s was going after this man full throttle. She had a terrible couple of weeks during it when she was nearly suicidal. The rest of the time… And I still talk to all three of them… The rest of the time Lena’s quite happy. Things happen that make her sad, but at that point in her life… And that’s the thing. The reason that these three were willing to talk as much as they were is because there’s pain. You want to talk about that. When you’re totally happy, you don’t really need to talk about it.
Debbie Millman:
And I don’t think people are that interested in reading about happy people.
Lisa Taddeo:
That’s the thing. People are like, “Why don’t you have happy marriages?” Well, first of all, I think Sloan’s is an incredibly happy marriage. There’s confusion as there is in any relationship. The thing I always say is that her husband tells her every day that she’s his fantasy. That’s a huge thing. “You’re my fantasy, like above all.” Yes, he wants to… What she said to me was, “Hey, you know what? So, yeah, he likes to watch me have sex with other people, but he does a lot for me, and so what?” And it makes her feel weird, but if she at any point said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he wouldn’t leave her or get angry. Because part of her likes it too.
Debbie Millman:
I have been, all of a sudden, in the same way that maybe 24 months ago we started reading and hearing all about polyamory, now I don’t know if it’s because of your book, but all of a sudden I’m reading all about this whole cuckolding thing, which is when a man likes to watch his wife have sex with other men. From a psychological perspective, do you understand that need?
Lisa Taddeo:
I think, yeah, psychologically I go. I understand it because I’ve talked to a few of them. I was very interested in going into depth with that. I had a couple like that. Esther Perel talks a lot about with women, the idea that once you feel safe, you start to feel a little bit bored sexually. That’s true for men too, but for women it’s very true is what she’s found and what I’ve found too. It’s like you go after safety your whole life, and then you get it and you’re like, “What can I do?”
Lisa Taddeo:
With men, I think it’s more some men are incredibly jealous, and other men use that jealousy to fuel their sexuality in a way. So I think that seeing that happen is a way of, one, I think it’s like, “Okay, look. Let’s say our relationship is at one point immutable, that one person’s going to cheat on the other,” which I’m not saying that’s true, but that’s a feeling that a lot of them said they have. “Then at least let me just open it up now. Let me watch the very thing that I fear.”
Debbie Millman:
Did you find in all of your research and all of the subjects any woman that wanted to watch her husband having sex with others?
Lisa Taddeo:
Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of that. In fact, in a lot of my readings, it’s been interesting because I’ve had a lot of women who are older come up to me and say, “This is what I’ve done with my husband. I’ve wanted to watch him have sex.” There’ve been a lot of women who’ve said, “Why don’t you talk to me?” I’m like, “I looked for you. I looked for a lot of people.” So yes, I did. I actually found more, like I said, after the book came out. People felt more comfortable talking about it.
Debbie Millman:
Did anything surprise you about women’s desires?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yes. I was surprised, and perhaps it’s because saying I’m prudish seems not true, but I am a little bit prudish. Not judgmentally prudish, but like, “Oh, wow. Oh, oh. That’s interesting.” That kind of like… I found a lot of people to be a lot more adventurous than I thought that they would be by just kind of looking at them. There’s a lot more sex going on at all times. I was shocked at women specifically that I thought were kind of stay-at-home, hanging out. There was a mom that was a friend of a friend’s, and she was just making out with other guys who weren’t her husband. I would never have thought that about her. She would go to bars with her friends, or even just the restaurant and make out with the bartender. I was like, “Really?” I’m not going to say her name, but like, “Jennifer? Oh my gosh.” I saw a lot of that.
Debbie Millman:
A lot of the book is rather steamy. Tell us how you regard writing about sex, especially if you feel like you’re-
Lisa Taddeo:
Prudish.
Debbie Millman:
… a bit more of a prude.
Lisa Taddeo:
Well, I’m not prudish in terms of writing or reading about it.
Debbie Millman:
It’s bold.
Lisa Taddeo:
What I wanted to do with writing about sex, because there’s a lot of… You know, bad sex writing bums me out. What I wanted to read and write was to have something that was in between profane and clinical. So I didn’t want to use the word that starts with a C. I don’t know what the sort of…
Debbie Millman:
You can say whatever you’d like.
Lisa Taddeo:
I didn’t want to use the word cock, and I didn’t want to use the word member unless the women specifically said them, but in terms of my writing about it, I just didn’t want to use it. I wanted to describe as much as possible the sex from a kind of positional angle, from the movement of bodies and less the… When I read hardcore and then there’s… Just like porn when it’s hardcore pornography, it’s a little bit this. And softcore porn, at least for me it’s like, “Oh, there’s a story and there’s softer.” I don’t necessarily need to see the National Geographic of it.
Lisa Taddeo:
But when I spoke to Lena, Lena’s section is the most graphic, and the reason that it is is because she was the most, she would just like, everything, would tell me thrust for thrust what was going on immediately afterwards. There’s one section that I just copied and pasted from Facebook, which is where she had written to me on, because I couldn’t do it better than that. And she was so aware not only of the bodily stuff and remembering every second the way that you do when you’re in passionate thralls with somebody. She remembered every second, but she also wanted it recorded in the world. Not in a book necessarily, but she just wanted to have it said out loud. So she was finding herself in those moments after being raped, after not being touched for a decade. Because she was finding herself in these moments, I felt like each moment was important.
Lisa Taddeo:
I think that writing about sex specifically is the same way that I would write about anything specifically. Like if I’m writing about the way that you make kombucha, I would be very specific about it because it’s interesting to me the specificity. The same thing is true of sex. Like why not write about sex specifically? Most of us do it. That’s the thing about this country. We have this puritanical hangover, and it’s fine. I get it. I grew up puritanical, but in terms of writing about it, and maybe it’s because my parents have passed away, I’m like, “Whatever. I want to do it like this. I want to be true to what happened.”
Debbie Millman:
Lisa, the book is now going to be coming to Showtime following a bidding war. Congratulations.
Lisa Taddeo:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
You’re currently set to write and produce it. How are you feeling about that?
Lisa Taddeo:
Both excited and very, very nervous. I want to do a good job, and it’s a lot of work, and I have a lot of other work to do. This is my priority right now, but I also have a novel to edit and a couple of other things going on. And a four-year-old daughter who is insane. So there’s a lot, so I’m really excited.
Debbie Millman:
It’s incredible. Your website alludes to two other works: Animal out in 2020 and Ghost Lover out in 2021. Are those both books?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah. Animal is a novel, and Ghost Lover is a collection of stories.
Debbie Millman:
Lisa, thank you so much for writing-
Lisa Taddeo:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
… such an illuminating book about female desire, and thank you so much for joining me today. [crosstalk 00:44:28].
Lisa Taddeo:
Thank you for having me. I also, can I just say really quick those questions were among the best questions ever.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Lisa Taddeo:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good.
Lisa Taddeo:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Good. Thank you.
Lisa Taddeo:
No, thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Lisa Taddeo’s remarkable book is called Three Women. You can find out more about Lisa on her website, lisataddeo.com.
Debbie Millman:
This is the 15th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. I’d also like to thank AC Hotels by Marriott and All Birds for their generous support of this podcast. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox Productions. The show is recorded at the School of Visual Arts Master’s and Branding Program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Petit, and the art director is Emily [inaudible 00:45:57].