Three Women, and the Audience a Want Acquires

There is something you want that you have not told anybody. It costs a certain amount to carry and it is, on the whole, manageable. You know its shape. Nothing about it has been settled, which is inconvenient and is also precisely why it remains bearable.

Now suppose one other person knows — not because you announced it, but because they worked it out, or you said it once at the wrong hour of the night, or something was read that was not meant to be read. The want itself has not moved by a single degree. What has moved is everything downstream of it. There is now an account of you in circulation that you did not write and cannot revise. What you do next is no longer a private negotiation between you and the wanting; it is a move made in a situation that has an audience.

In 2019 a book appeared that is almost always described as a book about desire. Three Women, by the journalist Lisa Taddeo, came out of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, on the ninth of July that year: some three hundred and twenty pages, the product of eight years of reporting on three American women called Maggie, Lina and Sloane. It went to number one on the New York Times combined print and e-book nonfiction list within weeks and spent eleven weeks on that list.

Read the way it is usually read, it is an account of what three American women wanted and what wanting cost them. That reading is available and it is not wrong. This essay proposes a second one: that the book is at least as much about audience — about who was watching, who acquired the right to narrate afterwards, and what a private want turns into at the moment it becomes a public account. Hold the three desires side by side and they do not organise; they are different in kind and they do not rhyme. Hold the three audiences side by side and the book snaps into a shape. Read that way it becomes usable here, in a way that a book about American desire alone would not be.

The method is not incidental to the argument, and the book itself is reticent about it, so it is worth stating accurately. Taddeo has described the work publicly as eight years long. She has said she drove across the United States six times, that she began by posting notices soliciting people willing to talk, and that she did not commute to her subjects but moved to where they were — to Indiana, where she found the woman the book calls Lina through a discussion group that met at a doctor’s office, and to North Dakota for Maggie. She has described interviewing with a recorder on the table over meals and drinks, and adapting the channel to each woman: with Maggie, largely by text, which was the medium in which the events of Maggie’s story had partly taken place.

The origin of the commission matters too, because it is itself a fact about audience. Taddeo has said that after she published a magazine profile of one of the women involved with Tiger Woods, an editor approached her about writing an updated version of Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the 1980 book about the American sexual revolution. She began, on that model, with men, and has said their accounts blurred together and ended quickly while the women’s did not. The book’s female shape was arrived at rather than planned, inside a frame that had been proposed to her.

The prose is the other fact. The book is written in close third person, moving inside each woman and staying there — her thoughts, her physical sensations, her private assessments of the people around her. Taddeo has said publicly that she wanted the book to be without her opinion in it, to be the material the women gave her rather than what she extrapolated from it, and that the process was collaborative to the extent that she wanted the women to feel the result was true to them. There are no footnotes and no endnotes. Nothing on the page distinguishes a sentence that is transcription from a sentence that is summary from a sentence that is craft. That is the book’s greatest strength as reading and its most serious problem as reporting, and a later section gives the objection its full weight rather than filing it as a caveat.

Lina and Sloane are not the names of the women the book calls Lina and Sloane. Maggie Wilken is the name of the woman the book calls Maggie. That asymmetry is the most structurally honest thing in the book and the clearest statement of its real subject, which is why it belongs here rather than in a note.

The reason for it is a matter of public record. In August 2014, Aaron Knodel, who had been named North Dakota Teacher of the Year for 2014, was charged with five felony counts of corruption or solicitation of a minor, after Maggie Wilken reported that a sexual relationship began when she was seventeen and he was her English teacher at West Fargo High School. A five-day trial was held in April 2015. Knodel was acquitted on three of the counts; the judge declared a mistrial on the remaining two, which were then dismissed. He was suspended without pay for close to a year, reinstated with back pay and reassigned to another high school in the district, and the school board found no violation of the ethics code. Local reporting notes that Wilken gave her local newspaper permission in 2015 to identify her, the ordinary basis on which a paper departs from its practice of not naming people who have reported sexual offences.

An acquittal means the charges were not proved to the standard the law requires. It is not a finding that nothing happened, and it is not a finding that something did. This essay asserts nothing whatever about what took place between those two people. It works only with what the record establishes: charges, a trial, a verdict on some counts and none on others, and a man who returned to teaching.

Here is the point. Two of the three women kept the boundary between the want and the account of it. They are described in the book and they are not findable; if they walk into a shop nobody looks up. The third did not keep it, and she did not lose it by writing a book or giving an interview. She lost it in a courtroom, years before Taddeo arrived, and once it was gone no version of her participation in this project could get it back.

This essay inherits the asymmetry and cannot escape it. It can say more about Maggie than about the other two, because more about Maggie is public — which means that writing about audience reproduces exactly the imbalance it describes. That is a limit on everything that follows.

Take the courtroom first, because it is the purest case: a court is the one audience obliged to return a ruling. Everything that happens to a private account inside a criminal proceeding happens by design. The account is converted into testimony. Testimony is examined by somebody whose professional duty is to damage its credibility. It is set against other accounts, and the question the room is answering is not what happened between two people but whether specific charges have been proved to a specific standard. A person who walks in holding the story of something that happened to her walks out holding something else: a story that has been ruled upon, in public, on a date, by twelve people she did not choose.

And the ruling does not answer the question she came in with. It cannot. A not-guilty verdict on a count of solicitation is not a statement about her; it is a statement about the evidence. But it is received by everybody who was not in the room as a statement about her, because a verdict is the only sentence most people will ever hear about the matter, and it arrives with the whole authority of the state behind it.

Then there is the town, the audience that does not disperse. The published record includes a photograph from 2015 of students standing in support of the teacher, and the school board’s finding, the reinstatement, the back pay and the transfer are all matters of record. This essay makes no claim about what any of those people believed or why. It observes only the structure: a place had two accounts available and, by the visible measures, largely settled on one, and the person holding the other went on living in the same weather.

The book renders Maggie’s interior life during and after this at length, and that rendering is the book’s doing rather than a fact this essay can vouch for. What can be said without entering her head at all is that whatever she wanted at seventeen, the thing she has been left carrying since is not her account. It is the town’s, and there is no procedure by which a person amends that.

Lina’s audience has no power at all, which makes it the more useful case: almost nobody reading this will ever testify, and almost everybody has a version of Lina’s room.

The book presents Lina as a woman in Indiana in a marriage in which physical affection had stopped, who re-established contact with a man she had known as a teenager and began an affair with him. It also presents her bringing this account, herself, out loud, to a discussion group of women that met at a doctor’s office — which, as it happens, is where Taddeo found her. Reviewers of the book describe the group’s response as judgement with a particular flavour: not horror, but a steady levelling, an effort to take a little of the pleasure back out of it.

Nothing in that room could be enforced. Those women could not fine her, sack her, divorce her or return a verdict. They could only hold an opinion. And yet the rendering of that scene is one of the most recognisable things in the book, because the cost of saying a want out loud to peers is not that they can do anything. It is that the want stops being a fact about your week and becomes a claim about what kind of person you are — and a claim of that sort is something the room is entitled to rule on, forever, without a hearing.

This Library has argued before that asking does not make a want less valuable: that what is lost when you have to ask is a measurement rather than a value, that the measurement was poor to begin with, and that the genuinely difficult part is consenting to be refusable. That argument holds and this essay does not withdraw it. But it was built around a single listener, one person who can say yes or no, and one listener is the easy case.

What Lina’s room adds is a loss that is neither epistemic nor a loss of value. It is jurisdictional. Before she spoke, the want was hers to interpret. After she spoke, its meaning sat with a standing committee that meets every week and never adjourns, and that transfer is not reversed by explaining better. Which is why so much of the reluctance to say a want out loud has very little to do with fear of a no. It is an accurate forecast about jurisdiction.

The third case puts the audience inside the arrangement rather than outside it, and it needs more care than the other two, because the record is thinner and the person is not identifiable.

The book presents Sloane as a woman in the north-east of the United States who runs a restaurant with her husband, a chef, and whose marriage included an arrangement in which she had sex with other people with her husband’s knowledge, at times in his presence. Published accounts of the book do not agree about whose want that arrangement originated in. Some describe it as something she asked for. Some describe her husband as the one choosing the participants. Some describe a negotiated thing whose origin the book leaves genuinely unresolved. That disagreement is a disagreement between readers of a book, reported here as such. This essay does not resolve it and has no standing to.

But the disagreement is itself the interesting object, and it is why this chapter belongs in an essay about audience rather than one about desire. The book renders a woman who cannot fully separate what she wants from what is wanted of her, and renders her, at one point, acquiring a vocabulary for her own position from a bestselling novel — the description of herself arriving from outside, in a mass-market paperback, and fitting. Whatever one thinks of the book’s reliability, that is a precise picture of an account of a private want that the person holding it did not author. There is a further audience here too, and it is not the husband: the other people who knew, a small place, at least one household into which the knowledge eventually arrived without being sent. On the book’s own rendering, being known was not an accident that happened to the arrangement but part of the weather it lived in.

This Library has written before about the difference between being seen and being watched, taking as its case a television series about a man whose attention is indistinguishable from love until you notice which direction the knowledge is travelling. That essay located the harm in asymmetry: one person holds everything, the other does not even know how much is held, and the imbalance does its work without anybody needing to have a secret.

Sloane’s case is the variant that essay did not cover. Here the watching is consented to and the information is not asymmetric at all. She knows she is watched; that is the arrangement. What is asymmetric is the narration. What the whole thing means — whose idea it was, what it says about her, what she is in it — is held by several people, and the book cannot establish that she holds the largest share. Whether being watched was the point is not answerable from outside and this essay does not answer it. What is visible is narrower and still worth having: the want and its witnesses cannot be pulled apart on the page, and on the page she does not appear able to pull them apart either.

Set the three side by side and try to organise them by desire. It does not work. A teenager’s attachment to an adult with authority over her, a married woman’s hunger for physical affection, and a woman inside a negotiated arrangement with her husband are not three instances of one thing, or even three points on a line. Any sentence general enough to cover all three is too general to say anything.

Organise them by audience and the book acquires a spine. Maggie’s was a court and a town, which returned a verdict that is binding and wrong in the specific sense that it answers a different question from the one she has. Lina’s was a marriage and a room of peers, which returns rulings continuously and can enforce none of them, which turns out to be no protection at all. Sloane’s was a set of people inside and around the arrangement, for whom the watching was not a consequence of the thing but a component of it. What is constant is the moment of transfer: the point at which a private want stops being a matter between a woman and herself and becomes an account held by other people, after which everything is shaped less by the want than by the terms of that holding. Stated that way it is a claim about structure rather than about anybody’s psychology, which is the only kind of claim an outsider is entitled to make about real people.

And there is a fourth audience, which the book cannot mention because it is the book. Taddeo is present in every chapter as the largest witness any of these women acquired: a reporter who moved to their towns, sat at their tables with a recorder running, and then wrote three hundred and twenty pages in a voice that sounds as though it comes from inside them. The close third person is what makes the book readable and also what makes the reporter disappear. A reader feels she is inside a woman. She is in fact beside a writer.

That is not an accusation. The women agreed to be reported on, one under her own name. But agreeing to be reported on is not the same as holding the account afterwards, and the distance between those two is the exact subject of all three chapters. The book is therefore both an argument about being narrated by other people and an instance of it, and it does not appear to know that it is the second.

This book drew serious criticism and a publication that recommends it owes the criticism its full force rather than a sentence of acknowledgement. There are three lines of objection and they are not the same objection.

The first is about who is in it. The title is bare — three women, no article — but the book’s framing, its reception and a great deal of its marketing invited it to stand for something much larger than three lives. Lauren Oyler, reviewing it in the New Yorker, wrote that the belief that the stories of three white women, two of them Catholic, might stand for American desire suggests a circumscribed view of both women and America. Shannon Keating, in BuzzFeed News in July 2019, argued that a book presenting itself as an exploration of desire in fact documents a very narrow and particular slice of it, and asked the obvious question of the relatability it was being sold on: relatable to whom. Octavia Bright, in the White Review that September, made the sharpest version — that even when women are being heard it is often only the right types of women who are actively heard, and that this belongs at the front of such a book as its condition rather than at the back as an afterthought. All three subjects are white, American, heterosexual and were under middle age. Three lives cannot carry a definite article, and this book was widely read as though it had one.

The second objection is about method and should worry a reader most. The close third person renders interior states — what a woman thought at a particular moment, what she felt in her body, what she privately concluded about somebody in the room — which no reporter can have witnessed. Oyler put it precisely: the close third person camouflages the source of the problems even as the book sets out to expose the sources of the women’s problems. Michelle Orange, in Bookforum, observed that the text reads as psychological realism while being framed as journalism. There are no notes. Taddeo’s account of a collaborative process may well be a fair description of her intentions; it does not solve the reader’s problem, which is that reconstruction arrives with exactly the texture of fact and there is no way to tell the two apart. When a book renders the inner life of a named woman whose credibility has already been contested in a courtroom, that is not a stylistic preference. It is a decision with consequences for somebody who has to keep living in West Fargo.

The third objection is about what the book is full of. Helena Duncan, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote of her discomfort at the implication that a cross-section of female desire would show abuse at its core, noting that all three subjects had experienced sexual harm. Stephanie Danler, in the Sewanee Review that summer, observed that there is precious little space in these lives for joy, and Bright made the same point from the other side: a great deal of sex in the book and very little of the joy of it. Keating reported something more troubling about the selection — that subjects who were not tormented by the way men looked at them were not the ones who made it in. If that is right, the book’s bleakness is not a finding about American desire but an artefact of who was chosen, presented as the finding.

The consequence for a reader here is direct. A person opening this book hoping to find permission to want something will find, for the most part, a warning. The implicit arithmetic across all three lives is that a want which becomes visible costs more than it returns. As a reading of three particular lives that may be accurate. As a prescription for a fourth it is unsupported, and anybody who takes it as one has been handed a conclusion the evidence cannot bear.

The strongest objection to this essay is not that any of the above is wrong. It is that the reframing performed here is a rescue operation, and it deserves to be stated in its most damaging form.

It runs like this. The problems named in the previous section are method problems. They are about what the writer did: who she selected, what she could not have witnessed, what she rendered anyway, what she left unsourced. Announcing that the book is really about audience converts a defect into a theme — it takes a book that is unreliable about interior states and finds it a subject on which its unreliability looks like depth. And the objection has a sharp point at the end: every claim this essay has made about what being witnessed did to these women is drawn from the same reconstructed interiority it has just criticised the book for producing. The essay has eaten the meal and complained about the kitchen.

A good deal of that lands and the honest response is a narrowing rather than a rebuttal.

The audience reading rests, where it rests on anything, on events checkable from outside the book. A criminal trial took place in April 2015 and produced the outcome described. A man was reinstated with back pay and a photograph exists of students supporting him. A discussion group met at a doctor’s office and was where the reporter found one of her subjects. A mass-market novel supplied a vocabulary a woman is described as adopting. Published readers disagree, in print, about whose want an arrangement originated in. Those are structures and events, not interiors. Where this essay has described what a woman felt, it has said in the same sentence that the book renders it, and that phrasing is load-bearing rather than decorative. The reading does not require the interiors to be accurate. It requires the audiences to be real, and the audiences are documented.

There is a second objection and it is not answerable at all. Reading a book about desire as a book about audience is conspicuously convenient for a house whose product is a private evening under discretion. If the trouble is not the wanting but the witnesses, then what this house sells looks like a solution, and an essay that arrives at that conclusion by a scenic route is still an essay that arrived there. That is correct, there is no rebuttal, and the next section states the interest and the refusals that follow from it rather than pretending the objection has been dealt with here.

And a third, the quietest and possibly the most serious. A book can be useful to a reader and still be a poor piece of reporting, and those two facts do not settle each other. This essay recommends the book for a structure it makes unusually visible while stating that its evidence about what people privately thought cannot be checked. Both are true at once and the tension is not resolved. A reader who concludes from all of this that the book is not worth their time has understood the essay correctly and is not being argued with.

Everything above is American. It belongs in this Library because the readers of this house live under a version of the same condition, and often a sharper one. The structure is this, and it is worth stating without any claim about a nation or a group of people. A want that exists is manageable. Many people carry one for years with no particular difficulty: it costs something, it is private, and its meaning is theirs to decide. A want that has been witnessed is a different object. It has acquired a second existence in somebody else’s head, in a form its owner did not choose and cannot edit, permanently.

What follows is the thing worth noticing. In a life where the roles are dense and overlapping — a household, a workplace, a family, a set of neighbours and relatives and colleagues who have held a consistent account of you for twenty years — the cost of a want becoming known is not a single reaction from a single person. It is the revision of a long-standing account held simultaneously by many people who talk to each other, and revisions of that kind do not run backwards. Nobody in that situation is afraid of wanting. They are forecasting jurisdiction, and the forecast is usually correct.

Which is why the ordinary advice fails. Be honest, say what you want: excellent advice, priced for a life with one listener. This Library has made a version of it, arguing that asking creates rather than destroys the value of what arrives, because a yes that could have been a no is the only yes worth having. That argument concerns a single person who can refuse. It does not survive contact with a room, and it was not built to.

The useful inversion is small and it is not advice. If the decisive variable is the audience rather than the want, then the audience is the part of this that is occasionally within reach. Nobody chooses what they want; the wanting arrives already formed and arguing with it accomplishes nothing. But who holds an account of it is sometimes, partially, a choice — about whom, when, how much, and whether the person hearing it will be ruling on it next Tuesday. That solves nothing. It relocates the difficulty to a place where a person has some purchase. And whatever one concludes about how this book was written, its three chapters establish one thing beyond argument: the audience a want acquires is very rarely the audience anybody would have picked. Maggie’s was assembled by a prosecutor. Lina’s was whoever happened to be in the room on a Wednesday. Sloane’s grew by accretion in a small place.

This house sells private companionship. An evening here has an audience of one, it is bounded, it is paid for, and discretion is a term of it rather than a courtesy. Which means the reading advanced above runs directly in our commercial favour: if the problem is not the wanting but the witnesses, then a scheduled hour with a single witness who is contractually silent is the shape of the product. This house is the party that benefits from a reader accepting that argument. What follows are the constraints it imposes, stated as refusals rather than as reassurance.

We do not claim that this solves it. A paid evening does not alter, retrieve or amend any account of a reader’s life held by anybody who already holds one. The audiences that exist are not reachable from here. What is on offer is one hour in which the number of witnesses is small and known, which is a real thing and a narrow one, and it leaves the rest of the week exactly as it was.

We do not claim it is a test. A reader might reasonably think that saying a want out loud once, to somebody who will not rule on it, is a way of finding out whether the want is acceptable. It is not, and we would be taking money under a false description if we implied otherwise. A listener who has been paid not to judge has produced no information whatever about whether anybody else would. A verdict you have purchased is not a verdict.

We do not claim any outcome. Nothing here says that an evening relieves anything, repairs anything or changes anybody. Nothing here diagnoses any reader, and a person who has never said a want out loud to anybody is not thereby suffering from a condition; she may simply have assessed her circumstances correctly.

And we do not claim the book is reliable reporting. We have spent a full section saying that its method cannot be checked and a second saying that our own reading of it may be self-serving. We recommend it for a structure it makes visible, not for its evidence about what anybody privately felt. Lisa Taddeo, her publisher, her subjects and every critic named in these pages have no connection to this house, know nothing of it, and endorse nothing.

This essay is analysis. It is not clinical guidance, counselling or advice. It describes no treatment, promises no outcome, diagnoses nobody, and tells no reader to disclose anything to anybody or to withhold anything from anybody.

Three Women concerns real people, one of whom is identified under her own name. Nothing here asserts anything about the inner life of any subject as established fact. Every description of what a subject thought, felt or concluded is marked in the body as the book’s rendering, because the book is written in close third person and renders interior states no reporter can have witnessed.

The account of the criminal proceeding is confined to the public record: charges filed in August 2014, a five-day trial in April 2015, acquittal on three counts, a mistrial on two which were then dismissed, suspension without pay followed by reinstatement with back pay and reassignment, and a school board finding of no ethics violation. An acquittal means the charges were not proved to the standard the law requires; it is not a finding that nothing occurred and not a finding that something did. This essay makes no claim about what took place between the two people concerned, and none about what anybody in that community believed or why.

Two of the three subjects are pseudonymous and are not identified here beyond what the book and its published reviews have already made public. Published accounts of the third chapter’s central arrangement disagree about whose want it originated in; that disagreement is reported as a disagreement between readers of a book and is not resolved, because it is not resolvable from outside and no outsider has standing to resolve it.

Publication details are drawn from publisher and library catalogue records rather than from inspection of a physical volume, and no passage of the book is quoted anywhere in this essay. No Japanese-language edition appears in the National Diet Library catalogue at the time of writing, which establishes what is catalogued and not what may exist or appear later. Criticism of the book is attributed to the named critics and their publications and reported as their argument, not as a finding.

Where this essay states a position of its own — that the book is organised by audience rather than by desire, and that the loss involved in saying a want out loud to a group is jurisdictional rather than a loss of value — that is this Library’s own reading, reasoned rather than measured, and the section preceding the Japan material states the strongest case against it. Nothing here is a statement about Japanese people, about any national character, or about any group; the passage describing dense overlapping roles describes a structure rather than a population, and describes no individual reader. This house’s commercial interest in the conclusion is declared in the body, with four specific refusals, because a declaration that appears only after the argument has finished its work is not a declaration. No service call to action appears in this essay, no retail or affiliate link appears anywhere, and no author, subject, publisher or critic named here is implied to know of or endorse this house.