Your new novel opens with a suicide, how does that set the stage for what is to come? I always wanted to go up to someone reading it and say, ‘I wrote that!’ There were so many far-flung things that sounded so cool, like someone I hadn’t spoken to in years saying they found it in a little bookstore in Greece, but I never once saw someone reading it. I felt it in different ways but not in the ways that would of made the most impact on me personally, because I didn’t see everyone on the train reading it. I was doing so much press that you almost lose the feeling of being on the ground with it. How did that level of success feel and could you sense how big it was while you were in the moment? When a book has the reception that Three Women had, I imagine there’s a sense of before and after. As her relationship with Alice blooms, we delve into both her dark childhood and history with men, the different parts of her life becoming entwined as the heat rises.Įarlier this month, on a Zoom call from Connecticut where she lives, Taddeo spoke to Esquire about the reaction to Three Women, the high stakes of female friendships, and the stories we tell ourselves to metabolise pain. We follow Joan to the heat of Topanga Canyon where she moves into a stifling house surrounded by a coterie of strange men, a journey she has undertaken to find Alice, the woman she is obsessed with. In Taddeo's debut novel, the animal grief makes of us and the way that it can mark us for life take centre stage. The 2018 book is a forensic look at sex and desire through the lives of Maggie, Lisa and Sloane, compiled after Taddeo spent eight years listening to these women tell her things about their love lives that they had never been able to say out loud. Taddeo wrote Animal during her MFA at Boston University, around the same time that she wrote her non-fiction best-seller, Three Women.

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