The title of journalist Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling first book is direct: She tells the stories of a trio of women in an effort to understand the nature of modern female desire. But what Taddeo found over the course of eight years of reporting is anything but straightforward. Through the stories of a young woman in North Dakota who had an affair with her teacher at age 17, a housewife in Indiana and an East Coast wife playing out her husband’s fantasies (sometimes with other people’s spouses) readers witness mistakes, moral confusion and more than one bad man. Her often fraught depiction, though limited by the diversity of its subjects, adds another dimension to the current cultural interrogation of desire—and the profound differences between what men and women do and don’t want.
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