Non-fiction bestselling author Lisa Taddeo talks about her first novel

Lisa Taddeo. Photo by J. Waite

Kiran Dass talks to Lisa Taddeo about her explosive first novel.

In 2010 while working as a freelance journalist, Lisa Taddeo wrote an incisive article for New York magazine, "Rachel Uchitel Is Not a Madam' about Tiger Woods' mistress. The first line read: "The sexiest part of an affair is where it begins." An editor at publisher Simon & Schuster read the article and offered Taddeo a book deal.

Three Women, the searing narrative non-fiction book she went on to write was published in 2019, the result of eight years spent researching the sex lives of women. Taddeo immersed herself in the daily lives of her three interview subjects, going so far as to cross America to live near them. The book was praised for its carnal directness and frank investigation into female sexual desire, becoming a sensational bestseller that Taddeo wasn't prepared for.

"I remain shocked and a little horrified," she says from her home in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and 6-year-old daughter. "I didn't think that many people were going to read my book. I really thought I was just writing a quiet little book."

Taddeo initially spoke to around 100 women, whittling that down to 30 that she interviewed over a period of six months before finally settling on her three women: Maggie, Lina and Sloane. But some of the other women's stories filter through her new book - her first novel - Animal, which revisits similar themes to Three Women.

It begins with narrator Joan having dinner in a New York restaurant with a man. Another man walks in and shoots himself in front of her. It's a firecracker opening scene. Joan flees town in her battered Dodge for Los Angeles, where she shacks up in a fishbowl-like compound in the dusty Topanga Canyon. Her new home once entertained a steady stream of tanned porn stars and Satan worshippers, like something out of Hollywood Babylon. Now it's managed by Joan's lecherous and dottery landlord Lenny, who is like a character out of a David Lynch film. The canyon is so heat-soaked it seems to inspire a kind of psychedelic madness, as bloodthirsty coyotes circle the compound. The vivid descriptions of place in Animal drip with a rich sensory detail.

"I lived in New York for about a decade and there wasn't a street I didn't walk down in Manhattan," says Taddeo. "I lived in LA for about a year and I was so taken with the gothic sense of it. I never got the hang of it though, the unknowability of it. It feels like all these different countries in one city. I just felt like I couldn't crack LA, so that detail comes from my own obsession with it."

While Joan is running away from something, she is also in pursuit of a woman named Alice, who she feels a "volcanic connection" to. But who is Alice? We also learn that Joan's parents died when she was 10. Taddeo slowly builds up to revealing how they died. Joan has been listlessly moving from house to house with her parents' belongings; "old yellow lotions from stores that no longer existed." Boxes stay unpacked in a constant emotional load.

Like Taddeo's own late parents, Joan's father is an Italian American doctor and her mother is a beautiful Italian woman. Taddeo's father was killed in a car accident and her mother died not long after from cancer.

"It's hard to write anything without drawing on your own feelings and emotions," she says. "A lot of what is in [Animal] is from the people I've spoken to for Three Women that didn't make it into that book. But my own experiences with my own mother, that is the largest part of me that is in this book."

Joan stalks the city, seeking quick sexual fixes with preferably married men. She craves "men who had big happy lives of which I would never be a part." She shoplifts and tells us, "If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use." The book is also about female rage, which Taddeo says still isn't given the same due as male rage because "we still live in a patriarchal society caused by men.

"I think it's important to look at female rage and not dismiss it. And to really think about the way we look at gendered rage." With both of her books, Taddeo focuses not on what women don't want, but what they do want sexually. "I think things are moving in a positive direction," she says, but feels concerned about how women judge each other. You see it with Joan. When she passes a couple while walking through a hotel hallway with her older lover, the woman shoots Joan a judgemental look, not the man. "The issue is how we treat each other. With women, there's always competition. We perform for each other, I think because we are our own greatest critics," says Taddeo.

She wanted to show Joan as an anti-hero, a woman who has been through a lot in life and who "has done many questionable and immoral things". Taddeo says she wants the reader to feel like they're seeing behind the glass of someone they don't understand. Like so many women, she says, Joan is haunted but misunderstood.

"I feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for all of us, actually. For all of us who have gone through something."

Taddeo laughs when asked if she is as staunch and gutsy as her books. "I'm really not at all! I'm a very scared person. I'm very anxious, a complete mess." A nervous flyer, she says she is worried about an upcoming flight to LA. "In fact, prior to Three Women I hadn't even flown in six years."

She likes to move between non-fiction and fiction because it keeps her interested. Having written fiction since she was a child, Three Women was more of a digression for her than Animal. A lover of the short story form, Taddeo's next book will be a collection of short fiction, which she has already completed. But after that, she will work on another immersive narrative non-fiction book about grief, which she says will be very personal.

"It will be hard for me but it's just something I have to do, I think."

Animal, by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $35) is out now.