IF FACTS HAVE LOST THEIR POWER to change the discourse, perhaps there's something weightier about ones that come wrapped in the methods of fiction. This has been the hope behind nonfiction narratives such as Common Ground, Random Family, and Behind the Beautiful Forevers. These books invite us into private experiences—of busing and integration in Boston, poverty and the drug trade in the Bronx, or survival and aspiration in a Mumbai slum, respectively—that have been more obscured than illuminated by public debate. But writing a true story as rich with detail as a novel requires immersive research. The rare successes become staples of J-school syllabi.
The latest book seeking to enter this canon—so explicitly that its publisher invokes the authors of the classics above—is Three Womenby Lisa Taddeo, a writer of both fiction and magazine features who spent eight years with her characters and in two cases moved to the towns where they lived. Taddeo's chosen terrain is perhaps the most private of all: not sex, exactly, but the intangible mess of desire that leads to it—in particular, the desires of women, who are usually frowned upon for wanting at all.
The subject drew her in part because she wanted to understand the enigma of her mother, a woman who didn't appear to have any desires. To her daughter, it seemed “that her sexuality was merely a trail in the woods, the unmarked kind that is made by boots trampling tall grass. And the boots belonged to my father.” Her dying advice to Taddeo was to follow her example and hide her true self from both women and men: “Don't let them see you happy.”
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