In her debut work of non-fiction, Taddeo recounts the stories of three white American women and the men with which they are romantically and sexually entangled. Over a period of eight years, Taddeo spent thousands of hours with Maggie, Lina and Sloane.
She talked to them in person, on the phone, over email and text. She lived in each of their communities and built an in-depth picture of their different experiences by reading their diaries and their text messages, and speaking to their friends and families. She was even present for some of the events she describes in the book, though her presence is rarely explicitly felt in the prose. Maggie, from North Dakota, is in her early twenties. Depending on who you believe, she was either groomed by or readily pursued an affair with her married high-school English teacher, Mr Knodel, when she was seventeen.
Six years on from the end of the affair, her life has fallen apart while his appears to be better than ever β he is crowned North Dakota Teacher of the Year. Lina is in her thirties. A middle-class housewife and mother from Indiana, she lives with the chronic pain of fibromyalgia and with a husband who refuses to kiss her. Her marital dissatisfaction eventually overrides her traditional beliefs, and she reconnects with an old high-school boyfriend on Facebook, who is also married.
She begins an affair with him, enlivened enough by the passion she feels to withstand his monosyllabic noncommittal contributions and general emotional unavailability. Sloane is a poised, wealthy woman in her forties who runs a restaurant with her husband on the East Coast, where they live with their daughters. She and her husband sometimes have sex with other couples, but mostly her husband chooses men for her to have sex with while he watches or she tells him about it, either in person or via a smartphone.
Her feelings about this arrangement are mixed and changeable, until they meet a man who, for a while, completes the triangle perfectly. This form keeps things suspenseful, and weaves their varying experiences of love and lust into a chorus that, in spite of the considerable differences in their circumstances, emphasises the common terrain of desire and its frustration.
