Three Women: A Review
I read this non-fiction, profile-esque novel after it was recommended to me by several people (and an Instagram poll). In their words, it was "haunting," "eerie," "necessary," and "not-put-downable." I'd say this was worth the read, but *trigger warnings* galore for sexual assault, PTSD, and trauma.
Now that I've read Maggie, Lina, and Sloane's stories I see what they meant. The author follows the stories of three women (surprised?) and their situations, desires, inner thought processes, marriages, bodies, and needs.
Maggie is the youngest, and she had a relationship with one of her teachers while she was in high school. We witness her naïveté towards the situation, and the way we weave in and out of her story (the book is structured with each chapter following a different woman than the previous one) feels like time passing. In a sense, it gave me time to understand how Maggie may have felt as her and her teacher's relationship evolved, broke, and then became a legal battle. Although we're always in Maggie's head, partway through the reader is faced with the teacher's legal defense; is Maggie and unreliable narrator? (No.) She's yet another victim who is overlooked, unheard, and let down by the system that presides over her body and life experiences. She does a lot of growing up throughout Three Women, but it's not sweet and flowery. Her growth teems with medications, anxiety, PTSD-like symptoms, and unacknowledgement. Her story made me sad, and it made me angry. I admire her bravery because she exists and is real and because there are MANY more like her too.
Lina is introduced second. She's married and adores being touched. She's unhappy with her husband, happy with her newfound body, and indifferent about being a mother. Her sections throughout the book compelled me. I love the author's choice to share her story from the perspective of a group of women circled up in a closed doctor's office waiting area. There's something about being at daytime places in the evenings, and Lina's story had that same vibe. Lina has an affair, and we follow her along the roller coaster of adrenaline and disappointment that secretly sleeping with an old flame carries her through. I found her story the most accessible... partly because I know the anxiety of waiting for a text reply, but also because I felt that we saw her thoughts play our more than the other two women. Lina was raw, taking risks to make herself available for the man she wanted to hook up with. She was transparent about the loneliness it causes, interspersed between the moments of ecstasy in the middle seat of her car. It felt like she could be any woman I know, which made me realize that so could Maggie or Sloane. That's the whole point. That we can all be these women; we all are.
Sloane's story was last. I'd summarize it as a Gossip Girl lifestyle grown-up: dimly lit corner booths, cashmere, thinness, and loads of sex. Sloane owns and manages a restaurant; her husband is the chef. She is cool, elite, and sleeps with men that her husband selects for her. Her story was harder to access for me. While she was excited by her situation, it often felt like she was in the passenger seat. As her story progressed, more of her past traumas unfolded, and her guarded nature made more sense. I still ached reading about her depression, but her story still felt unreachable to me (though it was a nice counter to Maggie and Lina's experiences).
Overall, there was no neat bow tied around the stories. The women don't find clarity or solace (that we know of) before the last pages of the Epilogue...but that's life, right?