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Women of a certain rage

Lisa Taddeo’s scorching first novel
by
August 2021, no. 434

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

Bloomsbury Circus, $32.99 pb, 321 pp

Women of a certain rage

Lisa Taddeo’s scorching first novel
by
August 2021, no. 434

In the prologue to her first book, Three Women (2019), a work of non-fiction exploring the structures and expressions of desire, Lisa Taddeo writes that she had not initially intended to focus on women. ‘I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.’ It was not until she began interviewing her subjects that she noticed that, while the stories of men all seemed to adhere to the same pattern, women’s stories were tantalisingly oblique; when a woman spoke of desiring a man, it was almost never (or never just) the man himself that she wanted. At first, the question that Three Women poses is: Why do these women desire the men that they do? But the further Taddeo delves inside the lives of her case studies (Maggie, the abused teenager; Lina, the woman in a loveless marriage; Sloane, the pariah of her community), the more the question becomes: Why, after everything that men have done to them, do women continue to desire men at all? 

Georgia White reviews 'Animal' by Lisa Taddeo

Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

Bloomsbury Circus, $32.99 pb, 321 pp

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