No TV Show Has Ever Explored Female Desire Like This Before
In July of 2019, author Lisa Taddeo published her debut book, Three Women, which quickly became one of the most talked-about releases of the year, spending 11 straight weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list. Through the true stories of three American women, it takes an unfiltered and unprecedented look at female desire—and how men shape, distort, and invalidate it. An overnight sensation, the book brought into sharp relief the lack of stories about female sexuality from female points of view, which, contrary to what the media has historically shown, are messy and nuanced and carnal too.
When Three Women was published, numerous bidders immediately sought to option it for television. On September 13, the adaptation finally premiered in the United States on Starz; a new episode will air each Friday for nine more weeks. Like the book, the series centers on a trio of American women from different backgrounds and regions of the country, each of whom has a very different relationship with sex and her own unique desires. Taddeo spent nearly 10 years researching and reporting for the book, not only interviewing the women but also becoming fixtures in their lives, moving to where they lived for up to years at a time to fully entrench herself in their worlds. There’s Sloane (played by DeWanda Wise)—sophisticated, successful, and wealthy, living in a Northeastern coastal town with her husband, who regularly invites third parties into their bedroom; Lina (Betty Gilpin), a married mother of two in Indiana, starved for affection from her husband, who has refused to kiss her for over a decade; and North Dakota native Maggie Wilken (Gabrielle Creevy), who decides to report her former high school English teacher, Aaron Knodel, for grooming and pursuing a sexual relationship with her while she was underage. Both the book and show use Wilken’s and Knodel’s real names; Wilken took Knodel to court over her allegations, but despite convincing evidence, he was found not guilty and remains a high school educator today. Wilken, in turn, was ridiculed by the local media in Fargo.
The series follows the general outline of what transpires in the book, with a few storyline tweaks that Taddeo hopes will allow more women to see themselves in it. The character of Gia (Shailene Woodley), who is based on Taddeo, was added in order for viewers to understand how Taddeo initially got the women to share their stories with her.
Harper’s Bazaar recently connected with Taddeo to talk about the anxieties and excitement of bringing Three Women from page to screen.
When were you approached about making Three Women into a TV show? Were there new anxieties around having it made into a series versus just letting it remain a book?
When the book came out [in 2019], it debuted at number one, so I received a lot of incoming calls and there was a lot of bidding; that was exciting. I was at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles for a book event, and I was hanging out with my kid at the pool. The first call I got about the book was “Your book’s number one.” And I was like, “That’s cool, I guess.” And then I got another call, which was like, “So-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so want to option the book.” I wasn’t ready for any of it. I think most people’s reaction would be like, “Woo hoo, I’m so excited.” But I was like, “Shit. How is this going to affect these women?” Whether or not a great show was being made, my main concern was always: How are these people going to feel?
I can imagine that would come with a lot of new anxieties—you just finished the book and suddenly had to think about bringing your subjects’ stories to television.
Yes. When there are real people involved, it’s incredibly nerve-racking. I didn’t write about people who are famous; I wrote about real people with private lives. I didn’t want anything I wrote to affect their trajectory unless it would be in a positive way, which I did feel I could do with Maggie. But to be able to tell a story in another medium is such a gift. With the show, I felt like we had an amazing opportunity to tell their stories with new voices and have more space to make more women feel like the ones that still write to Maggie every day—less alone.
When you did choose to move forward with making the movie, how did you make sure that the integrity of Lina’s, Maggie’s, and Sloane’s stories remained intact?
We had a writers’ room that included me; my husband, Jackson, upon whom the character of Jack is loosely based; Laura Eason, who was the showrunner; and Chisa Hutchinson and Tori Sampson, who are two brilliant writers. The five of us wrote all of the episodes. We added the Gia character, who is played by Shailene and loosely based on me. Almost all of the things that happened to Gia in the show happened to me, especially the really dark things. When people are like, “How’d you get them to tell you everything?” It was like, “Well, I didn’t get them to.” I was in a sad place. When you’re in the dark night of the soul, I think other people can feel it, and they feel less afraid and more comfortable to share. So the purpose of the Gia character was to show how the women talked to me. What was important to me, to the story, to the series, was to show that the women in it are all united by this thread.
Out of all the characters, Sloane’s story changes the most in the show. Why is that?
The book Sloane, who was very protective of her identity, was the second woman of that type I was looking for, which is to say someone more at the height of a position of power. The first woman I spoke to [who fit that bill] was a Black woman in Los Angeles—I spoke to her for six months when I was living there, between living in Indiana and the coastal town [where the book’s Sloane lives]. She had a unicorn of a story, but she started seeing someone with a higher profile in the celebrity world, and she got really nervous that anything she told me would be able to be widely known. She was like, “I can’t do it.”
I didn’t have a Black woman’s voice or an Asian woman’s voice or a man’s voice in the book, so when we were adapting it for the show, we were able to go, “Okay, well, we can put these pieces in now.” I based the TV Sloane on the book Sloane so that she would feel knowable to audiences of the book, but I also wanted to honor the first Sloane-type woman that I had met. Chisa and Tori, who are both Black women, were the main architects of TV Sloane’s story. There are moments from the original Sloane in the show, and there are moments from book Sloane in the show, and then there are moments that Chisa and Tori invented for the TV Sloane.
You know the women that the characters are based on so intimately. What was it like trying to cast each role?
It was wild and humbling to have so much interest from so many amazing actors. There was a lot of interest in Lina’s character, specifically. Betty [Gilpin] sent in a tape, and we also saw her do an audition on Zoom. I got chills. I couldn’t believe it. I feel this way about all of the actors in the show. What’s wild about Betty is that she never met Lina, and yet I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t. She has a deep well of understanding of desire and love, so she really was a force when it came to creating this character, but also embodying the very woman that I knew. We met a lot of young, amazing actors for Maggie’s role, and it was really important that the person playing her was somebody who would have a heart that was big enough to hold Maggie and to also take care of Maggie’s portrayal. And Gabby Creevy was just … there was an instant … it just made so much sense to me. Maggie came out to Hawaii for one of the shoots and was an extra in one of the scenes, and there’s a picture of her and Gabby sitting on this lawn outside the Royal Hawaiian on a break from production. It was really cool.
Before you guys started filming, was there ever a discussion around “I know this series deals with a lot of complex themes, some difficult, some not, some things we can relate to, some we can’t?”
There was a conversation about every single hard scene or medium-hard scene. And we had an intimacy coordinator, Claire Warden, who was absolutely phenomenal. She also helped make sure everybody was feeling safe on set. And not just the women, the men too. Because there were a couple of scenes where men were doing things that they felt nervous about. Every single person should feel safe at work.
The doctor that helped Lina with her chronic pain in real life—and who ultimately connected the two of you—plays a more prominent role on the show than in the book. And it’s incredible to see a male doctor finally take her seriously and tell her, “Oh, you have fibromyalgia, you have X, Y, Z,” because women’s pain is so often ignored or downplayed by men.
Yes. It’s my new soapbox. My next nonfiction book is going to be about grief—the grief of being alive, the grief of how hard …. Our society is sick. We’ve been through a lot, and it sucks. And one of the things I’ve been focusing on is the way that women are continuously not listened to, especially in the mental health world. Mental health and reproductive health are two areas that are very intertwined. I believe there should be a doctor who deals with women’s mental health in reproduction. You know? There’s not enough listening and believing.
Over half of my friends have had some physical ailment that it takes years to get to the bottom of, whether it’s endometriosis or fibromyalgia or something else. So seeing a doctor [onscreen] who justifies and validates that type of pain and fear is so important. Lina’s doctor in real life legitimately did that for her. He was like, “This is what’s going on. You are not broken. I am going to help.” There is nothing more healing than that. For women who watch the show, whether they’ve read the book or not, my biggest hope is that they feel like they’re not alone and that they will realize that the things they feel, we feel too.
There are a ton of projects that are out or will be soon this year that hinge on topics you address in Three Women, including female fulfillment and desire, like Miranda July’s novel All Fours and the movie adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. How does it feel to have these different narratives out in the world that deal—in such different yet equally textured ways—with these topics?
The more, the merrier. My book Animal [about female rage] was on a table at a bookstore that was labeled “In praise of naughty women.” I think that seeing more of these types of stories will mean there will be less tables of books for “naughty girls” or whatever and more tables of just … books. Across the TV, film, and book worlds, I see women taking back the narrative, which is so important.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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