“It’s so reprehensible and repulsive to me that we still use [the] word [“slut”],” says Lisa Taddeo.

What Women Want

In an interview with Three Women’s Lisa Taddeo, the author discusses grief, vengeance, her new story collection, and, of course, women

By Andrew Billen

It is not a usual question for me, but I would really like to know if Lisa Taddeo is capable of murder. The 42-year-old American author is famous for her 2019 nonfiction best seller Three Women, a book rich in empathy for its trio of protagonists and their tragically determinant sex lives.

If my question therefore appears inappropriate, it will not to those who have read Taddeo’s follow-up, Animal, a brilliant, witty, horrible novel that keeps you guessing not whether its depraved heroine will eventually kill someone, but merely who that someone will be. The story’s animus, not least toward men, surely erupts from a place so dark and deep that I just have to ask.