“Three Women” follows the sex lives of three American women (two are given pseudonyms), exploring the moments of passion that altered their lives. There’s “Lina” an Indiana woman who embarks on a life-changing affair with her high school boyfriend; Maggie, a North Dakota woman now in her late 20s who, when she was a high school student, allegedly had a relationship with her married English teacher; and “Sloane,” a New England restaurateur whose husband enjoys watching her sleep with other people.
The book excavates their upbringings to form three profiles of why these women want what they want, how they became the people they are today and how, consciously or not, they walk the delicate line between sexual subjugation and liberation. Ms. Taddeo said she spent eight years reporting it and drove cross-country six times to interview hundreds of women, eventually settling on the final three.
In the process, Ms. Taddeo began to reflect on her own story. “I got very intrigued by women’s desire, by my own, what I’d done,” she said. “These women had given their whole stories to me and to the world. And I felt like it was only fair that I put myself in there — to some extent to be like, ‘I’m this, too.’”
“I should perhaps try and write a book that is entirely serious, or entirely comic,” he muses. “But it seems to be, for me anyway, the natural way to tell the stories, the natural way to approach life and experience. That it is a mixture of comedy and pain. That sounds melodramatic or pompous, but it feels like the only voice I have.”
A few years ago, the novelist Helen Phillips woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of her young daughter’s screams. She rushed to her bedside but was unable to calm her child, who was stuck in a nightmare, crying: “I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”
“It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life,” Phillips said. “It’s a metaphor for motherhood. There’s always going to be things that they’re confronting that you’re powerless against.”
That moment gave rise to one of the more unsettling scenes in her new book, “The Need,” a thriller that explores the psychological, emotional and physical torments of motherhood. The narrative centers on Molly, a sleep-deprived paleobotanist and mother of two young children, whose harried domestic routine is upended one night by an otherworldly intruder. The interloper represents Molly’s worst fear: that something bad will happen to her children.
Is there a best time in life to make friends? I’ve heard people say it’s your 20s and your 60s, grimly suggesting friendship and child-rearing are mutually exclusive. I’ve read F. Scott Fitzgerald thought it was his 30s and Thoreau was inspired by his 40s. Maybe there isn’t one best time, but you know what is true? It’s always the right time to work on keeping the friends you have.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, ever since I wrote a novel about a middle-aged woman who sets out to visit four faraway friends over the course of a year. She sets strict rules for each visit, including no social media and no set plans; the friendship itself must be the sole purpose of the trip. On tour and in interviews, I’ve been asked if I went on such a journey myself. I’ve had to say no, I did not. The visits of my narrator, May Attaway, are imagined. Sure, I drew on personal experience—I have friends, and the novel is dedicated to five of them—but I didn’t travel to see them the way May travels in the book.
After telling the story of Susan's death to Stern, Alexander tweeted a note saying, “[Swedberg] was generous and gracious, and I am so mad at myself for retelling this story in any way that would diminish her. If I had had more maturity or more security in my own work, I surely would have taken her query and possibly tried to adjust the scenes with her. She surely offered. But, I didn't have that maturity or security."
Now that we know why Swedberg was written off the show—and have the benefit of 30 years hindsight—it's time to look back at how her performance was ideal for this show. And how the character of Susan brought out the worst—and funniest—in George. It's time to give her the credit she deserves.
I had just landed in Bogotá and was thrilled for this vacation: I was visiting Paula, a friend who was working at the embassy there, and you don’t get better guides than that. I stood on her high-rise balcony and took in the sweeping vista of the city cradled by a neck pillow of mountains. “What should we do?” I asked. “Let’s make a memory.” Paula lit up. She knew just the place. We walked a few blocks away and dipped into a grocery store. “Why are we stopping here?” I asked. She spread her arms, ta-da style. “This is where you want to be,” she said.
I thought it was a prank. But then I saw a pile of tomates de arbol — tree tomatoes — and my curiosity was piqued. I passed the dragonfruit and picked up a waxy green thing. “What’s this?” I asked. Now she thought I was the one pranking her. “That,” she said calmly, “is an avocado, mi amigo.” I turned it in my hand, studied its conspicuous lack of reptilian rind, and looked back at her. “No, seriously. What is it?” She laughed. Grocery-store laughs are pretty much the best kind. Top ten, easy. There’s something intoxicating about a burst of laughter piercing what is otherwise a space for errands and drudgery. Was being an adult in a foreign grocery store the grown-up version of being a kid in a candy store? The citrus tang of lulos! Feijoas! Borojos! Carambolas! Moras! Nísperos! Maracuyas! Guanabanas! Zapotes! Uchuvas! Pivas! Ciruelas! Chontoduras! I learned more in that grocery store than I did the next day at the Museum of Gold.
The Body Lies sets itself large challenges: that fragmentary narrative, including an official complaint and some bureaucratic emails; the difficulty of using violence as a narrative device while questioning the politics of using violence as a narrative device; the task of combining the satire of the campus novel with the high drama of the thriller. Baker is a writer who can make it all work. Beyond the dubious fun of the chase, the pleasure of reading this novel is seeing writerly ambition fulfilled.
Say what you will about writers, but they have some of the best in-jokes. You’ll find plenty of them, starting with the title, in “Very Nice,” Marcy Dermansky’s breezy follow-up to 2016’s “The Red Car.”
You don’t have to be an author to appreciate the novel’s pleasures. This rapid-fire tale, which switches among five narrators, will keep readers entertained even if they don’t fully appreciate the sting of having a writing professor cross out all the “very”s and “really”s and “just”s from your stories.
When Francesca Segal, almost 30 weeks pregnant with identical twins, was told that she needed to have an emergency caesarean, her first reasonable, lunatic thought was whether this meant she had got away with no stretch marks. The right way to respond to becoming a mother has become violently politicised in recent years, but for Segal, plunged in too early, the dominant reflex is a numbed detachment. Some hours previously she had found herself bleeding profusely, but her brain had been unable to compute what was happening. "It seems I am sobbing," she writes. "How odd I hadn't noticed until now."
Segal is the author of two novels about family life, one of which, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. But this is the first time she has written about her own family life, the first 10 weeks of which were spent with A-lette and B-lette, as her daughters are initially called, in hospital (names, she and her husband Gabe agree, seem "unimportant, compared with the business of keeping them alive").
Hansen is not a hagiographer, and parts of the book are unflattering and depart from official Cuban lore. But the decision to emphasize Castro’s original idealism is nonetheless striking, as it resonates in many ways with the efforts of Cuban institutions since his retirement in 2006, and especially since his death in 2016, to do the same. By contrast, Castro’s personal life after coming to power, together with many things about the government he led, remains a secret of state. Who knows how future biographers’ appraisals may change if those archives — assuming they even exist — ever open their doors?