Three braided case studies, reported over eight years, arrive as a single-reader audiobook of eleven hours and twenty-four minutes. Lisa Taddeo spent that time with Lina, Maggie and Sloane, and the resulting book was called literary reportage by the Atlantic and a nonfiction literary masterpiece by Elizabeth Gilbert. Simon and Schuster Audio released the recording in July 2019 with Tara Lynne Barr credited as the reader. What the record files it under is the first thing worth flagging, and it has nothing to do with reportage.
Where This One Lands
A four-star response posted nine days after release lays the three lives out without editorializing, and it remains the clearest description of the contents anywhere on the record. Maggie is a teenager in North Dakota who says she had a relationship with her married high school English teacher, and whose account ends up in a criminal trial that divides her town. Lina is a housewife in suburban Indiana whose husband of eleven years will not kiss her, and who reconnects with a man she knew at school. Sloane runs a restaurant in a wealthy corner of the Northeast and sleeps with other people while her husband watches.
Set out like that, the structure looks like a triptych about sex. It is not. What holds the three strands together is the gap between what each woman wants and what the people around her will permit her to want, and the reporting is at its strongest when it stays in that gap rather than in the bedroom. Taddeo is present in the book too, in a framing voice that explains why she spent close to a decade doing this, and that frame is doing more work than first-time readers tend to notice.
Maggie's chapters are the ones that will stay with most listeners, and they are the hardest to sit through. A courtroom is a machine for turning a private account into a public verdict, and the book follows what that machine does to a teenager in a small town, in real time, at length. Nothing about the treatment is prurient. Everything about it is uncomfortable, which is the correct response and not a comfortable one to sit with at length.
Why Listen to Three Women
What the marketing keeps underselling gets named directly in the July 2019 five-star write-up. That reader agrees the book is about female sexual desire and refuses to let it be reduced to that, arguing it is equally about desire in the broader sense, the wanting of happiness and unmet goals that gets people out of bed. The response quotes Taddeo directly on the sense that nobody, and particularly no woman, is supposed to feel desire in the first place. That line is the thesis.
Prose is why the book outlasted its news cycle. Taddeo writes reported nonfiction with the sentence-level attention of a novelist, and the audio format is unusually kind to that: sentences built for rhythm land harder read aloud than scanned. Eleven hours of close third-person reconstruction could easily become monotonous, and the reason it does not is that each of the three voices arrives with its own vocabulary and its own self-deceptions intact.
Tara Lynne Barr is credited alone, which means one reader carries three women from three regions and three classes plus Taddeo's own framing passages. That is a heavier casting demand than the runtime suggests, since the book depends on the listener holding the strands apart while they alternate. Buyers who find braided structures hard to track by ear should treat the sample as a load test rather than a preview.
What Gives Us Pause
Endings are the sticking point, and two of five arrive at that complaint independently. Both wanted an ending and did not get one. A three-star entry makes the sharpest version of the case, arguing that eight years spent with these three women should have produced more than the book delivers, that too much was left out, and that the close was a real disappointment. That reader still rates the writing highly, which is the pattern: admiration for the sentences, frustration with the shape.
I think the frustration is real and the diagnosis is off. The book ends where reporting ends rather than where a narrative would, and none of these three lives had resolved by the time the reporting stopped. But a listener arriving from the memoir shelf will feel the absence of a final movement acutely, and eleven hours is a long approach to a landing that never quite happens.
Filing is the other problem, and it belongs to the record rather than to the book. This listing's genre field reads health and wellness and the category tag reads sexual and reproductive health, which describes a subject the book is not about and says nothing about the shelf it actually belongs on. Nothing here offers guidance, technique or evidence about anyone's health. The description compounds it by opening on the casting announcement for a television adaptation that did not exist when this recording was made, so the first thing a buyer reads about a 2019 audiobook is a list of actors.
Should You Listen to Three Women?
Readers of literary nonfiction who come for prose and patience rather than conclusions are the audience, along with anyone drawn to long-form reporting on private lives and able to hold three parallel accounts across eleven hours without needing them to converge. An honest version of the recommendation sits on record in a four-star entry from August 2025: the characters feel real, the emotions run deep, and the wish for something that ties it together with a bit of light goes unmet, because that is not how the lives went.
A criminal trial involving a minor is territory some listeners cannot enter, and this book goes a long way into one. Narrative closure is not available either, so anyone who needs it to feel a book was worth the time should choose differently. Anyone browsing the health category and landing here should also know what they have found: not advice, not wellness, but eight years of reporting on what three American women wanted and what it cost them to say so.
Questions Listeners Ask
How explicit is the audiobook?
Frank rather than titillating. Sexual detail appears throughout because desire is the subject, and Maggie's chapters cover an alleged relationship between a teenager and her married teacher in specific terms. The register stays reportorial. Anyone sensitive to material involving a minor should treat that section as the deciding factor.
Is the audiobook the right format for this book?
For the prose, yes, since the sentences are built for rhythm. One five-star response nonetheless recommends owning a physical copy, an unusual thing for that reader to say, and points to an off-site blog for the full argument. Listeners who annotate will want print alongside the recording.
