It’s the first Saturday of the month which means a new round of #6degrees and this month’s starting book is Three Women by Lisa Taddeo.
You can find the details and rules of the #6degrees meme at bookaremyfavouriteandbest, but in a nutshell, everyone has the same starting book and from there, you connect to other books. Some of the connections made are so impressive, it’s a lot of fun to follow.
I haven’t read the starting book for this month’s six degrees and with a tagline like this:
‘Desire as we’ve never seen it before: a riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.’
…it’s unlikely I ever will. I honestly can’t think of something that would repel me more.
Of course, this book is being advertised as ‘the next big thing’ and is a NY Times #1 bestseller. The last NY Times #1 bestseller I read was The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney and it was possibly one of the most shallow books I’ve ever read. Nothing at all like Nest by Inga Simpson, of which it shares a name. Nest culminates in the ‘big wet’ (a Queensland summer weather pattern) which also features in The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus. The Breeding Season is chiefly about grief, specifically, the loss of a child to stillbirth. In this it shares themes with The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal. In this book, a young Irish girl leaves home and moves to a Birmingham boarding house for an independent life. This immediately puts me in mind of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. The destination may differ, but the era and starting points for the characters are similar. Any book about Brooklyn will lead me to The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman, which is so very Brooklyn you almost feel like you are right there alongside the characters.
And there you have it. I wonder where next month’s starting book will take me?
Theresa Smith Writes 
Great chain! I am really happy to see A Trick To Time get a mention – I loved this book and heard the author talk at a book festival a couple of years ago – so moving and memorable.
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That would have been wonderful! I really love that book. Perfection.
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Huh. I have The Nest in my TBR stack – I was sucked in by the hype… might shuffle it down to the bottom.
I have read Nest but recognised it as a ‘lovely book that just wasn’t for me’. Brooklyn on the other hand was for me – a wonderful story that has really lingered.
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I still think of Brooklyn. I loved the movie too.
The Nest was a bookclub read. I just found the characters shallow in the extreme. There were some amusing moments, but honestly, it didn’t shine a positive light on American people.
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Ooh some books in here that I must add to my TBR list. Brooklyn looks great.
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It’s wonderful! As is The Trick to Time.
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I’ve got no intention of reading such a tawdry book either.
By coincidence, I heard a snippet of a program on Radio National, and though I don’t know the context, (it wasn’t anything to do with reviewing this book) what they were talking about was the fact that research shows that people are not honest when they are interviewed about their sex lives at all. Apparently someone did some research in which they compared the responses of women who thought they were connected to a lie detector, to their responses when they didn’t, and guess what, they admitted to much more under the ‘lie detector’ that not.
And as the speaker said, most of us feel deeply uncomfortable discussing our sex lives, even with intimate friends, much less a journalist or a researcher. So I think books like this are rubbish.
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I tend to agree. It’s not a topic that I want to read about either, much less talk about for ten years. Interesting, that comparison of responses. Not surprising though, when you really think about it. Each to their own, but if I was going to spend ten years of my life researching something, it wouldn’t be that!
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I like the direction you took. I also liked Nest, and Brooklyn.
Thanks for sharing your chain.
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Both quiet yet impacting reads, I think.
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I’m surprised to hear that The Next was a NYT #1 bestseller. I thought it was OK, but certainly not THAT good. Interesting chain.
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I know! Sometimes there’s no accounting for tastes with these lists! 😁
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Oooh, ever since I heard Three Women was the next prompt, I’ve been eager to see what you came up with – I would have never guessed that The Breeding Season would work its way in there!! 😅 Having read Three Women, I’m fairly confident in saying you’re right, it’s probably not the book for your tastes… BUT, in its defense, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book “about sex” that had such a clear-eyed view of it. It wasn’t titillating or exploitative at all; it took an approach more like one would write about three different women’s tastes in food, or clothes, or music. I really appreciated that. 😉❤️
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Did you write a review on it?
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Not on KUWTP, but I did for Primer: https://primer.com.au/three-women-reveal-their-sex-lives-book-review/
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Will check it out! Thanks, it will be the closest I get to actually reading the book! 😁
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Interesting! But what was the point of researching three women’s sex lives for eight years?
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Well, I guess I wouldn’t want to speak on Taddeo’s behalf, but as I understood the book it was about interrogating desire, specifically female desire, as more than the simple “physical stimulus + biological response” equation to which it’s so often reduced. There are so many bio/psycho/social factors that go into what we desire and why, whether and how those desires are acted upon, and that makes a lot of boundaries very blurry. She originally conceived the book as a much broader project, if I recall correctly, and started interviewing 20+ women, but found for various reasons it was more effective to dive really deeply into a small number of women (three, duh) to reflect that complexity.
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Twenty women over ten years. That would have made for an ambitious project!
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I’m back and have now read your chain. I really want to read Simpson’s Nest, and I have seen Brooklyn (and have it) but haven’t read it (though I’ve read another Toibin.)
I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about Three women, but I must say I don’t talk about my sex life with my closest friends, not so much because I don’t trust them – there are a couple of trust highly – but because it would be betraying my relationship with my husband. No matter what I said – positive, negative or neutral – it would be spoiling something deeply personal about our life together.
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I feel as though you would greatly appreciate Nest. It’s one of the quietly powerful ones.
You know, I often think, on the odd times I read a memoir, how the person being written about might feel (and there’s always a person being written about). Particularly when it comes to things that are deeply personal. But yes, I agree with you and what you’re saying, very much so.
And there’s also the factor, for me, that if I talked about my own sex life to friends, they may then reciprocate, and I will be completely honest here and say that I couldn’t think of a worse thing I’d have to listen to. In terms of this book, even after Sheree’s explanation on it, I still comeback to: but who actually cares about this? Other than the women themselves. There’s something ingrained in me that finds it a frivolous and superficial topic to expend so much energy and attention on.
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