We expect stories of first kisses to be singular and unforgettable because that’s what movies and books taught us to expect. “Three Women” author Lisa Taddeo points to two incidents: “Because I don't know, my memory is so spotty,” she said.
Taddeo told me that her first may have been in Italy when she was around 12. That was the one she doesn’t remember in much detail other than it was with a beautiful, kind, red-haired young man named Massimiliano in a hay field in her mother's hometown. "And it was light and nothing, no tongue, and it was beautiful, it was 'The Princess Bride,'" she said, adding that it feels like such a figment that Taddeo doesn’t even remember how it happened.
The second one, the kiss Taddeo calls the real one, closes memory’s distance with sharper edges, and there was no hero whispering, “As you wish.” She was 16 or 17, and she’d just dyed her hair for the first time and went to a party where a guy just started kissing her. “I didn't want that kiss, but I was also like, 'Oh, at least now this will be my first real kiss,' so it was confusing.”
“I have this beautiful memory that was weighed down by this gross memory,” she concluded, “and I feel like that's a very, very female response.”
I don’t typically ask personal questions of those I interview, but the 10-episode series adaptation of Taddeo’s 2019 book contains so many scenes that are staged and framed from a place of profound knowing. (Taddeo wrote or co-wrote five of its episodes.)
The one inspiring my question is a character’s flashback to her first kiss outside a movie theater. Every detail is cut crystal – the titles on the marquee, the amber cast from the crowd of small lights. When the kiss happens, the boy spins the girl; the bright globes blur into honeyed sparkles. An exiting crowd filters around the pair, but for them, time has stopped.
It’s a brief rewind, but it holds another type of weight than what Taddeo recalls.
That memory belongs to a woman named Lina, played by Betty Gilpin, and it steadies her. Lina's marriage has deteriorated to a degree that her husband tells her that “kissing me gives him the heebie-jeebies the way wet wool does.”
We meet Lina at the three-month and 17-day mark of not being touched at all by her husband, which has driven her to take matters into her own hands — innuendo intended. That movie house memory pulls her back to her first love, pushing her to a new chapter where pleasure doesn’t come second to wifely sacrifice.
“I don't know if we've ever truly kissed,” Lina says. “It's important. It's the most important thing in the world to me.”
Taddeo’s book and the series do something too rare in literature and TV, centering the stories of women’s desire and everything encapsulated in that idea – bliss, emptiness, joy, agony. All of it, and never simply one thing.
Lina’s is one of four stories “Three Women” explores, including Gia’s. Like the book, the drama captures a spectrum of archetypes and definitions of how desire appears in life, which isn't uniformly rosy.
DeWanda Wise’s Sloane, for example, is a wealthy East Coast event planner and influencer whose husband (Blair Underwood) is turned on by watching her with other sexual partners. But their agreement chafes against a deep-seated resentment of restriction, and a lifetime of being dismissed and misunderstood has left her lonely and prone to self-harm.
A young North Dakota woman named Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy) is frozen after high school, combing through her relationship with a popular teacher (Jason Ralph) who abruptly cut her off. In its aftermath, she realizes it was exploitative and decides to report it to the police and go public.
Although the drama travels into dark emotional spaces, it’s still the sexiest show on TV that isn’t expressly about sex. Like the affection Lina yearns for, its main fuel is a yearning for intimacy.
“Three Women” was originally published in 2019 after #MeToo lost steam but also in a time of rearranging how popular culture considers female characters. Any character that wasn’t featured in a novel by Elena Ferrante or Natalia Ginzburg, Taddeo remembers, was some version of plucky and fun, with some physical flaw differentiating her from classic beauties. She wanted to present other profiles.
“I really do think that in fiction, there has been an incremental shift away from that, that I find to be incredibly promising,” the author said. “Not to say that we don't still want those plucky characters who, you know, they exist. They're real women too. I don't know as many of them, but that could just be what I attract. I attract fellow dark souls, not plucky heroines.”
She continued, “But it’s just about who feels adequate enough to tell their story. And the truth is that everybody should feel important enough to tell their story . . .We're used to men being swashbuckling pirates who go away and do the hero's journey but a woman doing the same thing needs to be, you know, extra self-aggrandizing.”
Or, as a famous author tells the show’s fictional version of Taddeo, called Gia (Shailene Woodley), they need to have a lot of sex with married men to gain stories worth telling.
“Three Women” is about how women have sex and want sex, and whenever we say those words about a TV series another famous title tends to come to mind. But this is not “Sex and the City” any more than Taddeo can be likened to a certain non-existent Manhattan author (even if Woodley sports a similarly tousled mane).
Taddeo’s and Gia’s story is expansive, the result of spending most of a decade crisscrossing the country to find her subjects, sometimes staying in their towns to wring every drop out of their accounts.
Starz’s drama reflects that through broad airy shots of the open road and varied landscapes – the luxe green of Rhode Island, the spare chill of North Dakota, and the hay-spun softness of Indiana, where Lina lives and is dying to truly live.
The depictions of sex are explicit but meaningful and conscientiously presented. Similar care is taken in showing women’s bodies – men’s too, but women’s especially. Bloodstains on sheets and towels are framed as shameful, dirty, or accidental. One scene makes it part of Lina’s erotic awakening. This is not coincidental; every episode is directed by a woman.
The TV version of “Three Women” was originally set to air on Showtime but, in 2023 the premium channel announced it would not air the completed production. Then Starz swooped in. Even so, the drama premiered in Australia first before finally making its U.S. debut early last month.
Five episodes into the season, full episodes have been devoted to each character’s story – more than enough to get a sense of how varied these women are along with their commonalities.
Taddeo once told Salon that she wrote the book “to show that women don't talk about their desire enough.” In the way of all screen adaptations, though, the meaning of stories shifts when we’re able to see them play out before our eyes.
“What I hope this show and the book do is to remind [us] genuinely not to judge other people,” she said, “to look at a representation of someone's shame and desire and not attack it, but receive it and go, ‘Oh, I am like that too.’”
New episodes of "Three Women" air 10 p.m. Fridays on Starz and on the Starz app.
