Do! Not! Read!

Ahh, happy Wednesday, dear readers. I am sitting here outside at Cafe Kitsune - totally unbothered by their oppressive-to-writers, no laptops inside policy - enjoying the fifth evening in five evenings that makes me say, “Okay no, I think this is the nicest day of the year.” Is the fall always like this? I don’t know what’s different this year, but I’m totally enraptured by this weather. And let me tell you, it’s such a blessing that I have something to uplift me because my most recent read…did not. This week is going to be short and sweet. Last week I read Lisa Taddeo’s recent collection of short stories, Ghost Lover, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I hated it. I’m going to briefly (famous last words) tell you why I hated it, and then I’m going to try to scrub these stories from my consciousness forever and go back to reading my new book - To Paradise by Hanya Yanigahara - which I will need to really glue myself to if I hope to finish it in time for next week. Can you tell how badly I don’t want to talk about Ghost Lover? Okay here we go.

Or actually we’ll get there in a minute. First: in 2019 Lisa Taddeo published Three Women, which told the true stories of three American women’s sex lives over the course of ten years. I can’t remember the exact details, but it boils down to the fact that Taddeo found these women and in a quasi journalistic project, kept in close contact with them for ten years. She then wrote down their stories, changing names and pertinent details to maintain their anonymity. It read like small-town juicy gossip, while also being broadly interesting, and at times, shedding light on nuanced facets of femininity and female sexuality. Aside from the good stories and the fact that Taddeo told them well from a narrative perspective, I also remember really enjoying her style - matter of fact, but not without emotion, and grounded in respect.

Between Three Women and Ghost Lover, Taddeo wrote a novel called Animal, which I haven’t read. I can’t say I plan to, but if any of you have read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Since I didn’t read Animal I’m not really in a position to make overarching claims and judgements on Taddeo’s trajectory as a writer, but I’m going to anyway. I think that she wrote Three Women about real people, and she did a good job with it. It was obviously a massive undertaking, and it paid off. She blew up, becoming a prominent voice in the movement of the new literary feminine, which is made up of two main components: rage and sexual appetite. Unfortunately, Taddeo is not able to write about created characters - or perhaps more accurately, she is not able to create characters that are real and relatable, let alone enjoyable to read about (which does not equate to likable for any of you who are thinking to yourself, “But hey! What about the unlikeable narrator”).

Which actually does bring us to the absolute nightmare that was Ghost Lover. It’s a collection of nine short stories, some of which (some of the worst ones in my opinion) were SHOCKINGLY published reputably prior to being lumped into this steaming pile of shit book. The first and titular story should have warned me off, but I actually held out hope. I’m not going to bother with avoiding spoilers, so be warned. The first story to which I refer is called “Ghost Lover,” and goes roughly as follows: Woman who was repeatedly molested by her mother’s boyfriend as a teenager falls in love with her best friend Nick. They have a fling, and it ends cordially on the surface, but while Nick is glad that they can still be friends, woman (I don’t think she’s ever named) is totally devastated. She creates a service called Ghost Lover that allows women to off pass the task (shouldn’t it be a pleasure?) of crafting and sending messages to new romantic partners to total strangers who will make sure that they get the guy! This service makes the woman wealthy and famous - she’s been named this year’s Golda Meir Ambassador for Women. In the midst of writing her acceptance speech for this honor, she receives a save the date to Nick’s wedding - to someone else. This sets her off so powerfully that at the end of the story she is walking up to the podium to accept her ambassadorship with a speech that falsely accuses Nick of rape.

UGHHHHH. Even briefly recounting the central points of this story makes me feel ill. Reading it was SO much worse. Our main character is a hateful person. She hates herself, she hates all other women, and she wants all other women to hate themselves as much as she hates them. That’s it. And THEN, when she has the opportunity to potentially make a difference, she gets up in front of an audience and tells them that an innocent man raped her instead of speaking truth to power about her real experiences with sexual abuse. It’s SICK. Say it with me now: false rape accusations help no one. To make matters worse, I found Taddeo’s writing to be sloppy and ineffectual. So yes, I definitely should have been warned off - if this is the story that Taddeo decided to name the collection after, it would have been safe to assume that we weren’t headed anywhere good. That being said, I wanted to give her a fair shake. I didn’t like the content, but maybe she was going for shock value right out of the gate. I didn’t like the writing style, but she went with second person, which is extremely difficult to pull off. So, I held out hope that the other eight stories would be better.

They were not. I really didn’t like any of them. Out of the nine stories, seven of them introduce the theme of hating other women, namely in relation to how much the central woman of the story hates herself, within a page and a half. Out of those seven, six of them specifically reference weight, with the clear implication that a woman’s value is tied to how skinny she is, within a page and a half. These are two things that stuck out to me the most because they were a jumping off point in almost every story. The ones that did not include obvious examples of either of the above within the first page and a half squeezed in both by the end without fail. I didn’t go through and tally up mentions per story for the following, but this collection is also rife with ageism (a personal least favorite), slut shaming, racism, and suicide ideation (so much suicide ideation). On top of it all - not a single woman in any of the stories ever does anything - or even thinks anything - without it being directly related to her relationship or lack thereof with one man or another. I am a woman, and I know a lot of women, and I know no women like these women. It genuinely felt like they were written by a man who had never met a woman.

Two stories stood out above the rest as tolerable. They would have made for reasonable inclusions in a different collection of short stories where they were the duds and the other seven were stellar. They were stronger than the rest stylistically, in that Taddeo’s choices seemed less formulaic and predictable. I don’t read a ton of short stories, so I don’t have a huge body of work for comparison, but Taddeo’s style, trite across the board, held my attention slightly more successfully in these two stories. I still didn’t find the content of either one to be remotely compelling - in fact I remained repulsed. The main characters were unsurprisingly miserable people, spawning nothing but misery - both also totally at the power of man (in one case the idea of man and in the other the actual thing) in a way that remained unpleasant to read about. DO NOT buy this book, but if you already own it and want to get something for your money, the two stories to which I refer are “Grace Magorian” and “Maid Marian.”

And so, ending on that slightly more positive note, I will say no more. I must be on to better and brighter things that don’t feel like they are actively worsening my mental health, view of the world, self esteem, etc. I did fail to mention that I read this in an effort to read and review something more recent for you, my dear readers. I know, I know, the lengths I’m willing to go to for you are nothing short of spectacular. However, since this was such a horrible reading experience, I will now only be reading books in hardcover that a) I already own, or b) are explicitly recommended to me by someone I trust. Please do get in touch with your recommendations!