One of the reasons I write a lot about looks and the way that women feel about the way they look is because it's what we all talk about. But all the books and stories that we read told us that beauty was a commodity. I came of age in the 80s when there wasn't social media. A lot of our gaze is still the male gaze. Something I said in Three Women is that heterosexual women look at each other the way that a man does. We're living under this patriarchal hangover right now. Is writing about the lengths women go to in order to manipulate their bodies intentional for you? Or rather, as a woman yourself, is writing about this catharsis?

Your characters’ desire for thinness seems to be tied to attracting men.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Įsquire: A theme of this collection is women trying to control their own bodies by manipulating them through starvation, over-exercise, dieting, and the like. Speaking by Zoom after a morning on set (the rights of both Animal and Three Women were acquired by MGM for adaptation), Taddeo spoke with Esquire to discuss Ghost Lover in depth. Ultimately, if you’re won over by gorgeous sentences and fiction so true to your experience it feels real, there’s something for you in Taddeo’s work-particularly this collection examining a breadth of characters, all connected by Taddeo’s talent for capturing the heterosexual female psyche at its best and its grueling, unspeakable worst.

The anthology includes previously published works like the dark, sexually charged friendship romp “Suburban Weekend,” as well as a meditation on aging and women’s social capital, “Forty Two.” You’ll also find exciting new stories like the titular work, “Ghost Lover,” which employs a striking second-person framework to narrate the thoughts of a woman who creates a dating app where hot girls craft indifferent messages to men on your behalf. And for fans hungry for more from the author, there’s news: a collection of Taddeo’s selected short stories, Ghost Lover, has just landed. Taddeo’s prose speaks to the seedy core of us, capturing the experience of being a woman in a world that hates women, but simultaneously loves to fuck them, both literally and in the abstract.

Animal lisa taddeo plot