Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: German Larkin
Author Lisa Taddeo has a bittersweet relationship with Hollywood. Last year, amid a rebrand and an executive shakeup, Showtime decided to drop the adaptation of her best-selling nonfiction book, Three Women, after the series was filmed. It was devastating news to tell her sources, who had shared their complicated experiences of female desire with Taddeo over the course of eight years. “I was told these are the breaks in Hollywood,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “Three Women’s stories are another man’s tax deductions.” But Starz went on to pick up the series, and Three Women finally premiered on September 13.
The 44-year-old has spent the past few months on red carpets and doing press, but what she really wants is fewer meetings and more time to write. Since Three Women came out in 2019, Taddeo got an MFA in fiction and published a novel (Animal) and a short-story collection (Ghost Lovers), both of which deal with female trauma and sexuality. Now, Taddeo is working on a second nonfiction book about grief and adapting more of her work for TV and film. She lives in rural Connecticut with her husband and 9-year-old daughter. Here’s how she gets it done.
On her morning routine:
My anxiety wakes me up at 4 a.m. That’s my alarm clock. I am not doing morning yoga; I’m responding to emails. Around 6:30 a.m., my daughter wakes up. I get her ready for the day and drop her off at school. I’m not typically hungry in the morning. I’ll make an English muffin just to have something in my stomach. When I come back home I usually have press for the show and a couple of meetings a day. I try really hard, though it’s been close to impossible these past couple of years, to have writing time. My ideal situation would be an uninterrupted patch between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., but that’s rare. It’s painful not to have the time, because writing is a way that I make sense of my feelings.
On her organizational hacks:
I set a lot of alarms on my phone. One might say, “Write 500 words on this document.” I’ll set another to pick up my daughter and one to eat. I’m petrified of being late. I try to be specific and exacting with my tasks so that I can make as much room as possible for having time to sit and think. I also have a very maniacal to-do list on a giant artist’s sketchpad. It has different colors of Sharpies. Stuff with my daughter is purple, and for important meetings I use a thick Sharpie. I probably get 20 percent of the tasks done, and then I transfer the rest by hand over to the next day. The writing is calming. Being in a Google Calendar feels like work. The Sharpies and paper take me out of that mode.
On managing her mental health:
For the last two years I’ve had greater issues with my anxiety and depression. I think about people close to me dying or watching my child becoming an age where things got difficult for me. Up until now she’s been unencumbered, and she’ll now have a carousel of things to worry about. I’m having a hard time seeing the good and I’m mostly seeing the stuff that is frightening. There’s a latin term, “solvitur ambulando” — through walking you will heal — so I try to put my feet on the ground. Whenever I go away for a couple of days I love to use saunas and steam rooms. A few months ago, I traveled to Iceland in the midst of a hard period and did a cold plunge into the Atlantic ocean. I was terrified of doing it, but now I’m looking into getting an ice bucket of some sort for my house. Those types of therapies are hard to find in a rural area. My friends in cities are like, “I just did a sound bath!” But I can’t get to those kinds of places in 20 minutes.
On her favorite form of writing:
With the show coming out, everyone has said, “Is this your dream?” I feel beyond grateful for the way things have played out, but my dream was to teach at a local high school and write short stories. Growing up I didn’t read kids’ books. I was into gothic horror and read short stories almost exclusively until I was 12 or 13. I love the fully contained worlds. Since the sentences have to be super-economical, sometimes they have more truth than those in a fuller novel. But I couldn’t have made enough money like that to survive. I remember the first time my agent said one of my short stories was being published and then told me the payment was in the low hundreds. It was a story I spent a lot of time on. With a script, there’s a very different price tag.
On dealing with the success of Three Women:
It’s changed the fabric of my life. People probably think the success has given me more time to write. But in reality, I have more meetings and other aspects of my career I focus on to keep leaning into the dream of being a writer. I have much less concern, though, about whether anyone will read my next book. That is an amazing anxiety to have gone.
On working in Hollywood:
What’s really hard is the lack of control over one’s daily life. Publishing has its own pitfalls, but I still felt like I controlled my time even when subjects weren’t responding to me. With Hollywood, it’s like, “because of this streamer we need to do this by tomorrow.” Or if one actor is excited about something, you have to move fast. I rarely know what my month is going to look like. Working on my new book, which is about the grief of being alive and mental health in general, has helped me cope. I’ve been talking to people who are suffering in ways that are more existential than the artifice of Hollywood. One of my friends said, “Isn’t it hard to talk to people who feel very sad?” But it feels better for me. I’m closer to their liminal state and we’re having real conversations. With the Hollywood stuff, I just try to let it go.
On writing so openly about sexuality:
My parents died when I was young, so that helped. I grew up watching HBO and movies that were rated R. I took in things sooner than I think my brain was able to handle. When it comes to being explicit in my writing, I want to be very specific and honest about things to negate feelings of confusion and fear. When I started writing Three Women I didn’t have my daughter. Now I think, Am I telling too much? I’m very sensitive about her reading or hearing or watching stuff before she can understand or have enough comfort to ask us about it. But I wish I had known more about my parents and that I had been able to ask them questions. I want to give her everything about who I am; she can do with it what she wants. I knew there was going to be judgment, but it’s strange that talking about sex in an appropriate venue, like a book, can be criticized. To me, that’s a form of censorship, and precisely the reason we have problems around sex and feel unsafe in so many intimate situations.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
