Hollywood couldn’t resist Lisa Taddeo’s book “Three Women” when it was published in 2019.
Three women had revealed their traumas, desires and sexual histories to Ms. Taddeo, who had traversed the country for interviews over the course of eight years. It was like gonzo journalism, if the gonzo journalist had gone to therapy.
A bidding war for the best seller ensued. Showtime won. It wasn’t the highest offer, Ms. Taddeo said, but the synergy seemed promising; at the time, Showtime and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, shared a parent company, Paramount Global.
Three and a half years later, the network dropped a bomb. Amid its bumpy integration into the Paramount+ streaming platform, Showtime shelved the completed series, and canceled or offloaded a handful of others.
“I was told these are the breaks in Hollywood,” Ms. Taddeo wrote on Instagram in January 2023. “Three Women’s stories are another man’s tax deductions.”
It was a terrible time for Ms. Taddeo. Showtime’s announcement coincided with a miscarriage, Ms. Taddeo, 44, told me this summer, sitting at her long outdoor dining table in Washington, Conn. It was one of several pregnancies she had lost over the years.
The upside was that Starz quickly rescued “Three Women.” The series will finally premiere in the United States on Sept. 13. Unlike the book, the show focuses on four women, including the journalist Gia, a version of Ms. Taddeo played by the actor Shailene Woodley.
Ms. Taddeo knows she has been “lucky” — “in air quotes,” she clarified. She is a working writer who can reach new audiences and create new jobs, “and all of that is rewarding and cool,” she said. But, she added, “I’m also not happy.”
Lisa and Gia
In the Starz series, Gia is broke, having spent most of her six-figure book advance on fruitless reporting leads.
It’s an accurate portrayal of what Ms. Taddeo’s life was like at the time: Then a freelance magazine writer, Ms. Taddeo pawned jewelry and her father’s Dodge Stratus to keep going. Her husband, Jackson Waite, worked at Kmart. She briefly lived in an RV.
Today, the couple lives with their 9-year-old daughter, Fox, in a Connecticut colonial-style home, purchased for just under $2 million in 2020, with a front porch so idyllic that it inspired Kirsten Dunst to comment “Your house looks so cute!” on Instagram.
It is a picture of success. And pictures can be deceiving. To maintain that success is to exist at the whims of Hollywood. To work for free until a deal materializes. To rewrite and wait and wonder whether a project will see daylight. To watch it bounce around for years, like a plastic beach ball at a concert for millionaires.
“To me, at least, more things dissolve than materialize,” Ms. Taddeo said. “Every day I sit at my computer and I’m like, ‘Am I going to make more money today staring at a blank page, or am I going to make more money resubmitting all the insurance claims from my ACL surgery?’”
One Monday at the family’s home, which they are considering selling in order to downsize, Mr. Waite made us pastrami sandwiches. He recreated the recipe from a deli in Millburn, N.J., near Ms. Taddeo’s childhood home. Her parents both died when she was in her 20s — her father in a car accident and her mother from lung cancer.
Mr. Waite, his wife’s screenwriting collaborator and co-producer, supported the idea of introducing Gia to the “Three Women” series. It seemed the only authentic way to bridge the original three stand-alone story lines: Maggie in North Dakota, bringing sexual abuse allegations against her high school teacher; Lina in Indiana, miserable in her marriage and having an affair with an ex; Sloane, in Rhode Island, whose husband watches her have sex with other people.
The women in the book were all white and mostly straight. Critics took note. “These are the women who talked to me,” Ms. Taddeo has said. “It wasn’t for lack of trying.”
In the series, Sloane is Black, written by the playwrights Tori Sampson and Chisa Hutchinson — a composite character half-inspired by a bisexual woman from Dominica who dropped out of the book while Ms. Taddeo was reporting for it.
Ms. Woodley plays Gia with giant Carrie Bradshaw curls, ricocheting between snarling independence and throbbing sensitivity. While the performance is not an impersonation, it can be difficult to parse where Ms. Taddeo’s experiences end and Gia’s begin.
In the series’ opening scene, Gia visits the journalist Gay Talese, played by James Naughton. She’s looking for guidance from Mr. Talese, the author of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a seminal nonfiction book about sex. (Speaking of Hollywood, those film rights were acquired in 1979 for $2.5 million, a record-breaking deal; the film was never made.)
“Female writers generally don’t do the same sort of work I do,” Mr. Talese tells Gia, who takes some of his reporting advice, like driving across the country, but not all of it. He encourages her, with colorful language, to have sex with married men.
“Can you believe that actually happened?” Gia says in a voice-over, resentfully referring to Mr. Talese as her “idol.”
It did actually happen, according to Ms. Taddeo, who wrote the episode, though the entire scene is not verbatim. “This was the cellular buildup to the book,” she said. “It started in the townhouse of this man I deeply respected, who I still respect for his work.”
The real Mr. Talese begged to differ. When reached by email, he said he didn’t recall advising Ms. Taddeo to sleep with married men. He was “very saddened” by the “falsification” in the depiction I described to him — and he said he didn’t know he was represented in the show until he heard from me. “I did once suggest she link up with an escort service and describe her experiences,” wrote Mr. Talese, 92, who worked as a massage parlor manager while reporting his book.
“I feel used by Ms. Taddeo,” he added.
Ms. Taddeo, for her part, denied his denial. (And she had already been reporting on escort services.)
In another scene, Gia has sex with a celebrity — an Esquire cover star she had profiled. This also happened, Ms. Taddeo said. (If this disclosure seems shocking, consider Ms. Woodley’s description of Ms. Taddeo’s “heart-based” communication style: “There is a way that Lisa navigates this world that is very much on-her-sleeve, and it’s very pure, and it’s very honest, and there isn’t any sugarcoating.”)
These incidents, Ms. Taddeo explained, made her more intent on leaving New York City in 2012, when she embarked on a cross-country reporting road trip and never returned.
“As a female writer working in a man’s world, especially at that time, it felt like a fun house,” she said. “This is not real life, and I am not built for this type of not-real-life.”
It is the same way Hollywood makes her feel now.
‘How Does She Know Me?’
David Granger, a former editor of Esquire, has often told young journalists the story of how Ms. Taddeo began to write for him, he said.
She was an ambitious associate editor at Golf magazine. They had breakfast at a diner in Midtown Manhattan. Afterward, she sent Mr. Granger a novel in progress about a white-collar guy in his mid-40s.
“I read this huge chunk of it and I was like, ‘How does she know me?’” Mr. Granger said, adding an expletive. “She’s 20-something years old.”
In 2008, he asked Ms. Taddeo to report on Heath Ledger’s death. The first draft of the story didn’t work, and the magazine offered her a kill fee. Ms. Taddeo asked for 24 hours to fix it.
Having spent the night smoking and crying, Ms. Taddeo said, she returned with “The Last Days of Heath Ledger.” The story was based on her reporting, but because of the creative liberties Ms. Taddeo took — it was written from the perspective of Mr. Ledger — it was published as fiction.
From there, “she did a bunch of stories for us,” Mr. Granger said. “And almost every time, she pissed somebody off.”
Her approach can be unconventional. Journalistic distance doesn’t suit her process. Maggie Wilken, the only woman in “Three Women” to use her real name, described Ms. Taddeo as “family.” Ms. Taddeo moved with her husband and baby to North Dakota for the book — for Maggie, now a 33-year-old therapist in Fargo.
“I wondered, ‘At what point are we done talking?’” Ms. Wilken said of that time. “‘At what point does this relationship end?’ To find out that it never does, that was just really special.”
For her next nonfiction book, Ms. Taddeo said, she has exchanged thousands of messages about grief with strangers online.
“I feel the need to respond to almost everybody because I don’t know how not to do that when someone’s sad,” she said. “It has given me focus again.”
Ms. Taddeo has been open about living with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Also: fear of abandonment, heightened anxiety over her daughter’s emotional and physical safety, a disconnected feeling around gender (“I’ve never felt like a woman or a man,” she said), and shame about all of this.
And yet, her only mental health treatment at the moment is “talking to these women who are super depressed,” she said. “It makes me feel useful.”
When Ms. Taddeo is not at work on the grief book, she is adapting more projects.
She has written a television pilot, potentially starring Vanessa Kirby, based on “Ghost Lover,” her short story about a ghostwriting service for dating messages. She has written a horror script, potentially starring Lizzy Caplan, based on her experience connecting with her gynecologist on Ashley Madison, a dating app for cheating.
Her short story “Lois and Varga,” which was published by Granta in 2019 and centers on a yoga-teaching stripper, is in development with Rachel Brosnahan. Her novel “Animal,” was acquired by MGM and Plan B.
“I already told her I was throwing my hat in the ring for ‘Animal,’” said Emma Roberts, who also volunteered to read the audiobook. The novel opens with a woman watching her married boss-lover shoot himself.
Ms. Taddeo’s projects tend to attract actresses craving complex, thorny roles. By her estimation, this has been one key to her success in Hollywood: Her characters behave badly, and bad things happen to them, but Ms. Taddeo neither judges nor coddles them. They are not victims, she said — “we’re all victims,” even the worst of us.
The morning after I visited her in Connecticut, Ms. Taddeo planned to fly to Los Angeles for more project meetings, as well as some promotional work for “Three Women.”
“I get off the plane and I go straight to a lunch and then a Netflix meeting,” Ms. Taddeo said with some disdain. “This is not me. I’m, like, a writer.”
Her dream is to write short stories, exclusively, and to teach at the University of Bath. As a child obsessed with William Shakespeare, Britain’s Cotswolds region fascinated her. It is a goal she has repeated in many interviews.
“I’m just trying to do enough so I can make the dream sustainable,” she said.
She gestured at her big backyard. “This is Cotswolds-like, you know,” she said. The hills, the trees, the flowers. “I’ve never been.”
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