Diksha Sundriyal
In Starz’s ‘Three Women,’ we meet a young writer named Gia Lombardi (Shailene Woodley), who goes on a cross-country trip to interview women while researching for her book. She is looking to write about the sex lives of American women and is advised by Gay Talese not to confine herself to the East Coast cities. This, along with a lot of other personal stuff that she has been processing, leads Gia to seek out women whose unique stories she can write about. This project becomes a life-changing event for her in ways she had never imagined. What makes her story even more impactful is that it is all very real.
Gia Lombardi is Based on a Celebrated Author
‘Three Women’ adapts Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 non-fiction book of the same name. The character of Gia in the show is closely based on Taddeo and her journey over the eight years she spent researching the book. While a few minor changes were made to the narrative, along with a few tweaks in the timeline to make the story of the source text more concise for the structure of television, the majority of the stuff shown is exactly how things happened. The writers for the series, overseen by Taddeo — who served as the executive producer, wanted to have Gia as the character that would connect the stories of the women who are at the forefront of the show. At first, they explored the idea of following a fictional character, but eventually, they decided to mirror Taddeo’s journey in Gia’s.
They didn’t want to add too much fiction in the story to “contrive” or “pollute” the narrative. Still, even with the focus on Taddeo’s real experience, the writers and the actress, Shailene Woodley, brought their version of the author to the story, with Woodley explaining that Gia is an intersection of both her and Taddeo. Apart from her research and her trip across America, the writers also kept Taddeo’s real background details in the show. For example, Gia mentions that her father died in a car accident, and her mother lost her battle with cancer a few years later. This is pulled right from Taddeo’s life. Her father, Peter, was an Italian-American doctor, while her mother, Pia, was a fruit stand cashier from Bologna. The latter passed away when Taddeo was 28, leaving the young woman feeling “completely alone.”
Another instance that the show takes from Taddeo’s life is her meeting with author Gay Talese, whom she approached before she started researching for her novel. When she expressed her desire to write a story about sex, Talese reportedly advised her to sleep with married men as a way to “stake her claim” on her story. He confessed that he had done the same thing while working on his own novel. There are several other interactions that Taddeo had, which are interspersed throughout the series to make things more realistic.
Lisa Taddeo Spent Eight Years on Three Women
When ‘Three Women’ was released in 2019, it became an instant success, but few know that Taddeo spent eight years chasing after the story. She revealed that she interviewed about 800 to 900 people (men and women) during this time period and initially ended up with a first draft of 700,000 words containing stories of 15 women. It was later decided in the editing process to reduce the number to three. Of the hundreds of people she talked to, three-quarters were women, which came as a surprise to Taddeo. She had believed that being a woman, she would be more interested in finding out a man’s perspective towards sex, falsely believing that she knew everything there was to know about the female experience.
Once Taddeo started talking to women from all kinds of places and backgrounds, she realized that their stories were much more interesting than she’d imagined, and what she thought she knew was barely a shred of the real scale of women’s experience. Considering that she wanted to talk about sex, it wasn’t easy to get people to open up with her. She revealed that she had started contacting lawyers, doctors, therapists, and even police officers to find out if they knew someone she could talk to about this subject. According to Taddeo’s account, she also posted flyers from churches and gas stations to universities and truck stops in the hopes of attracting the right crowd. It was through a doctor that she eventually found Lina Parish, and through a newspaper article, she found Maggie Wilken, who became two of the three leads of her book.
Taddeo spent years in Indiana shadowing Lina. She spent 18 months with the third lead of her book, Sloane. With Maggie, she spent 3-4 years to get a full perspective of her story. In between this, she also spent months talking to several other women who later dropped out of the story due to personal reasons. While this time period was exciting in terms of research, it also left Taddeo in a very tight spot financially. At the time, she had been working as a freelance magazine writer. She revealed that she was so broke during this time that she had to pawn jewelry to get some money to keep herself afloat. Later, she also sold her father’s Dodge Stratus and lived in an RV, trying to make ends meet. Eventually, her hard work proved fruitful when the book met with raging success.
Lisa Taddeo Has Written Several Award-Winning Stories
While Lisa Taddeo may be a celebrated author now, she had shown her mettle in writing at a young age. She was twelve years old when she won $1,000 at the National Library of Poetry competition. She had always had a love for reading and writing, encouraged by her parents, who shared her love for reading. Following her graduation from Rutgers University, she turned to magazine journalism. She had been working as an associate editor at Golf Magazine when she was approached to write what would become the Esquire article titled ‘The Last Days of Heath Ledger.’
Following the publication of ‘Three Women,’ which won the narrative non-fiction book of the year at the British Book Awards in 2020, Taddeo has published two other books. In 2021, her first fiction novel, ‘Animal’ was released and met with great success. In 2022, she published a short story collection titled ‘Ghost Lover.’ In between this, Taddeo also did an MFA in fiction as the Saul Bellow Fellow from Boston University. She has received the Pushcart Prize twice for her short stories, ‘42’ and ‘Suburban Weekend.’ She has also received the William Holodnok Fiction Prize and the Florence Engel Randall Award in fiction. Her work has been featured in The Best American Political Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, Esquire, the New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, Granta, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and the Sewanee Review.
Lisa Taddeo Enjoys an Illustrious Career and a Happy Marriage
Lisa Taddeo lives in Washington, Connecticut, with her husband, Jackson Waite. He is a screenwriter whom she met while researching ‘Three Women.’ She revealed that he quit his job and life in LA and moved with her to Indiana, where he briefly worked at K-Mart. He also worked as a writer on the TV adaptation of her book. The couple have a daughter named Fox, whom Taddeo calls a major motivation for her writing. They live in a colonial-style home, which they bought in 2020. Taddeo revealed that she is still in touch with the three women from ‘Three Women.’
She has been heavily involved in the creation of the show and kept the subjects of her story up to date about the developments of the project. The show was first picked up by Showtime but was later scrapped, which came as a huge disappointment to her. Eventually, Starz came to the rescue. In the meantime, she has been involved in developing other projects based on her work. Reportedly, her short story, ‘Lois & Varga,’ is in development at Amazon Prime with Rachel Brosnahan attached to star. Taddeo has also worked on the adaptation of a TV pilot based on ‘Ghost Lover,’ with Vanessa Kirby in talks to star. She has also been involved with a horror script with Lizzy Caplan attached, while her novel ‘Animal’ has been acquired by MGM and Plan B.
In 2023, Taddeo won the O Henry Prize for Short Fiction for her story, ‘Wisconsin.’ She is currently working on another non-fiction novel in which she intends to explore grief in a personal manner. The author has openly talked about her struggles with OCD, PTSD, hypochondria, anxiety, and fear of abandonment. She has thought about exploring all this trauma in her upcoming work but will not be keeping it limited to her own experience. She revealed that she has talked with a lot of strangers online about grief and trauma because she wants to present a wider set of experiences in her book, something she did very well in ‘Three Women.’
Read More: Three Women: Exploring All Filming Locations of the Starz Show
