SEX AND RAGE

Lisa Taddeo is trying to convince herself that her latest haircut, a thick, textured Phoebe-Waller-Bridge-in- Fleabag crop, is not a mistake, though she probably would rather we don’t publish a Zoom grab of it on these pages. “I’m trying to become the haircut”, the acclaimed author tells me. “It’s kind of exhausting.”

Taddeo is chatting over Zoom from her home in Connecticut, where she and her family have been hibernating since before the global pandemic. The attention she’s receiving continues after the titanic success of her 2019 debut Three Women , an eight-year deep dive into the sexual and emotional lives of three women from different backgrounds that landed at number one on both the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Fans included Harry Styles, Gemma Chan and Gwyneth Paltrow, and the book is now slated for adaptation into a miniseries on Showtime, with Taddeo writing the screenplay.

Following its release, 41-year-old Taddeo started work on her debut novel (Bloomsbury), which she says derived out of ideas from her first book that she wanted to explore further. “There was aI was not able to include,” she says. “There was so much rage I saw that didn’t really have a receptacle.”