Letting the dark in

Lisa Taddeo doesn’t shy from difficult subject matter, or controversy. Her 2008 story “The Last Days of Heath Ledger”, written in the first-person of Ledger’s ghost, was published by Esquire as “reported fiction” when Taddeo was still an associate editor at Golf magazine. Her bestselling non-fiction work, Three Women, did a similar deep dive into real lives. Her exploration of female sexual experience through real-life subjects was so detailed, vivid and intimate that the book drew comparisons with that most famous of “non-fiction novels”, In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.

Taddeo spent the best part of a decade travelling and interviewing for that book. Before it was finished, she had begun work on the novel that became . “I’d been writing fiction my whole