Looking for Mr Wrong
GHOST LOVER, by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $34.99)
It’s no surprise that the nine stories of Ghost Lover, Lisa Taddeo’s first collection, are dark, explicit, searing investigations of women’s lives and sexuality. This was the subject matter of her non-fiction bestseller Three Women; her 2021 novel Animal was narrated by a woman driven by rage to vengeful violence.
Taddeo was a short-story writer – publishing in and before she was known for her “big” books, and the stories of are expert and engrossing. Her female protagonists live in either New York City or Los Angeles; most are single, held in low regard by sexual partners or employers, and roiling with anger, bitterness or grief. This is without the shoe worship, glib chatter or pink drinks. In their place are deceit and self-destruction, women who “are always trying to be a decade younger”, women who hide a small bald patch from a lover (“Hats, hairspray, even Chanel Giallo Napoli nail polish”), women determined to “lengthen and tone and achieve”, waiting for a man to tire of “the slew of whores who had followed” his divorce.
