SHORT STORIES
Ghost Lover
Lisa Taddeo
Bloomsbury, $32.99

American writer Lisa Taddeo pulls off a literary trifecta with the release of Ghost Lover, a collection of nine short stories that shed a harsh light on the dark corners of women’s sexual and interior lives. It follows her 2019 non-fiction bestseller, Three Women, which made Taddeo hot property in the literary market and anointed her the voice of ordinary women’s travails in their sexual relationships.

Animal, her less critically successful 2021 debut novel, traversed the landscape of trauma and a victim-survivor’s acute response to sexual violence. All three of Taddeo’s books dissect women’s sexual choices, their struggle for bodily autonomy, and the erotic power-play between women and men.

In a cheeky reference to the Willie Nelson/ Julio Iglesias love dirge, Taddeo dedicates the collection to “all the girls who’ve loved before” but despite the universal declaration, her sights are set firmly on a specific demographic: white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Most of the stories anthologised here have seen the light of day previously in on-trend literary journals; two have won the Pushcart Prize, the US award for writing published in small, independent literary presses.

In Beautiful People, a props master has a one-night stand with a famous movie star who then swindles her for a valuable painting. In Grace Magorian, the story’s namesake develops an obsession with a man on a dating app who won’t respond to her messages, clinging to the “idea of not dying alone” while recollecting childhood sexual abuse. In Forty-Two – “Somehow it was better than 41, because 41 felt eggless” – a woman attends the wedding of the younger man she is desperate to seduce while his bride-to-be counts the years she has left to live should she follow her mother’s fate with breast cancer.

In the book’s title story, a woman becomes a tech-millionaire after inventing a dating app. In her attempts to win back the lover who spurned her, she yo-yo diets, reflecting, “All these years later, all these diets later, you are still mostly the same size. If only people knew how much work went into your weight … Your relationship with the fridge has given the cat an anxiety disorder.” She masturbates, and after orgasm contemplates suicide “in the boring, lonely way of unfulfilled, selfish women”.

Taddeo’s stories are loaded with the anxieties borne by women through the societal expectations of patriarchy-capitalism; they are commoditised and judged on their looks and age, not their humanity. She shows the ways in which women’s self-hatred and self-sabotage is often more damaging than the destruction dished out by the men they (try to) love.

Ghost Lover narrates a lifestyle of casual sex, toxic relationships, diets, Instagram filters, Facebook stalking, dating apps, and aspirational brands. Taddeo’s women aspire to having “a thigh gap through which you could see the whole world” and make out with each other for the titillation of men, “busy thinking about what it looked like, from the outside”.