Maggie is stuck because she can’t move on from an illicit affair six years earlier with her high-school teacher (The Magician’s Jason Ralph in form as a total creep). When he gets a Teacher of the Year award, Maggie decides to go to the authorities. Then there’s Sloane, whose husband likes to watch her having sex with other men, but men that he chooses.

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Each woman’s story unfurls across the series – Lina leaving her husband, Maggie facing her abuser and the judgment of her community and Sloane grappling, in her designer kitchen, with her own desires – and despite the reverberations of their different backgrounds (sexual coercion, abuse, disordered eating, among them), the common terrain here is women’s sexual desire, power and frustration, and the bravery they each exhibits in making changes for themselves.

This was never going to be an easy book to adapt, and it feels bloated at 10 episodes, but Maggie and Lina’s stories are compelling; Sloane and her husband (Blair Underwood) are the least relatable, a lot larger than life than they were portrayed in the book.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know to expect a lot of sex (some of Taddeo’s depictions of which veered into pulp romance prose), but you still may want to gird yourself for lengthy montages complete with graphic (presumably fake) erect penises. Thankfully the performances, particularly that of Gilpin, utterly convincing in her manic excitement as she finally experiences desire, make those scenes more palatable.