Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo
Ghost Lover (2022) by bestselling and award-winning author of Three Women (2019) and Animal (2021), Lisa Taddeo brings us another ferocious dose of female desire. This time it’s in the form of a collection of short stories, two of which earned Taddeo the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2019. The collection chronicles the lives of American women, young and old, successful and wanting: motherless, loveless and directionless.
From two best friends holidaying in Puerto Rico, famous tech entrepreneurs making life-changing decisions, middle aged women pining after younger heartthrobs, to Italian immigrants struggling with painful memories from their past – these nine stories are real and raw, with women who are in constant competition not just with each other, but time itself.
In ‘Forty-Two,’ Joan is forty-two and she’s waiting around for Jack, thirty-two, to leave his fiancée in favour of continuing their affair before the big day. Jumping between the past and the present, Joan’s obsession takes on a personality of its own, threatening to sabotage the wedding. What neither of them know is that the fiancée has her own secrets too.
“When someone hasn't changed a thing on Facebook in several weeks, then all of a sudden there is a new cover photo of a ring on a finger on a candlelit table, someone else might kill herself. That's something that Facebook can do.”
In ‘Beautiful People,’ Jane obsesses over a movie star that she works with. As their relationship advances and she finally has the chance to make all her dreams come true – to truly start living as she was meant to – she is faced with the impossible heartlessness of the world.
“Everyone died, Jane knew, but especially when you were too close to what nobody had promised you. Especially then.”
In ‘American Girl,’ three different women pine after the same beautiful politician. He’s poor but he’s charismatic, the people’s choice. Unbeknownst to the women, he has his own plans in place, indifferent to the weight of unrequited love weighing down on of the three.
“Men, after all, were easy to know after you fucked them. It was what they withheld when they weren't fucking you that made you think there was more.”
It’s hard to tell whether these women – Taddeo’s characters – are a product of their circumstances and a critique of modern sentiment in themselves, or a product of Taddeo’s own shortcomings and preconceptions. Ghost Lover certainly has themes that are woven through separate stories, lending a similar air to all of the characters. The most desirable women are often skinny and dark-haired, or otherwise voluptuous in all the right places. A resounding theme is conventional beauty, or rather the undoing of it. Whether it’s through age, childbirth, lack of exercise: these women are obsessed. More often than not, they are prisoners of their own minds. Taddeo paints a clear picture of how obsession about physical appearance creeps into the lives of all of her characters and poisons any chance of happiness.
“She wore short black exercise shorts. She looked good in them, especially from far away. Her knees were wrinkled, but her thighs were taut. Or her thighs were taut, but her knees were wrinkled. Daily happiness depended on how that sentence was ordered in her brain.”
Her characters never seem to be able to move past these conventions. In more than one story, there is an evident rivalry between two best friends – and in all of them, there is rivalry between women in general.
This quote puts it perfectly:
“The famous actress wondered if any woman had ever been happy for any other woman in the history of the world.”
In Ghost Lover, the answer is a resounding no. But while these tensions lend the characters complexity and an almost satiric edge, Ghost Lover lacks the baseline of female unity which elevates Taddeo’s non-fiction book, Three Women, so well. Whether this is intentional is hard to tell; rather, it seems like a minor theme amplified only by the stories’ close proximity to one another. As a result, I found the collection to be a fraction too negative, bitter and resentful, and myself frustrated at the women - whereas Three Women made me frustrated for the women. Taddeo herself acknowledges this hopelessness:
“That was the problem with unhappy women. They didn't just want the problem solved. They wanted everyone to die, including themselves.”
Regardless, Taddeo’s writing is fresh, biting, and often manic – it settles on a perfect middle-ground between the nuanced insight of Three Women and the feverish bizarreness of Animal. The result is prose that keeps pushing you on, so that even when you pity or disagree with the protagonists, you can’t help but turn page after page.
Ghost Lover examines the fractures in female happiness, jumping from extreme to extreme: from fame and glory to suicidal thoughts. In the end, these stories show us that no matter how beautiful you are or how much money you make, the intergenerational traumas passed down from parents to girls always grow into unattainable desires and profound despair. Ghost Lover isn’t a happy read – but through Taddeo’s arresting writing, it serves as a great reminder that happiness comes from within.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.