When Lisa Taddeo began researching her first book, “Three Women,” which she conceived as an exploration of “human desire,” she expected to be “drawn to the stories of men.” But, as she travelled the country, talking to men about their sexual dilemmas and “yearnings,” she found herself unmoved. “The men’s stories began to bleed together,” she writes in the book’s prologue:

In some cases, there was prolonged courting; sometimes the courting was closer to grooming; but mostly, the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning. There was complexity and beauty and violence even, in the way the women experienced the same event. In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like.

As the book’s title suggests, Taddeo decided to abandon the men. As her invocation of the unique, gorgeous elusiveness of female sexuality suggests, she turned her attention to uncovering “vital truths about women and desire.” Desire, of course, is a popular subject for analysis, precisely because of its stubborn resistance to same. To say someone always gets what she wants is to detach her from human experience, as the ability to get what one wants is necessarily bound by geography, the law, the wills of other people, or banal technical difficulties. What appears to be a straightforward relationship—I want something that I can or cannot have—branches off into hypotheticals and counterfactuals, compromise and denial and acquiescence. Desire becomes tangled with everything else.

Taddeo’s approach to this problem is to attempt to reconcile desire’s theoretical directness with its twisted reality. In her prologue and epilogue, she explains her intentions using pointed anecdotes about her mother, a beautiful Italian woman who grew up very poor and whose occasional sexuality Taddeo always found incomprehensible: “a strength or a weakness, but never its own pounding heart.” Now, after her mother’s death, she admits she was wrong. Despite its expansive concerns, her book is framed as something of a personal corrective, meant to “register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn.” In the rest of the text, Taddeo seems to cut herself out, using a novelistic close third person to consolidate eight years of reporting into stories of three women’s formative sexual experiences, which are told in alternating chapters. “Others lack a distinct voice in this text because these stories belong to these women,” Taddeo writes. “It is these three specific women who are in charge of their narratives. There are many sides to all stories, but this is theirs.”

Taddeo’s assumption that readers cannot be trusted to understand this is, in part, a reaction to her subjects, for whom the pressures of (sexist) external judgment have profound impacts. All come from backgrounds that could be called conservative, or else provincial. The most affecting account belongs to Maggie, a young woman from North Dakota who had an affair with her English teacher at seventeen and decided to report it at twenty-three, after he was named the state’s teacher of the year; the case engendered the sort of betrayals and name-calling and legal verdict that one might expect. Then there’s Lina, an Indiana housewife in her thirties who married a no-nonsense provider who refuses to kiss her on the mouth. Their couples therapist sees nothing wrong with this. “Some people don’t like the feel of someone else’s tongue in their mouth,” the therapist tells a gobsmacked Lina, whose own needs don’t seem to merit compromise on her husband’s behalf. She asks for a separation and starts an affair with her jerkish high-school ex, and much of her narrative is ingeniously structured around women’s-group sessions with small-town ladies who crave her dishy insights but judge her choices. (The jerk is married.) The final account belongs to Sloane, a beautiful, sophisticated East Coast restaurateur in her forties who has sex with men and women her husband selects for her—sometimes in front of him and, at other times, while recording the interactions. A day of reckoning comes when the wife of one of these men confronts her. Their future run-ins at the farmers’ market are awkward.

Taddeo, who has contributed to New York and Esquire and also writes fiction, chose her subjects based on “the relatability of their stories, their intensity, and the way that the events, if they happened in the past, still sat on the woman’s chest.” She told Marie Claire that part of her sourcing involved putting up posters that read “Looking for stories of love and passion.” Yet her belief that the stories of three white women—two of whom are Catholic—might “stand for” American desire suggests a circumscribed view of both women and America, one that involves the strange stress on “relatability.” Left unexplained, the possible links between these women’s stories and those of other people would, as in a novel or a traditional piece of reported nonfiction, be self-evident. Experiences that feel unique and gorgeous are usually replicable in others; the dissonance between the feeling of them—an intimate, personal sensation—and the knowledge that they’re typical is why it can be embarrassing to, say, remember your first love. Why couldn’t you help yourself? Was it because you couldn’t, or because you just didn’t want to?

“Three Women” is a book for people who enjoy embarrassment by proxy, which Taddeo uses to emphasize just how “relatable” these stories are. In addition to comprehensive sex scenes, Taddeo favors the knowing presentation of details that are meant to resonate with a large number of people. Nods to Applebee’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, and Foxwoods will spark recognition for some readers, as will “Housing Works Bookstore Café” and “boutique markets selling hydroponic butter lettuce.” Sex being serious, humor is rare, though not entirely absent. “This kiss, with this man, is roving, and she feels the five hundred Home Depot trips,” Taddeo writes of Maggie’s first kiss with her English teacher, who’s cleverly evoked as a “man with a wallet.” “It’s not so much the trips to Home Depot as the silent pronouncement of the tongue—You see, I have been to Home Depot. I have selected the precise stones out there on the walkway. I have stripped a table, and stained it a slightly darker color.”

This is capable, playful portraiture, at ease with the comedy of desire even as its tragic outcome looms. But, elsewhere, Taddeo’s view of women as both impossibly complicated and fundamentally constrained leads her to ascribe nonsense and clichés to them. When the sixteen-year-old Maggie loses her virginity to a divorced “military man”—the experience that will later send her to her English teacher seeking advice—she is described as “laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city. When they leave, their residue remains, the discoloration on the wood where the sun came through every day for many days, until one day it didn’t.” It doesn’t make sense, but you get the gist: young women, their minds and their bodies, are lands to be colonized by men—and they are also homes in these lands, in possession of surfaces that can become weathered by men’s fickle affections. In the middle of Maggie’s story, Taddeo begins inserting compound nouns to describe emotional states: her teacher makes her cheeks “hot with loveflush,” the feeling of danger when something threatens their affair is “fearquick,” and the response her mother has when she misses her curfew is “angerlove.”