Book Review - Ghost Lover
Lisa Taddeo is unafraid to write about women’s desperation, and it’s freeing. Her characters are desperate to be thinner, to be younger, to be loved, to be desired, and moreover, to be more desired than other women. They compete with themselves and each other, lie in wait for decades for crumbs of affection, and find tiny, obscure moments for self-destruction. Taddeo writes, to be blunt, like she doesn’t care what men will think. Like she doesn’t care that someone might leaf through and attempt to comfort themselves by thinking, See, women are their own worst enemies. There is no layer of pretence in her prose just in case of such a reader. It’s not for them.
Ghost Lover is Taddeo’s new collection of short stories, and features the signature searing style she has carved for herself in the explosive Three Women (2019) and Animal (2021). Perhaps one of the less emotionally impactful stories, the titular Ghost Lover follows the creator of an app in which experts compose perfect texts to client’s crushes on their behalf. Miserably sauntering around LA and receiving praise for the young couples she’s responsible for setting up, she plans a bombshell award acceptance speech in the hope of regaining the attention of her ex. The story is anchored more in interpersonal drama than futuristic fiction, and lays the groundwork for the moral murkiness that Taddeo often delves into.
A standout piece is Forty-Two, the first of two stories featured in this collection to win the Pushcart Prize. A 42 year old woman prepares to attend the wedding of a younger man she’s in love with, as she reflects on her own dwindling sexual capital compared to that of the bride. The story is a punchy take on ageing and female rivalry, where an unexpected shift of narrator brings to light parallel anxieties between two generations.
While Animal explored “the monstrosity of motherhood”, Ghost Lover often flips the perspective to that of a child missing parental attachment. Characters throughout the collection grieve the recent death of a parent, or anticipate the death of a parent, or wonder whether their dead parents are watching and judging the worst parts of them. This is deftly explored in the patient centrepiece Grace Magorian, in which a single woman finds her perfect suitor on an exclusive dating site and awaits his response in the home of her uber-wealthy employers, traipsing through memories of teenage trauma. The story is an exemplar of the short story as a vehicle for character study, as Taddeo builds a stunning, mournful complexity to Grace’s life within 25 pages.
The collection pulls together beautifully, bouncing between female protagonists in their 20s to 50s, circling around themes of grief, desire, female friendship and rivalry. Disparate narrators are strung together by motifs in Taddeo’s visceral world-building, using unexpected yet acute descriptions of food, place, and the human body. Like in her first two longform publications, Ghost Lover pulls you in with a marriage of craftsmanship and an uncanny talent for saying the unsayable.
Ghost Lover is available online and in stores now. For more info, click here.