Closing the coveron the final page ofLisa Taddeo’s razor-sharpcollection of shortstories, Ghost Lover, I wasreminded of a line fromthe Joy Williams song,‘What a Good WomanDoes’: ‘Everyone’swounded, nobody’s won …’ It’s exactly how Ifeel about the women in these pages.

After the phenomenal global successof Three Women and her subsequentdebut novel, Animal, fans of Taddeo’sshould be well prepared for the forensicfocus she applies to exposing a woman’sability for scathing self-criticism andloathing. Taddeo has a ‘gift’ for holdinga mirror to the myriad ways women haveinternalised the millions of messages fedto us from birth, created by patriarchalcapitalism, designed to keep us in aconstant state of competition, self-doubtand the exhaustive, endless effort to strivefor physical perfection. What Ghost Loverreally does though is showcase the uglinessof the inner dialogue that has resulted inthese women, after years of being trappedin this cycle. They are all victims of theirown repressed desires, their thoughtspoisoned by rejection and their toxicrelationships with men.

In one of the short stories, Taddeowrites: ‘The famous actress wondered ifany woman had ever been happy for anyother woman in the history of the world.’Reading Ghost Lover, I wondered the exactsame thing. Of the nine stories collectedhere, all are a dark exploration of femalerelationships in various forms, warped andtwisted by the expectations of society andthe men around them.

In her song ‘Mad Woman’, Taylor Swiftsings ‘women like hunting witches too’.Taddeo has presented us with storiesthat propose exactly that. Men no longerneed to do the witch hunting; in the world view presented in Ghost Lover, womenare indeed capable of doing so all bythemselves. How then, do we change it?

Tye Cattanach is from Readings Kids