Ms. Taddeo Goes to Hollywood

A writer’s success today may be measured in film and television adaptations. Lisa Taddeo, whose book “Three Women” is now a Starz series, hates that.

Hollywood couldn’t resist Lisa Taddeo’s book “Three Women” when it was published in 2019.

Three women had revealed their traumas, desires and sexual histories to Ms. Taddeo, who had traversed the country for interviews over the course of eight years. It was like gonzo journalism, if the gonzo journalist had gone to therapy.

A bidding war for the best seller ensued. Showtime won. It wasn’t the highest offer, Ms. Taddeo said, but the synergy seemed promising; at the time, Showtime and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, shared a parent company, Paramount Global.

Three and a half years later, the network dropped a bomb. Amid its bumpy integration into the Paramount+ streaming platform, Showtime shelved the completed series, and canceled or offloaded a handful of others.

“I was told these are the breaks in Hollywood,” Ms. Taddeo wrote on Instagram in January 2023. “Three Women’s stories are another man’s tax deductions.”

It was a terrible time for Ms. Taddeo. Showtime’s announcement coincided with a miscarriage, Ms. Taddeo, 44, told me this summer, sitting at her long outdoor dining table in Washington, Conn. It was one of several pregnancies she had lost over the years.