We expect stories of first kisses to be singular and unforgettable because that’s what movies and books taught us to expect. “Three Women” author Lisa Taddeo points to two incidents: “Because I don't know, my memory is so spotty,” she said.

Taddeo told me that her first may have been in Italy when she was around 12. That was the one she doesn’t remember in much detail other than it was with a beautiful, kind, red-haired young man named Massimiliano in a hay field in her mother's hometown. "And it was light and nothing, no tongue, and it was beautiful, it was 'The Princess Bride,'" she said, adding that it feels like such a figment that Taddeo doesn’t even remember how it happened.

The second one, the kiss Taddeo calls the real one, closes memory’s distance with sharper edges, and there was no hero whispering, “As you wish.” She was 16 or 17, and she’d just dyed her hair for the first time and went to a party where a guy just started kissing her. “I didn't want that kiss, but I was also like, 'Oh, at least now this will be my first real kiss,' so it was confusing.”

“I have this beautiful memory that was weighed down by this gross memory,” she concluded, “and I feel like that's a very, very female response.”

I don’t typically ask personal questions of those I interview, but the 10-episode series adaptation of Taddeo’s 2019 book contains so many scenes that are staged and framed from a place of profound knowing. (Taddeo wrote or co-wrote five of its episodes.)

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The one inspiring my question is a character’s flashback to her first kiss outside a movie theater. Every detail is cut crystal – the titles on the marquee, the amber cast from the crowd of small lights. When the kiss happens, the boy spins the girl; the bright globes blur into honeyed sparkles. An exiting crowd filters around the pair, but for them, time has stopped.

It’s a........

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