Book Review
Love Unedited
by Caro Llewellyn
Love Unedited is the story of a love affair haunted from the very beginning by guilt and by grief.
After a decade apart, Edna meets up with ‘the writer’ at the elegant Melbourne institution, The European restaurant. The writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning English author who lives in America, is five years older than Edna. He has returned to Australia on a book tour; he now looks older, tired and sad. Edna was 35 when she first met the writer. She worked in publishing when he toured Australia, and they began a secret intimate relationship. Edna was bereft when the writer left to continue his world tour. When the writer returned to America they shared daily personal emails; Edna pretended she was happy.
Both Edna and the writer share tragic events in the past that have shaped them: Edna’s parents both ‘left’ her; the writer’s wife and 5-year-old child were killed in a car accident many years before. Months after the book tour, Edna visits New York, spending fragments of time with the writer. There are no guidelines in their relationship; whenever they get close he pulls away, perhaps feeling he is cheating on the ghosts of his wife and child. Edna observes that he still wears his wedding ring.
Meanwhile Molly, a young Australian publisher living in New York, has come across a manuscript that feels familiar and she’s desperate to find the author and publish it.
Caro Llewellyn is from the world of publishing; she has directed the Sydney Writers’ Festival, written a memoir called Diving Into Glass, was the director of the PEN World Voices Festival, and CEO of The Wheeler Centre. She is now back in the United States working as the executive director of the City of Asylum. There are fascinating parallels between the lives of Edna and Caro Llewellyn.
Love Unedited questions the various power imbalances in relationships, while charming us with lush descriptions of New York, Paris and, of course, The (cosy) European in Spring Street, Melbourne.
