Many readers will be familiar with the name and reputation of Love Unedited‘s author. Caro Llewellyn is well-known due to her roles in the publishing industry and as director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival and festivals in the northern hemisphere. She is a well-regarded author of non-fiction, most notably of the Stella Prize-shortlisted Diving into Glass, a memoir that touches on her personal experience of living with multiple sclerosis (MS).Â
Llewellyn has subtly integrated MS into her first novel, Love Unedited, through her protagonist. Edna is a respected editor who is introduced as an older woman at a bitter-sweet reunion with her former lover in an exclusive Melbourne restaurant. She tries to disguise her walking difficulties as a running injury.
However, the novel is structured to follow Edna mainly in the past, particularly during the peaks and troughs faced by a younger professional woman. She is portrayed as a determined person who works hard to achieve what she wants and, despite her childhood trauma, is usually successful.
In the major narrative set during Edna’s prime, she meets a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning British novelist, a writer equated with Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Siri Hustvedt and other A-list international authors. Edna doesn’t refer to him by name until late in the book, but thinks of him as ‘her writer’. The two protagonists are intelligent and sensitive but, as victims of tragedy, both conceal their vulnerability, grief and guilt.
Even though she uproots herself to follow him to New York City for their grand passionate love affair, the relationship is, in effect, one-sided because while Edna is obsessed with him, the writer keeps her at a distance, ostensibly in respect for his deceased wife and daughter. Their trysts are always hidden: fine dining in quiet restaurants and country stays but, like Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester, he is unavailable. He keeps withdrawing physically and emotionally.
Molly is the focus of the minor narrative. She also works in publishing and is reading a partial manuscript by an anonymous author whose heroine, Edna, shares Molly’s mother’s name. Molly follows the ‘Hansel and Gretel crumbs’ to piece together Edna’s story.
While Edna and Molly have unfulfilling affairs with writers and (in some of the funniest scenes) Edna with many others as well, they both have positive, joyful relationships with chefs who feed them with care and kindness. This is likely a loving homage to the author’s own chef partner.
Llewellyn’s insights into publishing are revealing. Invisible women toil behind the scenes to make men famous. Excessive amounts are spent on food, wine and other expenses to fete big-earning authors, while editors and others are refused pay rises and expected to work for the love of books and the industry. Publishing is categorised as a ‘feminised cultural industry’ and ‘so-called glamorous industry’ where women are expected to work harder for less under the threat of being replaced. These insights propel the workplace setting into a story of its own to heighten readers’ interest.
The physical locales of New York, Paris, Melbourne and Sydney as travel destinations and major publishing hubs enhance the rarefied literary atmosphere.
Llewellyn acknowledges Taylor Swift’s songs as the soundtrack to her writing of the novel. The author reveals that she has been influenced by Swift’s ‘truth’, anger and vulnerability. The novel’s resulting atmosphere and tone become that of an absorbing tale albeit one tinged with disappointment and regret.
What is Edna prepared to accept? Life with her writer is her ultimate goal and greatest challenge, but is a grand but part-time passion with someone who always leaves her languishing enough on which to centre her life? Between assignations, is their email correspondence enough to nurture and sustain her? The birds who mate for life that symbolise the writer’s former marriage stand in stark contrast to the dead bird on the pavement that becomes Edna’s catalyst for change.
Read: Theatre review: Djuna, Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre
While the writing and depths of ideas don’t aspire to the quality commensurate with a contemporary classic literary love affair and mystery such as A S Byatt’s masterful Possession or even Susie Dent’s recent debut novel Guilty by Definition, Love Unedited is a compelling, spicy tale that will hook readers with its bookish premise and promise.
Love Unedited, Caro LLewellyn
Publisher: Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia
ISBN: 9781761561740
Pages: 272pp
RRP: $34.99
Publication date: 25 February 2025
