60 pages • 2 hours read
Rosie WalshThe Love of My Life
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Prologue and Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Leo & Emma”
Prologue Summary
Emma Bigelow is in Northumberland where she finds a dead crab. While taking pictures, she experiences dizziness from low blood pressure and passes out, finding blood on her hand when she wakes.
Chapter 1 Summary
Leo Philber, an obituary writer for a local paper, wakes to find his wife, Emma, checking the breathing of their three-year-old daughter, Ruby. He and Ruby go downstairs, amused by Emma’s singing to the dog, John Keats, an anxious rescue who requires music to keep him calm.
As they make breakfast, Emma discusses Leo’s obituaries with him, praising his skills as a writer while also criticizing him lovingly. At the same time, he asks about Facebook messages regarding a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) nature program she once hosted that recently ran again. Emma is an intertidal ecologist, studying “places and creatures that are submerged at high tide and exposed at low” (5). He knows she gets disturbing messages there, but she blows it off now, not anxious to discuss it.
Emma has recently been treated for cancer, and they will receive the result of her latest tests in a week. Despite the normal appearance of their morning, both are anxious about their future.
Chapter 2 Summary
Emma wakes up in the middle of the night alone. Leo, Emma, and Ruby live in a tiny house once owned by Gloria Bigelow, Emma’s maternal grandmother and a former Member of Parliament dating back to the 1950s. Gloria was a minor hoarder, and the house is still stuffed with many of her things.
While looking for Leo, Emma thinks about the past four years. She learned of her cancer while going through IVF to get pregnant with Ruby. The cancer was low-grade at the time and remained so until six months ago. The diagnosis causes her to reach out to an unknown man from her past, but she broke the connection when she learned she was pregnant. Emma finds Leo in his office, a remodeled garden shed in the yard, smoking a cigarette, not because he smokes, but because he promised to give up all his other vices should Emma continue to be sick, and it is all he could think to do to calm his nerves. Before dragging him to bed, she asks him not to pre-write her obituary. He agrees.
Chapter 3 Summary
Despite his promise, Leo has already pre-written Emma’s obituary. He works on it at night when she sleeps. He feels it is not a betrayal as she told him to do what he needs to get through the stress of her illness, and this is what he feels he needs.
Chapter 4 Summary
Leo is at the office when he learns Janice Rothschild, a well-known actress and wife of Jeremy Rothschild, is missing. His coworker, Sheila, is a friend of the Rothschilds. Leo begins writing an obituary for Janice to have on file should the worst happen. It is routine to pre-write obituaries for high-profile people to have them ready with just a few tweaks in the event of their death. Leo looks Janice up and finds photographs of her leaving a psychiatric hospital after the birth of her son almost 20 years before. Sheila hears from Jeremy and tells everyone that Janice walked away from rehearsals for a new show. Sheila then focuses on Leo and asks why Emma had been at the Waterloo train station a week ago. Leo explains she was going to Poole Harbour to see phytoplankton migrate to deep waters.
Chapter 5 Summary
At the doctor’s office, Leo catches Emma looking at coffins while he attempts to focus on an obituary for a former MP. Emma explains she does this because it never hurts to plan ahead. She also tells him she thinks she would like a wicker coffin.
Chapter 6 Summary
Emma wants to share her secrets with Leo, but she knows that his past experiences will cause him to react badly. However, they do receive good news from the doctor. Her “PET scan is clear” (37). They go to a pub to celebrate before picking up their daughter and spending the afternoon with her. They discuss taking a trip to Northumberland, a place Emma has visited often because she is searching for a living crab that matches a potential new species. Years ago, she found a carcass of the crab in question but was only able to photograph it. However, Leo knows this is also a place Emma often goes alone while having bouts of depression, a fact he respects. After Leo falls asleep later that night, Emma reads text messages from a man asking to see her. She agrees to meet him.
Chapter 7 Summary
Leo’s editor asks him to pre-write an obituary for Emma. Normally this would be reserved for celebrities, politicians, and other people of note. However, the editor, Kelvin, appears to have something of a crush on Emma. Not only this, but because Emma hosted the BBC wildlife series, she has developed a few fans for which a pre-written obituary might be warranted. Kelvin wants Leo to do it because he can make it more personal than the stock obituary Kelvin has already had written. As they talk, Leo reflects on how Emma was fired from the BBC program for reasons that were never revealed to them, and her agent, Mags Tenterden, fired her, ending the possibility of other such positions. Leo also remembers how when Emma suffered a miscarriage, she refused to share her thoughts and emotions with anyone, even John Keats.
Chapter 8 Summary
Leo begins working on Emma’s obituary while she’s out having dinner with her university friend, Jill. He realizes there are basic things he doesn’t know about Emma, such as exactly how her mother died. He decides to look in the folder where she keeps her personal papers. Normally, this folder is in a locked cabinet as Emma is intensely private and has never allowed him to look at the folder’s contents. However, the cabinet is unlocked on this occasion, but the folder is nearly empty although Leo knows it is normally quite full. He searches for the papers, assuming Emma moved them because she has hoarder tendencies like her grandmother. He finds them in a shopping bag in the dining room among her grandmother’s old papers.
Leo looks through Emma’s papers and is surprised to find a letter from one of her St. Andrew’s University professors that suggests she dropped out of school before graduation. Leo knows Emma graduated because there’s a picture of that day in their home. However, when he searches the internet, he realizes the color of her graduation gown does not match the St. Andrew’s colors on her degree. He also searches her laptop, checking the Facebook messages on the fan page for her BBC show. He finds several concerning messages that he deletes and blocks the users. He also discovers a message from someone named Robbie that matches a note he found in her papers.
Chapter 9 Summary
Emma does not have dinner with Jill but calls Jill to get her to lie to Leo. Emma has actually been meeting with a man who grilled her over whether or not she spoke to his wife. As Emma approaches her home on foot, she notices a man in a baseball cap standing out front. She becomes frightened but realizes the neighboring house is for sale and assumes the man was there for that. She also notices that the light is on in the dining room, and she worries but decides it has nothing to do with the papers she hid there. However, to be on the safe side, she decides to take them to her office the following day.
Chapter 10 Summary
Leo and Emma met at Gloria’s funeral 10 years ago. Leo was charged with writing the obituary and, after talking to Emma on the phone, decided to take her up on an invitation to attend the funeral. They spent the reception talking and took a nature walk together the next day. They began dating immediately, and Emma eventually moved her life to London to be with Leo. She was the one who proposed as well. On that first night, Emma told Leo she was complicated but never completed her thought. Now he wonders if he should have encouraged her to finish.
Part 1, Prologue and Chapters 1-10 Analysis
The novel is written in first person point of view, with each chapter written from either Leo’s or Emma’s perspective. The prologue is an exception, as it does not reveal who the narrator is, nor does it state which characters appear. This scene will be important later in the novel and plays a pivotal role in the story’s climax. It sets the tone of mystery and misdirection the author often uses to build tension in the plot. It also provides an excuse for Emma to visit the area of Northumberland because of its connection to the dead mystery crab found there, which has led Emma to search for the species.
How Leo interacts with his wife and daughter shows there is great love in their relationship. This is underscored in Chapter 10 when Leo reflects on how he and Emma met at the funeral of her grandmother, Gloria. This reflection is important on two counts: The first is that it establishes Gloria’s role as a woman MP in the 1950s, setting her up as a groundbreaking figure and a role model for Emma. Leo’s reflection also reveals an important plot point: Emma attempted to tell him something about herself on the first night they met but decided not to. At the time, Leo didn’t think much of her hesitation, but as he looks back, he realizes that moment held more significance than either of them knew, and he wishes he had pushed her to tell him more. At the novel’s end, the secret Emma wanted to reveal will be made clear; most of the story would not have taken place if the two had started their relationship with open honesty.
The normalcy of the scene described in Chapter 1 is undermined by the anxiety revealed in greater detail in Chapter 2. This couple struggles with the uncertainty of a cancer diagnosis. The possibility of Emma’s death is a fact they don’t discuss even though Leo’s career is centered on death, and death is a common focus of conversation between the two of them. In one scene, Leo writes an obituary for a woman who has gone missing. In another, he becomes outraged that his wife is picking out coffins for herself even as he reads through yet another obituary. Death is a fact in their lives, but it’s largely abstract until it becomes a possibility for Emma, when it becomes difficult to deal with.
Emma is a highly educated woman who works as an intertidal ecologist. Her work deals with unknowns, mirroring the uncertainties in Emma’s overall life. As the daughter of a military chaplain, Emma traveled frequently in her childhood and before Leo, she had no nuclear family to lean on. These realities create uncertainty and leave her feeling unrooted and unmoored, a fact shared with the creatures and habitats she studies. Her lingering uncertainty is reflected in her ritual of checking on Ruby’s breathing. At this point, it appears Emma is simply an overprotective mother. However, as the plot develops, it will be revealed that Emma’s compulsive need to check Ruby’s breathing has roots in a more sinister scenario.
Emma has developed a fan following because she once hosted a television program on marine ecology for the BBC. This brush with fame has led to her receiving dangerous messages on Facebook. The messages and the sight of a man wearing a baseball cap standing outside Emma’s home add to the novel’s tension. Many celebrities deal with stalkers who can sometimes be dangerous, foreshadowing a moment later in the story when it appears Emma has become a victim of a crazed fan. Emma brushes these messages off, and she also refuses to discuss them with Leo, showing that she is not afraid to keep secrets.
In exploring the theme of The Danger of Secrets in a Relationship, Walsh shows that Emma is not the only one keeping secrets in this marriage. Despite making a promise not to pre-write an obituary for Emma, Leo has been writing her obituary as an antidote to his overwhelming anxiety about her cancer treatments. Rather than telling her, he does this in secret. Leo justifies his actions by suggesting Emma gave him permission to use any coping mechanism, but the act of lying to her about it sets up a comparison between what Leo views as an acceptable lie and the outrage he feels when he learns about the long list of lies Emma has told him.
Emma has things that she keeps from Leo. She admits that she would like to tell Leo her secrets but cannot because of some unrevealed event in Leo’s past. At that same time, however, she arranges for her friend to conceal that Emma met with a mystery man and to provide an alibi, another lie added to what later is revealed as a long list of lies Emma has told Leo. This particular lie suggests that Emma might be having an affair, an idea that will occur to Leo as the lies and secrets are revealed later in the novel.
These chapters see Leo beginning to unravel Emma’s secrets. He discovers paperwork belonging to Emma that appears to show an inconsistency in her past: She told him she earned her undergraduate degree at St. Andrew’s University, but her graduation picture seems to imply she graduated elsewhere. These papers become a symbol of Emma’s lies and will play an important role in Leo’s discovery of the many secrets Emma keeps from him.
This opening section also reveals that Janice Rothschild, a well-known actress, has disappeared. While this seems like just a bit of background, her disappearance will become an important plot point as Emma’s connection to the missing woman is explored.
