Llewellyn’s first fiction is about a coup de foudre involving a young editor and an older literary great, the search for the identity of an anonymous author, and a romance between another editor who is hunting for the aforementioned writer and a chef. So there is passion, romance, and a quest of some sort.

No one could accuse Llewellyn of not knowing about what she writes. She has worked for Random House. She was for several years the director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival before moving Stateside and, after being interviewed for the position, by Salman Rushdie no less, got a coveted job running the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. While she was there, she was named inaugural director of the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, and although she declined the position for personal reasons, she did eventually run the Wheeler, joining twelve years later in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Llewellyn left Melbourne in 2023 and has since returned to the United States, where she is executive director of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a non-profit organisation that offers ‘sanctuary to endangered writers and artists’ and that programs literary, arts, and humanities events ‘in a community setting to build social equity through cultural exchange’. Its co-founder, Nicholas Reese, was on stage in October 2022 when Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed in an assassination attempt, and sustained injuries attempting to protect his endangered friend.

Love Unedited begins with the reunion of Edna and her unnamed lover in Melbourne a decade after their passion has dwindled. Their relationship began when she was seconded from the editorial department of her multinational publisher to escort him on a publicity tour spruiking his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The lover is English, but after his wife and daughter died in a car crash, he abandoned the country for the United States. Edna’s feelings are sufficiently powerful to lead her to jettison her life in Australia and follow him: ‘She felt their first meeting like someone who’d wound down the window of a fast-moving car and stuck her head out, mouth open. He rushed at her, into her, filled her up completely.’

After about fifty pages, the point of view changes. It emerges that we are reading a novel within a novel. It is a manuscript that has been sent to Molly, a young New York-based Australian editor. When she breaks off from her own reading, we learn that not only does she not know the identity of the author, but that the famously disorganised agent who sent Molly the work a year earlier – editors can be so slow to read submissions – has died.

Like Edna, Molly has had an unsatisfactory love life, emerging bruised from a troublesome relationship with a science writer. Parallel to her investigations into the provenance of the manuscript, she falls for an Italian New York chef, who woos her through his kindness and talent in the kitchen.

In Diving into Glass, Llewellyn wrote about her adored father’s polio and paralysis, and how he inspired her with his brave commitment to living life to the full. He always insisted that he had taken a metaphorical bullet for the rest of the family, so the shock of her own diagnosis with multiple sclerosis years later was considerable; she had assumed she was indestructible.

In the same book, Llewellyn also wrote in breathless fashion of her passionate encounter with a visiting American novelist while she was running the Sydney Writers’ Festival that ended her marriage, and also, after she moved to the United States, of her deep friendship with Philip Roth.

If you have read Diving into Glass, there are moments and lines in Love Unedited that will undoubtedly ring a loud bell; indeed, some sentences and scenarios are almost identical. Perhaps it is no surprise that Llewellyn chooses as one of her epigraphs a line from Zadie Smith: ‘Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it.’

Lines she gives to her lover in the memoir are spoken by Edna’s writer in Love Unedited; descriptions of his country home where she visits regularly chime with those of Llewellyn’s own time spent at Roth’s home. When Edna is inflicted with MS, well, you know the rest. Smith’s veil is not that thick here. Llewellyn has written elsewhere of her relationship with her chef partner, Maurizio Esposito, and indeed the genesis of their relationship and other details also find their way into Love Unedited. Of course, you can choose to ignore the roman-à-clef elements in Llewellyn’s novel and simply relish its portrayal of love among the literary.

After all, as Fanny Trollope wrote: ‘I draw from life – but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognise a pig in a sausage.’

Yet in this tasty sausage some of the ingredients are distinctly recognisable.