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 2, Chapters 32-47Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Emily”
Chapter 32 Summary
Twenty years earlier, Emily and Jill meet a group of older men while drinking. Emily ends up taking a man home with her. Emily and this man have sex multiple times. In the morning, Jill informs her that the man is married. Jill insists on knowing if Emily was careful. She says they were, believing they used condoms, but she is unclear because she was intoxicated. A few months later, Emily realizes she hasn’t had a period in months.
Chapter 33 Summary
Emily takes a pregnancy test that is positive. Emily is 15 weeks along, which limits her options. She goes to a clinic to discuss termination but can’t go through with it. She and Jill look up Jeremy Rothschild because he is a public figure and easy to locate. They send him a letter, to which he immediately responds with a phone call.
Chapter 34 Summary
Emily’s mother died from a postpartum hemorrhage a few days after Emily’s birth, which sent her father into a depression from which he never recovered. Despite protests from Emily’s maternal grandmother, Gloria, he joined the military. Gloria worried that Emily’s father had not made arrangements for Emily should he be killed in a war zone. After his first deployment and the death of a young woman whom he held in his arms, Emily’s father began drinking heavily. He had the forethought to buy a home for himself and Emily that would later serve as rental income for Emily. However, he died of alcohol-related heart failure when Emily was a teen, leaving her alone with her elderly grandmother.
Chapter 35 Summary
Jeremy explains to Emily that his cousin, David, the father of her child, is married and uninterested in involving himself in her pregnancy. Jeremy is very kind and offers to support Emily financially. He also explains to her that he and his wife have struggled with infertility and have just begun the process of adoption. He wonders if Emily would be interested in giving him and Janice her baby. Jeremy gives Emily time to think it over.
Chapter 36 Summary
Emily worries that she is not equipped to give a baby a good life because she only has her elderly grandmother and her university friends for support. She also does not have a job and relies on the income from her rental property for support. Although her friends have worked out most issues for her, offering incredible support, she still worries. She also recalls reading in her father’s diary about a girl, Erica, whom her father attempted to help and his opinion that the child was miserable in its unfortunate circumstances. However, a phone call from Janice shows how compassionate and caring the couple is. Janice expresses her deep desire to be a parent and makes Emily see that the Rothschilds could give her child more than she ever could. Emily agrees to give her baby to the Rothschilds.
Chapter 37 Summary
Janice begins coming around to buy things for Emily while they go through the adoption process. Emily’s grandmother pressures her to keep the baby, promising support. During a visit to Northumberland with Janice, Emily recalls being on the beach with her father and how the beach is the setting of most of her good experiences with him. She imagines the Rothschilds bringing her child to the beach, a girl as she imagines it will be, and giving her little girl the life she deserves. As Emily and Janice stroll on the beach, they take refuge in a small stone sheep shed. Afterward, they find a crab carcass that Emily bends down to photograph, when she experiences some bleeding and fears she is miscarrying. She leaves Janice and takes herself to the hospital, spooked by Janice’s possessiveness over the baby.
Chapter 38 Summary
The midwife assures Emily the baby is fine, but the episode causes Emily to change her mind about the adoption. Emily confesses her fears to the midwife, who then takes the information to Emily’s grandmother. Emily’s grandmother ends the adoption proceedings and moves Emily into her home. Emily quits school and eagerly anticipates the birth of her daughter, only to admit that nothing goes as she had planned.
Chapter 39 Summary
After the birth of her child, Emily has postpartum psychosis, in which she has convinced herself her infant is a girl. During a home visit by the midwife, Emily continuously insists she gave birth to a girl. Emily confronts her grandmother when the elderly woman attempts to convince her the male child she is caring for is Emily’s son, Charlie. Instead, Emily believes someone has stolen her daughter and replaced her with a little boy. Emily’s grandmother and the midwife arrange for Emily to be hospitalized.
Chapter 40 Summary
Emily is treated in the hospital and cycles through delusions and mood changes. She is initially reluctant to be sedated, concerned for the welfare of the little boy someone replaced her daughter with. However, she becomes friendly with the other patients and begins to trust her therapist, slowly starting to come back to reality and accept Charlie as her own. After a few weeks, Janice asks to visit, and Emily allows it.
Chapter 41 Summary
From Janice’s diary: Janice visits Emily despite Jeremy telling her it is a bad idea. She walks down the hall and believes she hears someone playing peek-a-boo with a child. She is upset when she arrives because of a fight with Jeremy. Janice walks into Emily’s hospital room and sees her smothering Charlie with a pillow. She screams for help while taking on the guilt of the situation because she believes her visits have overstressed Emily.
Chapter 42 Summary
Janice alerts the hospital staff, who come and take Charlie away. Emily is confused and unsure of what is happening. When they ask if she tried to hurt Charlie, she remembers putting the pillow over his smiling face, so she convinces herself that Janice is right and that she was smothering her child. She insists she didn’t mean it. A nurse’s aide is assigned to watch over Emily and Charlie. Her meds are adjusted, and she begins to hate herself for her actions. She decides to ask Jeremy and Janice to adopt Charlie for his safety.
Chapter 43 Summary
From Janice’s diary: Charlie has arrived at the Rothschild home, but Janice is frightened Emily will change her mind. Janice has trouble sleeping because of her fear and guilt over Emily. Janice is also annoyed that a photographer took pictures of Janice and Jeremy leaving the hospital with the baby and is planning to publish them in a local paper. When the news comes out, the press surrounds Jeremy and Janice’s home, and the adoption agency expresses concerns about their ability to continue as Charlie’s parents but agrees to allow it with regular assessments.
Chapter 44 Summary
A year later, the adoption is final. Emily goes to the Rothschild home to try to catch a peek at her baby through the windows. She feels physical pain at the loss of her baby, and her therapist’s meditation techniques are not helping. Janice spots Emily and sends Jeremy after her. Jeremy is kind, assuring Emily that Charlie is safe and well. Jeremy understands Emily’s pain and worries about her. But he tells Emily that Janice will have her arrested if she sees her again.
Chapter 45 Summary
Four months later, Emily watches her baby in the park from a distance. He’s playing with a train. Charlie sees Emily and starts toward her. She tries to move out of his line of sight, but he continues to follow her. Before she can stop herself, she goes to him and hugs him, assuring him that she loves him. She slips away when she hears people calling out Charlie’s name. Emily knows she needs help.
Chapter 46 Summary
From the diary of Janice: Janice notes that Jeremy caught Emily as she left the park, and she is arrested. Janice is outraged and wants to get Emily out of their lives. She is equally outraged after Emily’s court date because her only punishment is a two-year restraining order. Janice goes to Emily and tells her she will make her pay for what she has done.
Chapter 47 Summary
Emily begins the Open University after her conviction. Emily went on to earn a master’s degree at Plymouth and got a research post there. Emily became Emma and returned to the light-hearted young woman she once was, even though she was never truly happy. Her grandmother dies some years later, and she meets Leo. She feels as though Leo gave her a second chance even though there had always been that space where Charlie belonged.
Part 2, Chapters 32-47 Analysis
Walsh reveals that Emma went by Emily while she was a student at St. Andrew’s University. She is a much different person during this time: a young girl who suffered a great loss when her mother died and her father drifted into alcohol addiction. Her experiences shaped her, particularly her dependence on her unreliable father whose military career and addiction created instability in her life. Emily never had roots or family and friends she could count on. This made her independent, but it also caused her to crave connection, which she finally found in her friends at university.
Learning of her pregnancy sends Emily into a tailspin, as it might with most girls of such a young age. Lacking roots and a stable home, Emily questions her ability to be a good mother, which primes her for the request by the Rothschilds to adopt her child. Her self-doubts are amplified by the memory of her father’s diary describing a 19-year-old mother struggling to provide a good home for her child. Emily has few good memories of her childhood, but the ones she does have lead her to believe the Rothschilds would be better equipped to offer those sorts of memories to her child. Emily’s father’s diary also continues the motif of diaries helping to connect parents and children.
The motif of adoption takes a starring role in these chapters. The novel portrays Janice sympathetically through her harsh struggle with infertility, paralleled earlier in the novel with Emma’s struggle to conceive her daughter Ruby. However, Emily concludes that Janice’s desire is too strong, and she struggles with the idea that Janice has already claimed Emma’s unborn child as her own as early as the 21st week of her pregnancy. While the idea is still new and unfamiliar to Emily, it is a finished thought for Janice, which spooks Emily. At the same time, a bleeding incident hinted at in the novel’s prologue sparks fear in Emily that she might lose her baby, which convinces her that she is attached to the child and would like the chance to raise it as her own.
Walsh does a good job comparing and contrasting Emma and Janice regarding motherhood. When Janice is struggling to get pregnant, Emily experiences an unwanted pregnancy. Where Emily struggles with the prospect of raising a child on her own, Janice is more than ready to take on the role of motherhood. Where Emily finds hope in her growing child, Janice’s hopes of becoming a mother are dashed. These women’s lives are somehow connected and appear to experience highs and lows opposite each other, a trend that continues as the novel progresses.
Emily experiences postpartum psychosis, a rare pregnancy complication, and slips away from reality for a time. While Emily’s condition is treated quickly, it leaves her in a vulnerable position that allows Janice to return and place herself in a position of authority: Janice is portrayed as the responsible, well person, and Emily is seen as a danger to her child, which Janice uses to her advantage. No one doubts Janice’s claims, not even Emily, even though she does not remember doing what Janice claims she has done. This once again pits Emily and Janice against each other and is the catalyst for Emily giving up her child.
The incident in which Emily is accused of smothering Charlie was foreshadowed whenever Emma would check on Ruby’s breathing. Leo sees this as a funny quirk, but it takes on a new meaning with the knowledge that Emily was once so confused that she might have attempted to harm her child. Emily doesn’t remember the incident; therefore, she finds herself frequently checking to ensure her daughter, Ruby, is breathing.
Emily cannot stop attempting to catch glimpses of Charlie, which explains the earlier revelation of her arrest for stalking. From Emily’s point of view, these innocent visits are not meant to harm. Through the diaries where Janice wrote about the constant fear Janice lives with regarding Emily, her waffling decisions, and her stalking behavior, Walsh gives two perspectives from each mother’s point of view. Once again, she compares and contrasts the two mothers, exploring the theme of motherhood and showing how each side of the situation impacts each woman.
Emily’s arrest changed her life, inspiring her to return to school and become Emma, leading her to become the woman readers have seen so far throughout the novel. The two versions—Emily and Emma—are a stark contrast, perhaps explaining Emma’s reluctance to tell Leo about her past. The adoption motif also harkens back to Leo discovering his adoption, explaining how Emma might think Leo would change his opinion of her if he learned she had given her son up for adoption. However, Walsh delves deeper into Leo’s character in these chapters in a way that suggests Leo might be more understanding than Emma suspects.
