A woman in her late thirties comes home to an empty flat. She locks the door, checks the windows, opens the wardrobes, kicks open each door before entering, and turns on every light. She leaves her bedroom door wide open and sets small obstacles along the hallway so that she will hear anyone coming. Then she sits up in bed with the lamp on and waits for five in the morning, because five is her rule, and nothing bad ever happens after five. She has done this for more than twenty years. She has also spent those same twenty years telling anyone who asks that she does not want a partner, does not believe in marriage, and is perfectly content by herself. Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern is sold as a romantic comedy about padlocks removed from a Dublin bridge, and it is one. It is also a sustained interrogation of the difference between choosing solitude and being unable to survive it.
The Woman Who Cannot Be Alone After Dark
Melody Yates is a successful dance DJ and half of a chart-topping podcast in which her job is to argue that love is overrated.
She is very good at the argument, and Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern lets her make it properly rather than setting her up as a fool waiting to be corrected. She points out that compromise means somebody always surrenders something. And she notes that she has never once regretted refusing to marry a man she genuinely loved. Her position is coherent.
It is also load-bearing in a way she has never examined. She organises her diary around her flatmate’s nights away. She keeps an ex-boyfriend in her life under the cover of a shared business. And she has a man she calls when she needs a body in the building. Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern is careful never to say the obvious thing out loud, which is why a group will enjoy saying it for themselves.
What Love Unlocked Says About Wanting to Be Alone
The novel’s sharpest move is to give the same speech to two women and let the reader decide which one means it.
Melody’s mother, Belinda, ends a twenty-three-year marriage in the opening weeks of the book. She tells her daughter that being alone is bliss, that love is a vortex where a woman loses herself, that she has rediscovered a third party in the marriage and that person is herself. It is a genuinely persuasive feminist argument, delivered by a woman who spent her youth as a rock band’s girlfriend and her middle age going wherever her husband wanted to go.
Then she tells Melody, kindly, to stop finding people to sit with her at night. Figure out how to be alone. It is the cruellest and most useful thing anyone says in the book, and reading groups will not agree on whether she was right to say it.
The Marriage That Ended Over a Jigsaw Puzzle
Nothing in Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern is more discussable than the reason Belinda gives.
Her husband Derek is seventy-five, kind, monumentally boring and utterly reliable. He does jigsaws. One particular puzzle, a dark Dutch painting, took over the kitchen table for months, and she could not have anyone over, and he would not move it. One day she threw the pieces across the room and told him to leave.
The novel understands perfectly well that this is not about a puzzle, and it also refuses to pretend the puzzle does not count. Elsewhere a couple splits over a dishwasher. Readers who have watched a long marriage end late will recognise the shape of it, and grey divorce is worth ten minutes of a group’s reading beforehand, because the book is far more interested in it than the marketing suggests.
A Symbol, and What People Hang On It
The padlocks give the discussion its spine.
Thousands of couples travelled to a footbridge in Kilmainham, clipped a piece of metal to a safety grid, threw the key into the river and went home believing something had been settled. When the locks come off, hundreds of them come apart within days. Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern leaves the mechanism gloriously unresolved, and that is the point.
Ask a group whether they believe a symbol can hold a relationship together, and you will get a polite consensus that of course it cannot. Ask them about their own wedding ring, or the photograph in the hall, or the anniversary they would be quietly devastated to have forgotten, and the consensus falls apart.
Where Love Unlocked Falls Short
Not everything works.
- The revenge subplot outstays its welcome. Frozen mice, ruined shirts and a mail-order prank run past the point of comedy.
- The middle repeats itself. Several chapters of meetings restate a theory the reader accepted long ago.
- One character exists to be glamorous and awful, and her eventual complexity arrives late and fast.
- The resolution is hurried. Months of careful damage are repaired in a handful of pages.
The prose is warm and the jokes land, and Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern never sneers at anybody in it, which is not nothing.
Questions Worth Bringing to Love Unlocked
Start with the mother. Ask the group whether Belinda was right to refuse her adult daughter a bed for the night. Then ask the version that hurts: whether any of them has ever said no to somebody who needed them, and whether it helped.
The second question in Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern is about the difference between independence and avoidance. Melody’s stated position and her nightly behaviour contradict each other completely. Ask each person to name one thing they say about themselves that their own diary would dispute. It takes a while, and then it gets very good.
Third, and best kept for last: the novel puts real letters from a condemned man to the woman he married hours before his execution beside a story about people who will not commit to a mortgage. Ask whether that comparison feels earned or unfair. Groups tend to split hard, and the argument is better than the question suggests.
Groups that finish this one should try Into the Storm, the Ahern novel whose folklore research first sent her looking at bridges. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman is the colder, stranger book about a woman walking out of her own life. Love Forms by Claire Adam suits a group that came for the mother and daughter rather than the romance. And Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid is the natural pairing for anyone taken with the idea that one small event decides everything.
Where It Leaves You
Late in the novel, Melody eats dinner in a camper van with the stepfather she spent her adolescence ignoring. The jigsaw is still there, spread across the only table, still unfinished. He cooks, he talks, and then he puts her plate down directly on top of the puzzle pieces as though they are not there at all.
That image is what Love Unlocked by Cecelia Ahern finally hands a reading group. One person in that marriage needed the table cleared before life could resume. The other simply set life down on top of the problem and carried on around it. Neither of them is wrong, and the book declines to award the point. What it suggests instead is that most relationships do not end over the thing people say they ended over, and that the small, stupid, unbearable object on the kitchen table is usually standing in for a much older question about whose comfort the room is arranged around.