- Performance: The memoirist did not read her own book, and the record pairs that hired credit with a supplemental PDF it never describes.
- What it covers: An anxious dog, inherited emotional absence, a queer marriage under strain, caretaking as repair
- Feel: Warm, anxious, frequently funny
- Our call: A dog memoir that turns out to be about being raised by someone unavailable, and better for it.
An anxious golden retriever puppy is the engine of this audiobook, and also its excuse. Meredith May, who wrote The Honey Bus, brings home a dog with saucer brown eyes and buttery white fur, and the dog turns out to be so frightened of the world that the slightest noise sets off a frenzy and the household cannot leave the house. Eight hours and seven minutes later, the book has said far less about dog training than about the woman doing the training.
Without Turning Confession Into Performance
An entry dated April 19, 2022, the day the audio edition appeared, gives it four stars and raises the objection that sits closest to the book's blind spot. The description says May and her wife adopt Edie. That reader says she impulsively buys the puppy from a breeder, and finds it hard to sit with when so many animals need homes, then adds a sharper point: May expected Edie to behave like the two golden retrievers she had before, which is not how dogs work. Both criticisms circle the same thing, an author whose care arrives well ahead of her curiosity.
Candace Thaxton reads it, which is worth noticing on a memoir this interior. May is working through a mother who was physically present and emotionally absent, a childhood spent learning to need nobody, and a marriage in which she has to learn to be needed; a hired voice has to deliver all of that in the first person without turning confession into performance. Sample a passage about the mother rather than one about the dog, because the dog material is the easy half and the childhood material is where the register gets decided.
CBD Gummies and a Visit to a Dog Medium
An August 2024 five-star names what the book is doing better than the jacket does: this is not only a dog learning to be courageous and teaching her humans how to help her be brave, it is a couple healing from their own trauma, told emotionally and compellingly. That double structure is the reason it works. Edie's fear is legible and specific, and it gives May a way to write about her own inherited fear without ever having to announce that she is doing it.
May can also write, which is not a given in this aisle. The description signals as much with saucer brown eyes and buttery white fur, and the book earns that level of attention: the puppy is observed rather than summarized, the fear is rendered as behavior instead of as a diagnosis, and the household's contraction happens gradually enough that you notice it the way the couple must have noticed it, one canceled plan at a time. Prose that patient is what separates this from the shelf of books it will be filed beside.
The specifics are memorable in a way generalized memoir never is. CBD gummies for a panicking dog. A visit to a dog medium. A household organized entirely around whether a noise outside will destroy the afternoon. Those details are funny and then, fairly quickly, not funny at all, and eight hours gives that turn enough room to happen at a believable pace rather than as a manufactured pivot.
A Supplemental PDF That Never Says What's Inside
The record advertises a supplemental enhancement PDF and never says a word about what is inside it. On a memoir that is a genuinely odd inclusion. Photographs would be the obvious guess given the subject, but the page offers no contents note, no page count, no description, and no indication of whether the file travels with every edition or only some. Anyone who cares about the extra material is being asked to buy it unseen.
Coming to This Cold Costs You Nothing
An October 2025 five-star assumes something the record does not require. It recommends the book to readers of The Honey Bus and tells anyone who has not read that one to go and read it first. The description names The Honey Bus only as the author's previous title, with no shared characters or continuing story indicated anywhere, so coming to Loving Edie cold costs you nothing at all. Enthusiasm has a way of turning into a prerequisite, and this is one of those cases.
Two smaller record problems are worth a glance. This page files the book under home and garden alongside biographies and memoirs, a category with no visible relationship to anything in it, which surfaces it for the wrong browsers and hides it from the right ones. And the copy promises a wild and emotional memoir, where the actual arc is domestic, indoors and small in scale, which sets an expectation the book never tries to meet.
Ordinary Domestic Life Rather Than a Subject
Dog people will find their own household in it, and a September 2024 five-star says so in the plainest possible terms: the story reads well, and it is the story of a golden retriever. For a large part of the audience that is the entire recommendation, and it is sufficient. Add to that anyone who has lived with an anxious animal, anyone drawn to memoirs about being raised by somebody unavailable, and readers looking for a queer marriage written as ordinary domestic life rather than as a subject under discussion.
It also works for listeners who are wary of memoir as a form. The dog supplies a plot, an antagonist that is not a person, and an ending that does not depend on the author arriving at an insight about herself. That structure keeps the self-examination honest, because it always has somewhere else to be, and it keeps eight hours moving at the pace of a story rather than at the pace of a reckoning.
A training manual is not what this is. Nobody should come here for behavioral protocols, since the interventions run from gummies to a medium and are reported as one desperate owner's improvisations rather than recommended to anybody. The same applies if you want a happy dog story with no shadow in it, because the book's central question is what happens if the dog cannot be fixed, and the answer is not withheld out of kindness. And listeners raw about a difficult mother should approach carefully, since that thread runs underneath everything and surfaces without warning.
