Quick Take
- Narration: Candace Thaxton brings warmth and restraint to May’s memoir, her voice rising and softening with the emotional tide of Edie’s anxiety and Meredith’s parallel vulnerability, well-matched to the material.
- Themes: Pet adoption, trauma and attachment, unconditional love
- Mood: Tender, emotionally layered, quietly funny in places
- Verdict: A dog memoir that earns its emotional weight by being genuinely honest about the author’s own limitations, not just Edie’s.
I started listening to Loving Edie on a rainy afternoon, the kind of Sunday where you want something that feels like company. I’d already loved Meredith May’s The Honey Bus, that remarkable debut memoir about growing up with her beekeeper grandfather in Big Sur. So I came to this with expectations, and with the slight wariness that comes with knowing a writer’s best work first. What I found was something more stripped down and, in some ways, more honest.
This is a book about a golden retriever puppy named Edie, but it is also a book about what happens when the self you’ve built around not needing anyone gets quietly dismantled by a dog who needs everyone. May is direct about who she was before Edie arrived: someone shaped by an emotionally absent mother, who had learned to equate self-reliance with survival. She and her wife Jenn adopt Edie with open hearts, and Edie arrives with saucer brown eyes and buttery white fur, which May describes with the precision of someone who paid close, loving attention from the very first day.
When the Dog Cannot Be Fixed
The central tension of this memoir is not sentimental, it’s genuinely uncomfortable in the best possible way. Edie turns out to be an unusually anxious dog. She cowers, she panics at sounds, she makes ordinary life impossible in ways that push Meredith and Jenn to their limits. May does not soften this. She describes the helplessness of watching Edie suffer, the fear that they may have made a mistake, and the deeper, harder question she keeps circling: what does it mean to commit to something you cannot fix? What the synopsis calls treating Edie with CBD gummies and visiting a dog medium reads as comic on the surface, but May frames these episodes without mocking herself. She went to extreme lengths not out of absurdity but out of love that had no other outlets.
What the Author Is Actually Confessing
The memoir’s emotional core is not Edie’s anxiety, it is May’s own. One reviewer described this as a journey about a couple’s healing from their own trauma, and that reading is accurate. May traces her mother’s emotional unavailability with clear-eyed clarity, and gradually the reader sees that Edie’s fear response and Meredith’s instinct to fix-rather-than-sit-with-feelings are not so different. That parallel is never forced or over-explained. May lets it develop at the pace of lived experience rather than essay logic, which is the right call.
There is a third reviewer note worth addressing honestly: the observation that May chose to buy Edie from a breeder rather than adopt. May acknowledges this indirectly, and listeners who are animal welfare advocates may find it a point of friction. The book does not engage with the ethics of breeding directly. For some listeners, that absence will matter. For others, it will not. I mention it because the review record suggests it came up, and a fair review does not skip the parts that didn’t work for everyone.
Candace Thaxton and the Shape of Warmth
Candace Thaxton’s narration suits this memoir well. She does not perform emotion, she carries it. May’s prose is warm but not saccharine, and Thaxton mirrors that quality: present, unforced, with a voice that feels like someone who has also loved something complicated. She handles the gentler comedic passages, including the CBD gummies episode and the dog medium visit, with a light touch that keeps the humor from tipping into farce. At just over eight hours, the listen moves at a comfortable pace that rewards sustained attention rather than background listening.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Loving Edie will land best with readers who came to The Honey Bus and want to follow May into the next chapter of her emotional life, and with listeners who have experienced the particular helplessness of loving an anxious animal. It also speaks quietly to anyone who grew up in a household where love was inconsistent, and who has found themselves re-learning attachment in adulthood through unexpected means. If you are looking for a breezy pet memoir full of golden retriever charm, this is not quite that, though the charm is genuinely present. It asks more of you than that. Skip it if you are sensitive to content about a parent’s emotional neglect, or if adoption ethics in pet ownership are a dealbreaker for your listening experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have read The Honey Bus to appreciate Loving Edie?
No, though readers familiar with The Honey Bus will recognize May’s storytelling precision and the emotional landscape she draws from. Loving Edie stands fully on its own.
Is this a sad book? Does Edie’s story end well?
The book deals honestly with anxiety, fear, and uncertainty, but it is ultimately a story about love and self-discovery rather than loss. The tone is hopeful without being falsely tidy.
How does Candace Thaxton’s narration compare to May reading her own work?
May does not self-narrate here. Thaxton is a skilled professional whose warmth complements the memoir’s emotional register well. Listeners familiar with May’s voice from interviews may initially notice the difference, but Thaxton earns the material.
Is there content about animal suffering or veterinary distress that might be hard to listen to?
There is content about Edie’s anxiety and distress, including her extreme fear responses, which may be difficult for listeners with anxious pets of their own or those sensitive to animal suffering. It is not graphic, but it is emotionally present.
