Book Club Meets: Rekindling intimacy in marriage, with Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees
4/30/202639 min
Adam and Jules have been married for 25 years and are stuck in a bit of a rut. Adam stumbles across some old mixtapes he and Jules made for each other when they were young and falling in love, and when they play them... they get to travel back in time to different moments in their relationship. Will remembering the passion they used to have get the future of their relationship back on track, or will it just spark absolute chaos?
You & Me, You & Me, You & Me was our Happy Place Book Club pick for April. In this chat with Fearne, authors Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees – themselves a married couple – explain why they wanted to explore rekindling intimacy in the empty nest phase, and reveal how they write together on a practical level.
What do you reckon, if you could go back in time to tweak some of the decisions you’d made – would you? Maybe it would make you even more grateful for the happiness you have now...
Thank you to Vintage Digital for the use of the You & Me and You & Me and You & Me audiobook, narrated by Rory Kinnear and Sally Phillips.
If you liked this episode of Happy Place, you might also like:
Book Club Meets: Maggie O’Farrell
Book Club Meets: Nussaibah Younis
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
Dum, dum, da-dum-dum. Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum Hello, hello, and welcome to The Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. An '81 hit, but recorded on here as the opening track because it was having a total revival in the Brighton sixth form indie discos in '89. Right away, I can feel the bass radiating out from the dusty old speakers and churning up this sad, dense emotion inside me- Today, You and Me, You and Me, You and Me by Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees ... leaving me feeling anxious and happy and nostalgic all at once, and suddenly so bloody young again it makes me wanna weep. Because we had it all back then, didn't we, Jules and me? We had everything ahead of us. We hadn't screwed anything up. It's like I can feel the music pumping right through me now, like it's somehow charging my very soul as tears of loss and something like homesickness stream down my cheeks. I can't stop looking at the tape's twin spindles as they keep on turning, staring back at me like a pair of hypnotic eyes, round and round, and round, and round, and round. Then I'm jolted by a thunderous crash, and a blinding flash of lightning obliterates the square of black night sky framed by the shed window, and I feel my whole universe shake. Next thing, what the hell? It's me turning round and round and round, faster and faster, like I'm gonna break, in a hideous whirlwind of colored lights and rushing wind, and all the while with Phil bloody Oakey singing, "Don't you want me?" over and