Love Quote by Rose Tremain

Tremain’s line makes finishing a book sound less like closing a file and more like leaving a room where something intimate just happened. It’s a bracing choice because “love affair” is deliberately excessive: it rejects the tidy, professional myth of the author as a calm craftsperson and replaces it with a private drama of attachment, obsession, and withdrawal. Work, in this framing, isn’t merely produced; it’s lived with, argued with, idealized, and sometimes forgiven.

The intent is to normalize the emotional hangover that follows completion. Anyone who’s written seriously knows the strange grief after the last sentence: the characters stop talking back, the world you’ve been carrying collapses into a fixed object, and the days suddenly go quiet. Calling it a love affair also sneaks in the element of secrecy and intensity. An affair isn’t stable domestic love; it’s high-stakes, time-bending, a relationship that can crowd out the rest of life. That subtext acknowledges what devotion to art often requires: a narrowing of attention so total it can feel slightly immoral, or at least socially inconvenient.

Contextually, Tremain is a working novelist from a generation trained to respect discipline, yet wary of romanticizing genius. This sentence threads the needle. It admits the sensual, irrational pull of creation while implying the necessary separation afterward. You don’t “finish” a love affair cleanly; you survive it, you learn from it, and you carry its traces into whatever you dare to begin next.