Unsung Love Song

by Laurence Dillon

Twenty-five years ago, Laurence Dillon received an unpleasant surprise – he was diagnosed with malignancy and had his testicles removed. Life wasn’t quite the same after. Unsung Love Song is his quest to understand the anguish of the emasculated a compilation of the fractured tales of lives lived and unlived by men in a similar situation. It is unlike anything you’ve ever read wistful memoir meets emotional an urban psychogeography field trip without a map that wanders through rarely visited neighbourhoods of eroticism, masculine identity, and darker aspects of the soul. It is a chaotic scrapbook containing a multitude of forgotten cuttings and seemingly banal souvenirs, carefully collected from many sources over the course of a life. The result is a very unique sort of ‘coming-out’. Unsung Love Song is a collection of curious exhibits in a secret gallery. Its reflections, revelations and remembrances have been laid out with great care and dignity for just one visitor – You. Twenty-five years ago, Laurence Dillon received an unpleasant surprise – he was diagnosed with malignancy and had his testicles removed. Life wasn’t quite the same after. Unsung Love Song is his quest to understand the anguish of the emasculated a compilation of the fractured tales of lives lived and unlived by men in a similar situation. It is unlike anything you’ve ever read wistful memoir meets emotional an urban psychogeography field trip without a map that wanders through rarely visited neighbourhoods of eroticism, masculine identity, and darker aspects of the soul. It is a chaotic scrapbook containing a multitude of forgotten cuttings and seemingly banal souvenirs, carefully collected from many sources over the course of a life. The result is a very unique sort of ‘coming-out’. Unsung Love Song is a collection of curious exhibits in a secret gallery. Its reflections, revelations and remembrances have been laid out with great care and dignity for just one visitor – You.

Paperback

Reviews

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dillon begins with the circumstance of his own surgical castration due to testicular cancer. In this hybrid memoir, he discusses loneliness, sadness, identity, and a sense of belonging, and he intersperses these with many anecdotes of historical eunuchs from around the world. The general impression given is that he feels some kind of kinship with eunuchs in history but there is a gap there — if only one of space and time — that can't quite be bridged and doesn't quite bring solace. What he is and isn't, and what he can and cannot be, is left undefined.

(The cover image is of an Ottoman eunuch, taken by Turkish photographer Pascal Sébah in the 1870s.)

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book of self-examination - at times poetic, sweet and brutal.

It’s kind of a memoir but more than that, made of fragments, stories and brief scenes, old histories and snapshots. The writing is simple and perfect, gently lyrical just where it needs to be. It’s about gender, sex, love, the city, shame, regret and happiness.