elseship: an unrequited affair

by Tree Abraham

Overview

“elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. It’s a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neatly contain them.” —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end. elseship deftly and courageously recounts the starts and stops of a transitioning relationship. Having recorded the experience in real time, Abraham combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love.

For readers of Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, and Carmen Maria Machado, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted territories of the heart. It is a deeply specific yet universal story of modern love that will accompany and enlighten anyone who’s been in any kind of complicated “ship".

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593767860
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	29 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

TREE ABRAHAM is an Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, art director, and book designer. Her authorship experiments with fragmented essay and mixed media visuals. She is also the author of the creative nonfiction book Cyclettes (2022).

Editorial Reviews

"What to do with the missives of a manic, brilliant woman who can’t turn off her emotions? . . . . Abraham invokes a magnificent range of literary, cultural and scientific references to provide ballast for her richly detailed awakening into a love that was no less real for not being returned . . . The mixed media of elseship is as formally inventive as In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Argonauts and Bluets by Maggie Nelson. A paean to voluptuous absence, elseship is a worthy contribution to the canon established by Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse . . . Baring a brain and heart whirring in tandem, elseship plumbs the interpersonal ambiguities of how love went awry and yet left a soul on fire, ever glowing.” —Kristen Millares Young, The Washington Post

"With equal weight given to the ephemera that constructs our lives, the ideas that help us find meaning, and her love for words, elseship paints a kaleidoscopic picture of what it means to be in love." —Nirica Srinivasan, Write or Die Magazine

"Abraham’s greatest strength is in relaying small moments to readers, aided by visuals such as drawings and old receipts that give these moments a sense of intimacy and tangibility . . . Memoir readers who enjoy nonlinear storytelling and books that test the limits of what makes a memoir will feel at home here, as will all readers interested in discussing the forms of love that exist outside of mainstream heteronormative culture." —Booklist

"elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. It's a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neatly contain them." —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

"Nothing triggers archival fervor quite like unrequited love. For those of us who have ever Googled 'what is love' late into the night, this book is ours. Tree Abraham has managed to do the impossible: transform the excesses of that delirious, excruciating fever state into a true work of art." —Anelise Chen, author of So Many Olympic Exertions

From the Publisher