elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham

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 compassionately recounts the year that followed a friendship confronted by unrequited love. Abraham details the beauty and mania of this experience, mapping thought pathways, confessing ugly truths, and treading the edges of eroding territory.

In these pages, Abraham interweaves personal entries and research with illustrations, photos, and diagrams, all organized within the eight ancient Greek categories of love. Written with reverence and searching honesty, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted archipelago of the heart. This 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.”

Praise for elseship

“elseship is a book that knows it cannot contain everything, yet contains more: a love letter to love in all its shapes, a thank you to the thankless kinds of love, a love story previously unwritten about. A generous exploration of how devastating and consuming love can be if untended, elseship is compassionate in its grief, while self-assured and loving of one’s own multitudes as well as those of others. elseship fashions a language for the inarticulable and shapes something new for we elses  to echolocate off of, pulling us in from the waiting room to a space where we not only make sense, but belong. More than anything, elseship is a gift.” —Nic Brewer, author of Suture

“elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught between 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