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.”

Tree Abraham is a queer Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, book designer, and maker of things whose design articles have been published in The Author Journal, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Spine Magazine, and All Lit Up. She has a Bachelor of Social Sciences in International Development and Environmental Sustainability and a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design and Illustration. She is a cover designer for publishers across North America, serves as publisher and art director for Canthius, a feminist literary journal, and is an associate art director in-house at Grand Central Publishing. Her authorship experiments with fragmented essays and mixed media visuals. When not working, she can be found travelling to unmarked places, collecting people, and cycling to swimming spots.

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