She Loved Me Not

Shortly after leaving Canada for Brooklyn half a decade ago, Tree Abraham responded to a Craigslist ad for an opening in a four-bedroom apartment. A week after moving in, one roommate joined her for the first of many craft nights to come. The book designer recalls their early friendship with nostalgia and curiosity. Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, the two bonded while watching TV, sketching, folding laundry, and doing crossword puzzles. “We are floor people,” she writes of the shared habit that made them inseparable. “When the world is too much, we lie on floor.” Eight months into her lease, Abraham suddenly — like a “thunderclap” on her twenty-eighth birthday — felt her platonic feelings change. She endured the “bodily distress” of a crush for seven days. When she finally confessed, the feeling was not mutual.

“Telling you was the beginning of / an odyssey,” Abraham says in the opening pages of Elseship, an experimental memoir that...