Tree Abraham: On Her Relationship to Language, Constructing a Literary Love Letter, and Her New Book ‘elseship: an unrequited affair’

I first read Tree Abraham’s writing in her book Cyclettes in 2022, but I’d encountered her work long before then—in the scores of gorgeous book covers she designs. (You’ve probably encountered it too, perhaps unknowingly!) In Cyclettes, she celebrates all kinds of spirals and loops and cycles in little vignettes, as well as through photographs, artwork, and collages. I turned each page to find a surprise—an unexpected map, a fun fact culled from a wide range of sources, a new way to look at the world.

In her new book, elseship: an unrequited affair (Soft Skull, 2025), Abraham brings this same sensibility to make sense of a traumatic, messy time in her life—the year in which she fell in love with her housemate, who did not reciprocate the feeling. Instead of going their separate ways, they remain friends, finding themselves in new, uncharted territory. Structured around eight Greek categories of love, Abraham explores the depth of her feeling in elseship. 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.

I was delighted to speak to Tree Abraham over a video call, about resisting labels (but also being a chronic cataloger), constructing an unconventional memoir, paying attention to the world around us, and more. 

Nirica Srinivasan: To start off—it’s evident from the title, but you’re writing about a relationship that is an “else,” outside of the norm. I was fascinated by how the physical object of the book itself mirrors that feeling—it’s not a conventional memoir or diary, or even a conventional love letter. What was it like to imagine the book itself as something out of the ordinary?

Tree Abraham: This was the first thing I’ve ever written—I wrote it before Cyclettes. I come from a background in design, so I’ve made a lot of books before that were driven by the visual inspiration, and then words came later. This was the first time it was the opposite. And it felt very instinctual to me. I have such a love for the nonverbal, I have a love for books, I have a love for ephemera. It felt natural sometimes, instead of describing those things, to just show them.

Every time I did a draft, I would lay it out as if it was going to be printed, and I’d make images for it. Across the drafts, there’s a lot of images that didn’t end up in the book, and I had to question, what is here just because I wanted to put in a visual, versus what is here doing work that the words cannot, and that more emphasizes the themes in the book?

It got to the point where I couldn’t really know what I was going to write until I knew what I wanted as an image, and vice versa. That opened up this flow of when I wanted there to be pauses or spaces—which I think helps people digest the book, because otherwise, reading in fragments you can kind of get lost.

NS: I feel like I’ve read a lot of unconventional books, it’s just that none of them is like each other. Which I think is really true of generally creative nonfiction as a genre! Were there any specific writers you looked towards for inspiration when you were writing elseship?

TA: I had only started reading these lyrical creative nonfiction works around the time that this experience happened to me, and it was through my “else” that I was exposed to some of these verse books. It was like I was ingesting them and then being shown a way to express these deep feelings at the right time. 

Those early books were definitely Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I also have been a longtime lover of Leanne Shapton, who’s an artist and works in books, and several of her books are really out of the box. In one, she tells the story of a relationship through an estate catalog—like they’re auctioning off all the items after the breakup. It felt like I was being given so much permission when I saw what she was able to do in an unconventional structure. With Maggie Nelson early on, I felt like I never had found a voice that thought through things in the same way that I did. 

NS: In the book, you talk about “else”-ness specifically in the context of queerness, living beyond rigid labels, and creating or finding a new way to live or to be. I’d love to hear more about how you were drawn to that.

TA: It’s hard for me to use labels other than for myself, because they do feel confusing to me, and I don’t want to be put into a box. But I think I’m definitely more on the ace spectrum, and that is the least represented sexuality, just by virtue of the fact that it leaves you more isolated than connected. It’s a smaller group. Because of that, it can be confusing to understand your place in the LGBTQIA+ community, because I don’t see myself there and I don’t necessarily always relate to that group, but that space is where the queering of relationships is happening. If I was more embedded in it then, and even now, I think I would’ve found a lot more support for what I was struggling with. Especially in New York, there are so many models for living here where people are in these communal spaces, they have multiple partners, they have friends without labels. They are supporting and having deeply intimate relationships with a whole cohort of people beyond a primary partner. And there’s permission to not have to go further than just loving people. 

Coming from my generation and how we were raised and the media we consumed, and then feeling attraction for someone who at the time felt a lot more rigid in their understanding of what boxes you should sit in, I felt like there was an added layer of struggle to make sense of what I was supposed to be feeling and where I was supposed to be directing my desires—just as a person with my sexuality, with my needs and my maybe lack of certain support networks. I tried to write about it without too much reference to the outside world, because as I was experiencing it, I wasn’t really that exposed to the outside world.

NS: Yeah, I totally see that. I can imagine New York must be really good for those models, but unless you're in very specific spaces, it’s so conventional, and there really isn’t anything other than exactly what you expect.

TA: It’s very oppressive. It could just be because I’m on the outside, being single for a really long time. Especially as you get older, you see how the world has been constructed to favor couples. And couples themselves get really exclusive to each other. It’s really penalizing, I think, to anyone who’s not in that.

If I were to choose a model that I think is better for our health, it would be something more commune-like, where you depended on a small group of people, almost equally. (Obviously you can’t make all your decisions as a group, because that’s very challenging.) But I feel like we’ve been talking about the value of friendship and community for a really long time—there’s these amazing think pieces going back more than a decade. I think there is definitely a disconnect in the majority from what I’m reading to what I’m still seeing happening. And that’s very frustrating, because you buy into this philosophy and you’re ready to embrace it and there’s so much mismatch with the people around you.

I think there’s hope for sure in the younger people, but it’s slow. The change is slow.

NS: elseship is a lopsided story, because we only know your perspective—and you remind us that we’re only seeing the “else” through your eyes. How did you find the balance in your writing between your own vulnerability and this absence of the other person’s perspective in the pages, especially when you’re being so intimate and open?

I’m asking this because I think I can be quite private, and I’ve been in situations where friends have written or made things where I’m like I think I might be that character. And I don’t know how to feel about it! 

TA: It’s not perfect! I know I have lots of friends who are like, if you even mention one fragment of me, you’re dead. And obviously the “else” is the most private person you could imagine. So I didn’t go into writing this to violate that privacy. I try to keep to my observations and not do too much psychoanalysis. Because ultimately at the end of the day, even though she’s private, what happened to me is my story now, that she has crossed into. In some ways, protecting her privacy would prevent me from being able to live out my story, and be able to heal from the very traumatic experience. So that balance feels impossible.

I think all I can say about it is I wrote only from a place of complete love and desire to protect her, and attempted to be as ethical as possible. Not that that always protects someone. But ultimately, I was trying to make art that has nothing to do with my personal life. I try to make the art and imagine that it’s going far away from me to strangers and that it won’t touch our lives. There is this wall.

I like to think I wrote about two people that no longer exist. By the time the book comes out, we’re not those people. So I’m writing about a history—all I can do is draw the line between who we are, living now, and what this archival record is.

But I am apologetic for anyone who’s not a writer and gets written about! Even though I know ultimately the books that I’ve most benefited from are nonfiction books that speak about people. So it’s this conundrum, because we have to keep doing it in some way, you know?

NS: There’s a playfulness through the book with language. At one point you say that the story “resisted arborescence... I’m not the tree I was when I began telling it.” And there’s another bit where you say “we two knowbodies,” which is so much fun. But then at other times, there are no words or metaphors for what you are trying to describe. I thought the play between that was so interesting. 

TA: The book is this tension between who I am as someone who wants to dissect and define and communicate and exploit language to its fullest dimension of humanity, and a person who is truly the opposite of that. To get more than a sentence out of her most of the time is impossible. And when you love someone, there is this natural way of comparing, and you hit up against all these parts of yourself that were neutral that now seem positive or negative compared to this other person. Especially when you’re trying to speak and someone’s trying to silence, you naturally are trying to question whether your relationship to language is the correct one or if it’s holding you back.

My writing very much is evidence of that. Because sometimes I’m really reserved and I’m pushing it away and trying to allow for the space, and then other times I just vomit out a paragraph of rambling thoughts. I aspire to be someone who allows things to be what they are without labels, but I’m always categorizing and labeling, and it is just the tension of my life. I think I love in book form how sometimes what I can do is change my reality. Because I can write all of it and then I can just delete some of it and then I can be the balanced thing that I am not in real life.

NS: elseship is a collection rather of so many different things—artworks, definitions, ideas, concepts, metaphors. What was it like to collect those and then to curate them and see what fits and what doesn’t? Was there anything that didn’t make it that you missed?

TA: It wasn’t like while I was living out this experience, I was gathering up trash—a lot of it was stuff that came to me incidentally. It probably would’ve been a lot easier if I was gathering things as I went, but that felt really icky, because that wasn’t the headspace I was in when I was initially writing the book. Many years later when we no longer lived together and I was editing this book, sure, it would’ve been ideal as an artist to have those resources. But at that point, it was a little bit more scant.

Ultimately the book reflects what a mess it was to write a first book—and to be in love, where you’re looking for metaphors and meaning in everything. Everything feels like evidence and you’re putting it all together to feel satisfied that the choices you’re making are the right ones. So there’s nothing I left out that I was precious about. If anything, it was more that I wish I had more ideas so I could have pared down, or felt like there were options for what to leave out.

What I had more of were the same ideas said in a different way. I feel like I was making notes for so many years and realizing that what I was saying was just different words for the same feeling. I had to keep coming back to myself and realizing, oh, I already knew this! I already drew this conclusion, and you’re just spiraling, and you forgot. If it were up to me, I would’ve given ten more examples for everything that I loved about her. And my editor was like, nobody wants to read that. Like, You don’t have to give a complete catalog of every single thing that’s ever happened to you.

NS: It’s fascinating, the idea that you were approaching the same ideas in different ways. Your book is structured into these eight kinds of love, and while reading I was struck by how there aren’t rigid boundaries to the experiences you put under each label. Which makes sense because these aspects of love are amorphous, and they’re all bleeding into each other. What was it like to structure elseship?

TA: It was really hard, because I don’t think structure is my strength. Since then, the manuscripts I’ve written, I actually don’t begin properly converting my notes into writings until I’ve decided on a structure that feels really logical. But with this book, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I’d been reading these fragmentary books that just seemed to be able to do whatever they wanted. Maybe they had a structure, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. So for the first however many drafts it was just fragments, and there were no sections at all—it flowed tangentially from one idea to the next.

There was an arc of growth that had to be more intentionally teased out, by holding back my conclusions. Because my conclusions were there! I’d have a thought and then I’d have this fairytale wrap-up of the thought. And in a book you have to see someone slowly arrive there, so that was hard to rework.

Initially, when I was forced to create a structure [around the eight types of Greek love], I’d have a type of Greek love and then there was this gap and then another Greek love, and the gap section represented a blurring of those two Greek loves. How they were falling out of the categories. And no one got that. They were confused! It was too much. They were like, you just have to force them into the categories. A lot of the editing of the book was having to surgically take things apart that were written together and then remaster them in a new place and new context, which is kind of painful.

And I did that physically. I cut out the whole book into strips and rearranged it on the floor, and I’d have these sessions once a year where I did that to try to get it to make sense. 

NS: I love that because I think it’s all leaning into the same overall idea, which is that they don’t fit neatly into labels! And the blurring together idea is evident even without the physical gap pages—it comes across in the writing.

TA: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe this is true for everyone, that they don’t have people in their life that they could clearly put into one category. But definitely when the intensity of affection is so much greater, it’s just going to spill out of everything.

NS: I have to ask about the cover! I really like your work as a cover designer in general, but also specifically love your use of physical objects, collages, and photographs. What was it like to make this cover for your own book?

TA: Because I’m a book designer, I was thinking about the cover before the book was done, as I was writing. Even if I didn’t think I was going to be making it into a book, I would always be thinking, what would I title this? What would the cover look like?

Similar to Cyclettes, I only had one idea in the end—or two ideas, because there’s also a Canadian version [from Book*hug Press]. Because I know so well both what everything in the book imagery-wise represents, and then my own personal taste for covers, all that stuff really backs you into a corner. So by the time I came to the cover, this was my idea and I just had to figure out how to execute it—working with the clay, finding objects to put in, all of that. There were a lot of technical challenges. But in the end, it made the rest really self-evident. And I’m so grateful that I didn’t spend months and months making this thing and then look at it and think, no, that can’t be a cover!

NS: What’s it like to think of the two covers differently? 

TA: I always would like to do a Canadian edition, because I’m Canadian and it’s a special market. The publisher, I’m sure, would be happy to just use the same cover as the American one. But for my own indulgence and love of book design, I want it to be different. The Canadian press is small and indie and definitely wants something weirder, which I’m always trying for in all markets anyway, so it’s not like I have to change my approach!

In this case, both are paperbacks. But if one was a hardcover and one was a paperback, I would think about them differently, or if one allowed more effects than the other. In this case, I knew that I would be able to get away with smaller type and fewer colors and that sort of thing with the Canadian cover than the American. But I do love both covers. And for both, they were made physically and I photographed them. 

NS: I love the idea of doing them physically and photographing it. That’s so exciting to me.

TA: I went to an art school that was very analog. It was supposed to be us learning about design, but they were very much pushing us to be weird artists and do things with old technologies. That was great for showing actually how many effects are better achieved in the physical than trying to digitally construct them.

NS: This is a bit more of a fun question! Something I loved in the book is the recommendation lists that you got people to do for you. If you had to recommend something to a stranger (or to me!) what would you put on your list? And you can pick whatever—movie, song, food, anything.

TA: I have to keep it to just what I’m into right now, I change my mind a lot!

My favorite movie last year was Perfect Days, the Japanese film. I think about that a lot, because I’m really interested in attention. A book that I loved that is maybe a good companion to elseship is called The Hearing Test [by Eliza Barry Callahan]. It’s autofiction. I love it. I went to the book launch, and it was interesting hearing her process, the way that she first documented in fragments things that were happening to her throughout the year, and then she went back through and wove a narrative into it. She’s a master.

I’m also obsessed with climate change and the environment. Rising by Elizabeth Rush, a collection of essays about the sea level rise in coastal areas in the US, was one that really stayed with me this year. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth; he’s the founder of the Dark Mountain project in the UK. Notes From An Apocalypse [by Mark O’Connell], a collection of essays where the author looks at how different people are preparing for the future apocalypse. Lisa Wells, a poet, wrote a collection of essays called Believers, and it’s similar in looking at different people doing things related to the environment, but she’s weaving in there a belief system about what it means to care and to be intimate with the world, and how that should change what you’re thinking every day.

I was reading the other day about the LA fires and some people are connecting it to climate change and some people aren’t, and it’s convenient not to connect the two things. But there was a writer, maybe in the Times, that was like, you need to be talking about climate change all the time, in every conversation. You should be bringing this up actively with people in your life. I’m of the belief that we need to be educating ourselves and preparing ourselves and not being in denial, because that will ultimately modify our behavior and help us wake up to the reality of a new future that we’re going to have.

NS: In elseship you mention something a friend said to you, about waking up and seeking one thing from the day as a way of moving closer to love. You write that your “thing” is wonder. I think that that is so evident in your work as a writer and as an artist. I was wondering if there is anything that you offer in the way of advice for how to keep that sense of wonder alive in our everyday.

TA: There’s a Life Kit podcast episode I recently listened to about how to cope with anxiety, but I thought a lot of their notes were actually helpful for everyday life because, well, we live in anxious times. And one of the things was about changing your depth of focus. I don’t think they said it like that, but oftentimes when you’re struggling, you get tunnel vision. Even physically—walking down the street, you’re in yourself and you’re hardly perceiving anything else around you. And if you just lift your gaze and start paying attention to the sounds, the sight, the smells, the observations of the bigger world, it calms you down. 

I also find that the noticing in your ordinary environment has a greater potential to evoke wonder than if you went and saw one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It’s so much more miraculous to have not moved, and the universe is revealed to you. I try to do that a lot when I catch myself feeling foggy-eyed. I just look around and try to look at something different for the first time. 

These days, for me, it’s just all about what we’re giving our attention to, and being intentional with that. That’s the best you can really do.

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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).
Author photograph by Mei Cheng Wang.