The Deep End

He never blocked her number. She blocked his. That is the first fact in the record, and the record is all he has.

In a converted cotton mill in New Orleans — two hundred and eighty-seven doors, a courtyard, a pool with a deep end — a man's three-year relationship ends by text at four minutes past one on a Saturday afternoon. The woman who ended it lives one floor up. She keeps the books for the building's Board. He is not going anywhere either.

What follows is eighteen months in which the building starts to answer back. A shelf at the gas station stocks his own losses at a dollar apiece. A film crew arrives in the lobby. A stranger knocks on doors at three in the morning. A library seems to speak to him in titles. A Board fines him two hundred and fifty dollars over a mouse trap, on the word of two men and no video. And through all of it, the woman one floor up walks her dog on a route that no longer crosses his — except when it does.

The Deep End is autofiction built like a case file. Every text, email, meeting minute and hearing transcript is laid on the table, dated to the minute, and where the record and the narrator's memory disagree, the book says so rather than choosing. Between the chapters sit thirteen invented rooms — a location scout, a Board meeting, a Russian relationship program, a reality-television run of show — in which he imagines the other side of his own story, and then admits, each time, exactly what he made up.

Is he being watched? Is he losing his mind? Or is he simply doing what she told him to do on her birthday, standing in the pool — write it all down? The book never decides. It ends where it began: in the water, at the wall, turning to go again.

A breakup memoir with the rigor of an investigation and the nerve to leave the question open.