Read Bottom Up

This book is dedicated to your best friend,
who saw the whole thing happen.

We wrote this novel because we were sick of the scenarios: Boy likes girl; girl goes on comically disastrous date with boy. Girl likes boy; boy thinks she hates him, but it turns out this is her way of expressing affection and now they're married. Or girl likes boy; boy doesn't like girl; boy sees a shooting star or a taco and comes to the realization that he has been in love with girl this whole time. We were fine with the novels and the movies and the songs about these stories when we were younger, when we didn't realize how very distant they were from our own romantic realities. But these dating trajectories all have one thing in common: They're neat. Clean. Tidy. And therefore they bear little or no resemblance to our contemporary lives. Because sometimes, when a man and a woman like each other
very
much . . . they make an ill-defined mess.

Tell us if this scenario feels right: A great boy/girl enters your life. You both try to make it work but there's a presence of baggage or a discrepancy of feelings and by month five, you've driven each other crazy and yet, miraculously, you both keep this hope train rolling. The relationship lasts for another three months before slamming into a total communication breakdown and creates disproportionately large wreckage considering this person was
barely
your boyfriend/girlfriend. Sound familiar? It should. After all, you've already written it. It's in your inbox.

Somewhere deep in your Sent Items graveyard are the emails you wrote to your former flame along with the emails you wrote
about
those emails to
your best friend. It's all right there—a partial record of your relationship. But what if you could see the whole picture? Not just your side of it. After all, somewhere in the pixelated part of the world is your ex's inbox. Therein lies all sorts of analysis to which you were never privy. What if you could read the whole funny, tragic, wincing train wreck of it all, if you could finally open up your relationship like a dollhouse (or, say, a cadaver) and know the truth of what happened?

Read Bottom Up
makes this twisted fantasy a reality. This book is composed entirely of carefully time-stamped emails between our hero (Elliot), our heroine (Madeline), and their respective best friends (David and Emily). But format alone is not what makes this book a mirror of our lives. We also wrote it in real time—emailing from the perspective of two characters apiece—which means that, just as you wouldn't see your boyfriend or girlfriend's emails to his/her best friend, we, as authors, never saw each other's complaints or cries for advice. Nor did we see the well-meaning (but often biased) responses that came back. We're reading half of this book for the first time, same as you. We're seeing the parts of Madeline and Elliot's relationship that we were never meant to see.

And why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we write a half-blind which-way book of the modern heart? Science, friends. Science.

—Neel & Skye