There's Only Alice

There's Only Alice is a hypnotic descent into grief, obsession, and erotic memory-a literary novella told in seven haunted vignettes, each introduced by a poetic epigraph and steeped in the raw, disorienting aftermath of love lost.

The narrator-unnamed, unraveling-wanders through the wreckage of a relationship with a woman named Alice, whose absence is as visceral and overwhelming as her presence once was. Whether Alice has left, died, or disappeared into myth is never made clear. What is clear is that she left a shape behind. A shape that he now inhabits. A silence that now whispers back.

Through fractured, sensual prose, the narrator revisits fragments of their past: a hotel hallway where time folds in on itself; a mirror that no longer reflects but remembers; the scent of skin, the key to a locked door, the memory of thighs like scripture. Desire, memory, madness, and mourning swirl together until they are indistinguishable. What began as longing becomes ritual. What began as grief becomes theology.

Written in lyrical, fevered language and structured like a dream you can't wake from, There's Only Alice blurs the line between novella and prose poem, confession and hallucination. The book explores not just romantic loss, but the ritual architecture of obsession-how we try to reconstruct a lover in their absence, how memory distorts what it cannot release, and how the erotic and the spiritual can become indistinguishable in the ruins of longing.

For readers of Ana鮢 Nin, Marguerite Duras, Jeanette Winterson, and Roland Barthes, this is a novella that lives in the body as much as the mind. Each chapter serves as a candle lit in a darkened room-an act of remembrance, invocation, or exorcism. With its stripped-down structure and poetic density, There's Only Alice will appeal to those drawn to experimental fiction, hybrid literary forms, and meditations on love, identity, and the ecstatic ruin left in love's wake.

"She left, and the silence started whispering back."

In the end, it isn't about what happened between them. It's about what remains.