The Mystery Guest (A True Story)

A “frank and wry, mad and graceful” true story about getting dumped, and getting over it. (Slate, Best Books of the Year)

When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn’t have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she’d vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he’d never met.

Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a poken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated—by mistake—in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the year’s best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a “sad, funny and vivid” memoir that “gives shape to the painful yet somehow hilarious disjunction that is the residue of a shattered love affair.” (—Erica Wagner, The New York Times Book Review).