The Catastrophic History Of You And Me

Brie Eagan's heart stops the instant her boyfriend Jacob says he doesn't love her — not metaphorically. She dies at sixteen and wakes up in the afterlife, rendered as the pizza parlor her family used to run. Her guide, an '80s-throwback charmer named Patrick, hands her the D&G Handbook (Dead and Gone) and walks her through the five stages of grief while she processes her own death from the outside.

From the afterlife, Brie can watch her family unravel and her best friend keep a secret that reframes her relationship with Jacob. Revisiting her own memories forces her to separate what she believed about her final months alive from what actually happened.

Jess Rothenberg's debut mixes dark comedy with genuine heartbreak, using its afterlife framing device to work through first heartbreak, grief, and the gap between how a relationship looked and what was really going on inside it.