The Mystery Guest: A True Story

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 broken 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 “darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes” (O, the Oprah Magazine).

“Somewhere out in the woeful constellation of literary comparison, a lonely satellite drifts between remote stars—Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, The Stranger and When Harry Met Sally—beguilingly reflecting the distant light of each. Taped to the bottom of that satellite is this perfect little book, a message to extraterrestrial intelligence that says: We are human, heartbroken, grim, and funny in our despair, yet hopeful and miracle-prone, and some of us are French.”

—John Hodgman

“The year’s most charming oddity . . . Frank and wry, mad and graceful, Bouillier riffs on his convictions, delusions, and stray theories in [this] French pastry, performing a kind of slapstick philosophy that sheds some light on his soul.”

—Troy Patterson, Slate, Best Books of 2006

“[A] sad, funny and vivid new memoir . . . He is an artist of the memoir form . . . Its talky, run-on, breathless tone [is] confiding and endearing . . . As The Mystery Guest beautifully shows — the power [of] revelation lies entirely within ourselves . . . This memoir—which is shot through with references to the literature that Bouillier loves, to Ulysses and to Ulysses and to Virginia Woolf—gives shape to the question of ‘meaning,’ whether it’s illusory, whether that matters at all . . . It also gives shape to the painful yet somehow hilarious disjunction that is the residue of a shattered love affair . . . You never know, as they say, what’s waiting out there for you; but if you’re lucky, you might discover, at least, The Mystery Guest.”

—Erica Wagner, New York Times Book Review

“I woke up the other morning and started to read this marvelous book. I stayed in bed until I had read the last page. I could not for the life of me think of anything in the world I wanted to do but read this book. I am tempted to stay in bed until Grégoire Bouillier writes another one.”

—Daniel Handler

“[A] slim and lyrical memoir . . . What Bouillier makes of this simple setup is pure Gallic magic—a mix of hapless obsession, sophisticated abstraction, unearned righteousness and hyperarticulate self-doubt—as he tries to guess the woman’s motivations and get a hold of his own feelings. The book’s four short parts—phone call, preparation, party and aftermath—are small miracles of Montaigne-like self-exploration. Reading as Bouillier moves through the light and dark of love, through its forms of ‘maniacal sublimation’ and through its mystery, is arresting.” 

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A mesmerizing, lyrical memoir of loves lost and unexpectedly found . . . Existential angst has rarely been as humorous or as heartbreaking.” 

—Jake Lamar, People

“Proust in a bottle … Read it, then set it on your desk. Pick it up again. Be startled. By your own scaled-down reflection most of all.”

—Walter Kirn, GQ

“Darkly hilarious . . . an odyssey [that] wends its loopy way toward yes.”

—O, the Oprah Magazine

“A refreshingly odd voice . . . With its restless intelligence, The Mystery Guest manages to encompass all the thematic preoccupations of its touchstone, Mrs. Dalloway: time, fate, and the meaning of life. And unlike Ms. Woolf, Bouillier keeps us laughing . . . Bouillier’s prose . . . turns every interaction between the narrator and his fellow guests into a comic meditation on the impossibility of communication . . . And then suddenly, in a stunning reversal, Bouillier sets off the depth charges he’s quietly been planting throughout the book. In the end, we discover that The Mystery Guest isn’t a symphony of missed connections after all, but a kind of hymn to possibility . . . It leaves us moved, even as we shake our heads in disbelief . . . The Mystery Guest [leaves] the reader in a state of grateful intoxication.”

—Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions

“[A] perversely satisfying memoir . . . Anyone whose anxieties tend to buzz in the ear, creating a din that makes it impossible to act unself-consciously, will enjoy this slim volume. Mr. Bouillier is looking back and poking fun at himself, but the events are captured with a raw immediacy, making his parade of humiliations feel fresh and profound.” 

—Emily Bobrow, The New York Observer

“A skillful blurring of art and reality is achieved in French author Bouillier’s beguilingly spare ‘account’ of recovery from a romantic heartbreak . . . [Full of] self-aggrandizing, hilarious reflections on matters such as the ridiculous turtlenecks he has taken to wearing as a kind of Band-Aid . . . A treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.”

—Kirkus, Starred Review

“Pitch-perfect . . . one of the most detailed social train wrecks in contemporary letters.”

—Time Out NY

Grégoire Bouillier was born in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, and raised in Paris. A former editor of the magazine Science et Vie, he is the author of several memoirs including Report on Myself, which received the Prix de Flore, and Le Dossier M. 

A London native, Ben Truman lives in New York.

The Mystery Guest: A True Story • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341050

May 21, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 29

5" x 8.5" • 104 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341067