My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor

As a twenty-eight-year-old who grew up juggling late-night fast-food runs, endless indie bands, and an unhealthy fascination with the absurd, I felt immediately pulled into the cracked surrealism of My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor. The book is as much a novel as it is an extended fever dream, a wandering through heartbreak, depression, and self-sabotage, punctuated with fast-food grease stains and the ever-looming presence of “sad-looking blue whales.”

At its core, the novel follows Daniel, thirty-one and hollowed by loss, as he drifts through grief and disconnection. We meet him adrift on a bright-orange boat with a six-foot blue whale in a fanny pack; a whale who just finished watching Titanic and admits he’s writing a novel “about nothing, really… the frailty of life.”

This is the texture of the book: absurdist dialogue that plays like stand-up comedy whispered from the abyss. Daniel, too, is a writer, or at least he once was, clinging to the memory of his eleven-year-old opus, Passing Gas, “about a fart contemplating its brief mortality… over eight hundred pages long.”

The humor is dark, juvenile, and weirdly profound, all at once.

What drives the narrative is Daniel’s fractured relationship with Laura, a woman whose chaotic magnetism gives the book its only warmth. Their moments swing from deeply intimate, like creating a tongue-in-cheek contract permitting Daniel to “punch [her] square in the tit” if she smokes again, to raw confessions about her manic episodes, where she once ran through the streets wearing every item in her closet. Laura is both salvation and trigger, grounding Daniel while reminding him how broken he feels.

The “sad-looking blue whales” that follow Daniel everywhere operate as both absurd comic relief and metaphor for depression. They stalk him through his house, ride shotgun in his car, and cry out in haunting refrains: “Oooooh, ooooh, ooh!” Daniel translates this into “I’m alone! I’m alone! I’m alone!”

The whales embody the relentless weight of sadness, a constant presence Daniel cannot shake, even in his most mundane moments. McDonald’s becomes his only sanctuary. It’s the one place where whales do not follow, and where he can attempt, however futilely, to write.

Stylistically, the author blends the grotesque and the poetic in a way that feels equal parts Bukowski and Vonnegut filtered through late-capitalist despair. The prose can be jarring; one moment you’re immersed in surreal imagery like “Kate Winslet’s breasts on VHS… Laura’s breasts on VHS… like two flaming zeppelins slowly going down, screaming, milky and beautiful,” and the next you’re hit with gut-punch sincerity about loneliness and failure. It’s uncomfortable, funny, and devastating all at once.

I found myself relating to Daniel’s paralysis, his inability to finish projects, his shame over dead-end jobs, his sense that adulthood is just moving heavy sadness from one room to another. Yet there’s a kind of bleak comfort in the author’s willingness to stare unblinking into that void. The novel doesn’t sugarcoat depression; it marinates in it, folds it into humor, and spits it back out as something both grotesque and strangely beautiful.

This isn’t a book for everyone; it’s messy, self-indulgent, and sometimes offensive in its imagery. But for readers who’ve felt the absurdity of depression, who’ve found themselves writing in the corner booth of a McDonald’s just to keep the darkness at bay, it hits close to home. This is not just a novel, but an experience: a greasy, surreal descent into the sad hilarity of being alive.