Deep Salt Water is an intimate memoir about abortion, expressed through a layering of language and imagery of the ocean. The story gravitates around the reconnection and ongoing entanglements of a couple who'd had an abortion twenty years earlier. Interdisciplinary in nature and entre-genre in style, Deep Salt Water is organized as thirty-seven separate pieces, divided into three sections (or 'trimesters') that detail the couple's love affair and unwanted pregnancy; the abortion itself; their separation and tenuous reconnection; and the sorrowful, urgent attempt to come to terms with the abortion and its consequences.

Included in its pages are two innovative elements—a series of collages by visual artist Catherine Mellinger and a section entitled the 'Afterbirth,' which discusses environmental issues that informed Apostolides' writing and moves the book from a place of intense intimacy to an outward focus that engages with the broader world and our shared responsibility and hope.