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Irish Times
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey: Two sides of the same story
The Möbius Book Author : Catherine Lacey ISBN-13 : 978-1803511474 Publisher : Granta Guideline Price : £16.99 Catherine Lacey's latest publication is her most personal to date. Part fiction, part non-fiction, The Möbius Book follows the experience, innermost reflections and philosophical questioning of a woman who has just experienced a cruel and traumatic relationship break-up. Lacey and her publishers present two versions of this experience. A Möbius strip is a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. This book plays with that concept: two versions of the same story presented head-to-tail and upside down – you read one short book and then flip the book upside down and turn it back-to-front to read the other. The writer seems to be suggesting that her actual biographical break-up told in the longer non-fiction book and her fictionalised trauma in the creative version, are basically one and the same story. Where does real life stop and art begin? Ultimately, the writer seems to imply, it's all a loop, all an attempt to process life and suffering. READ MORE The fiction opens with a truncated phone call, a one-sided, broken communication. Edie is coming over and it's urgent, she tells her ex-sister-in-law. Marie had betrayed Edie's sister for an intense psychoerotic and sexual adventure with another woman. Her infidelity discovered, she has been ejected from the family home. Six months later, she is holed up in a grim suburban apartment. There is blood seeping out the door of the apartment next door, but Marie fails to report it to the authorities. This apparent lack of a moral compass is simply left for the reader to make of what they will. Edie, too, is going through an intense and unexpected break-up. She reflects on her religious Methodist background, her putative college relationships and on the time she spoke to a dying dog in Greece who offered her the almost gnomic spiritual guidance: 'Men were created to destroy everything, and women were created so that there would be only one thing they couldn't destroy'. Essentially, the writer suggests, both women must get on with their lives as best they can. The non-fiction half of The Möbius Book opens with a description of the final days of the author's cohabitation with her partner, who is referred to as 'The Reason'. 'The Reason', a coercive man she met at a conference, persuaded her to leave her husband. Six years later he broke up with her by emailing from the room next door. Constant self-questioning and re-examining of past behaviours by the narrative voice could quickly become tedious. A wide cast of friends and friends of friends bring distraction, shelter, advice and physical comfort. New insights from these characters keep the existential questioning fresh and provide some relief. The dazed action moves from many locales in the US including the midwest, New York, San Francisco, as well as memories of time spent elsewhere. [ Biography of X by Catherine Lacey: Unorthodox portrait of a revered artist by her grieving widow Opens in new window ] Matters of faith are repeatedly returned to by the writer from a position of almost-disbelief. Given this often signalled suspicion of the immaterial, it comes as a surprise to the reader (but also to the narrator) when she agrees to undergo a form of exorcism in Oaxaca where her healer, Michal, together with Jesus and Lao Tzu, conducts a spiritual surgery on her. This New Age wackiness is disconcerting. The narrator acknowledges this, suggesting to her healer that rather than devils it might be anger that is being exorcised from her body – intergenerational trauma is intimated. She also notes that many rational people are now seeking answers in the non-rational supernatural realm. She seems to suggest that when a person is rudderless they will try anything. The narrator describes her own transformative exorcism as 'a fiction or a theatre'. Fiction, she says, is 'a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did ...' There is an attractive clarity in this reflection, and in many other considerations on the nature of writing included in the book. The Möbius Book is a thought-provoking philosophical exercise, which explores abstract questions of aesthetics as they relate to the personal and creative life. Ultimately, the writer's brutal honesty, playful language and the unexpected twists and turns she describes in her journey to make sense of herself and her art during a pivotal period of trauma, make this a book to be read with care. Sinéad Mac Aodha is director of Literature Ireland
Wall Street Journal
03-07-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Möbius Book' Review: A Breakup Story With a Twist
'Grief expands as it constricts,' writes Catherine Lacey in 'The Möbius Book.' It 'turns a person into a toy version of herself.' The grief in question concerns a breakup, or rather an abandonment. One day, after six years in a relationship with her boyfriend, Ms. Lacey receives an email from him. It is marked 'Please Read—urgent.' 'I am speaking,' writes the sender, 'about the dissolution of our relationship.' He is writing from another room in the house they share. 'People get fired with more dignity,' comments Ms. Lacey's friend later, when told the details.
New York Times
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.
THE MÖBIUS BOOK, by Catherine Lacey The first thing to know about 'The Möbius Book,' by Catherine Lacey, is that it is actually two books. One is a novella with a hint of murder mystery. Start from the opposite side, flipping upside down — how will this work on a Kindle? — and you'll find the other: a memoir of breakup and friendship during the pandemic, interspersed with musings on religion. Where will bookstores put this loopy blue thing? Amazon, with unusual resourcefulness, has nested it for now under Self-Help/Relationships/Love & Loss (though I'd wager the author's core audience avoids Amazon). One has come to expect such formal experiments from Lacey, especially after her bravura 'Biography of X': not a biography of anyone real, but a footnoted, name-dropping, time-melting fourth novel that made many best lists in 2023. There are plenty of names pelted into 'The Möbius Book,' too — author friends like Heidi Julavits and Sarah Manguso, and many others — but one notably missing in the memoir part is that of Lacey's ex, which gentle Googling reveals is yet another writer, Jesse Ball. Here he is referred to as The Reason: the literary-circle equivalent, maybe, of The Weeknd. He is the 'reason' why she has become a visitor to, rather than a resident of, the house they bought together, after receiving an email he sent from another room, composed on his phone, telling her he'd met another woman. (At least not a Post-it?) He is also, or so she believed, a pillar of masculine rationality. With tattoos. The Reason has control and anger issues. He noticed when Lacey, or her memoiristic avatar, put on weight and advised her how to take it off. After they split she found it hard to eat for a time. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Literary star Catherine Lacey: ‘The editor saw my draft and worried about libel laws'
As I sit on the patio of a French restaurant in Brooklyn, the beautiful and intimidatingly tall sommelier comes over, and tells me that there'll shortly be a reading in the bar. I ask who's reading. 'A novelist!' she says, beaming. I decline, and resist telling her that not only do I have my own novelist on the way, but it's Catherine Lacey. It would be easy to be awed by Lacey; many people in the literary world are. She has only just turned 40, but she's already on her fifth book, the first four having earned critical acclaim; her second, The Answers (2017), in which an ill young woman becomes a narcissistic actor's hired girlfriend, is being adapted for television by the director Darren Aronofsky. She was named one of Granta's best young American novelists in 2017; she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Lacey, in other words, has scored the rare hat-trick, among leading young writers, of accolades, prolificity and cultural cachet (or to put it more bluntly, coolness). Her extraordinary new work, The Möbius Book, is a tête-bêche, meaning that it's formed of two autonomous though related parts. You can start reading from either end, and when you get to the middle, you flip and restart. In one direction, it's non-fiction, a relatively straightforward chronological catalogue of the mental disarray that followed the end of a relationship between Lacey and her partner of several years, known as 'The Reason', a man whose behaviour is portrayed as coercive, controlling and obliterating. Lacey doesn't use the word 'abusive' in her account, but readers are bound to ask whether it's applicable. The Reason's behaviour is depicted as imbued with rage. He has a tantrum when Lacey wants to leave a light on in the stairwell for a female friend sleeping in their guest room. When Lacey looks at her phone during a film he had wanted her to watch, he punches a wall so hard that he breaks a part of it. He habitually slaps her on the backside – ' playfully (his word)' – despite her voicing her dislike of it, and then is outraged at how she reacts. Until their 2021 break-up, Lacey had been in the relationship for six years. The end came when Lacey received an email from her partner, who was in another part of their house, to tell her he'd met another woman the previous week and so was ending the relationship. She writes: 'This isn't what I want so much as what you want, he told me, and when I said it wasn't what I wanted he simply said yes, it was.' 'The first chapter of the non-fiction,' she explains to me today, 'is exactly what I wrote in the bedroom as it [the break-up] happened. I was like: 'This is what's f------ going on.' And I didn't edit that part, I think, at all.' She wrote the non-fiction part of The Möbius Book first. The fictional part introduces us to two friends, Marie and Edie, who meet around Christmas and discuss the painful fallout of their failed relationships. Across the hall, a substance that may or may not be blood emerges from beneath a neighbour's door. Why the two-part form? 'I showed the non-fiction to my agent,' Lacey says, 'and she was really happy with it... I'm close to my agent and she was p----- off for me [about the relationship], so I think she was happy to see a book that was this fire-pit of p------off-ness.' Not everyone was satisfied. 'My editor told me that with memoirs, because libel laws are different, sometimes things that can be published safely and legally in the US can't really be published in the UK. And I was thinking: my very angry book, yes, there might be things in there... 'But I also started thinking: why did I have to write about this thing? Why does it have to be non-fiction? I started thinking about rewriting the whole work as fiction, in a different shape. Or maybe I could publish it in the UK as a novel and in the US as non-fiction, but give it the exact same title. I think, now, that the libel issue was an excuse for me not to publish the book as it was. There was nothing untrue, but it wasn't fully right.' Lacey wrote a piece on Substack last year about adding to The Möbius Book, late in the editing process, a scene between herself and The Reason that she had tried, in real life, to forget. The passage, she tells me, describes him observing that Lacey had gained a negligible amount of weight, and providing her with a workout plan and guidance on what to cut out of her diet. 'He was concerned,' she writes. 'He didn't want this to begin a pattern.' 'His logic would be there,' Lacey says now, 'and I would go along with it because it was rhetorically very powerful. That was one of the details [where] I was kind of sickened by the idea of it being published – partially because of my own self-betrayal in accepting that from him, and then the idea of my whole family knowing it. I got kind of mangy for a few years. There was nervousness around my basic mental and physical health. And here was more evidence that when I had thought I was doing fine, I was not.' Lacey was born in 1985, and raised devoutly religious in Mississippi. She wanted to be a preacher as a child. When she began to lose faith in God at the age of 15, the shock took away her appetite. Though Pew (2020), her third novel, was also concerned with faith – a mercurial stranger with no memory arrives in a devout town and reflects its contradiction back – The Möbius Book is her most direct addressing of the subject so far. It investigates faith in many different forms: cycles of existence; the impossibility of conclusion when it comes to portraying a life. Why return to the topic? 'I've been trying to write about faith for as long as I've been an adult,' she says. 'But I think I needed to get a lot further away from the period of time [in which] I stopped believing in order to see it. I needed to have my metaphysical understanding of the world changed a few times. 'I needed to stop being so p----- off and self-righteous about the culture I grew up in. And I needed to have experiences that humbled me again out of my just-as-dogmatic atheism. What was going on in my life in my mid- to late-30s changed the way I saw the past. It uncovered things I'd been unable to look at or understand.' How does she think of romance now? 'I see my friends as angels sent from God, the finest human beings to ever walk the planet. And I have seen them at their worst, but I still think that. There's something kind of Christian there – the idea that you should treat everybody like they're Jesus. That radical idea of Christianity is part of what I connected to as a child. I felt very odd.' She smiles as she describes what an ideal, rather than realistic, rendering of Christian faith might look like, a faith where the radical offering of acceptance and love was actually universalised: 'In my Southern town, I didn't fit in, and I was always attracted to this beautiful idea of that Christianity. All these people say they're Christian. I'm like, if they can only see it, right? We can be in paradise.'
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey review – beyond the bounds of fiction
From her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, to 2023's Biography of X, Catherine Lacey's work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Möbius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else. Life writing, autofiction, memoir? Whatever you call it, The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention. A Möbius strip is a length of any material joined into a loop with a half twist. It's an uncanny shape, common and obvious, easily created and yet awkward to describe geometrically. For literary purposes, a Möbius is interesting because there's intricate structure and constraint but no ending. It goes around again, mirrored with a twist. Lacey's book takes this literally, the text printed from both ends, with memoir and fiction joined in the middle. Twin stories experiment with plotlessness and irresolution, while remaining aware of the way fiction attaches itself to linear plot and reverts to romance and quest. Characters find and lose love, find and lose meaning. In one half, two women, Edie and Marie, reminisce about their messy love lives and Christian beliefs in Marie's grotty apartment, ignoring the pool of blood forming outside a neighbour's door. In the other half, the first-person narrator leaves a controlling partner, recalls an ascetic adolescence and struggles to write and think about faith with clever friends during lockdown. Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play. Late in the day, the narrator, 'with trusted friends who knew how, got tied up and whipped', as 'a rite in all this, the chaos of having more freedom than I knew what to do with'. It's impossible, in a book so preoccupied with crucifixion, martyrdom and self-denial, not to see the image of the twisted Möbius loop in this friendly bondage. The structures of novels and the iconography of Christian martyrdom are both narrative responses to suffering; both offer freedom through constraint. But for Lacey, suspicious of pleasure, the compatibility of faith and art is questionable. The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form. The shadow of the angry, manipulative ex-partner falls across both, challenging the narrator's memories and intentions although, reassuringly, never inviting the reader's distrust. Edie's recounting of a transformative encounter with a dying, talking dog which speaks of the meaning of suffering (is 'dog' a Möbius rendition of 'God'?) is reprised when the narrator attends to a man lying on the street. In the first-person section, the narrator sees Matisse's painting The Red Studio in New York's Museum of Modern Art, 'the red I imagine on the floor of an otherwise white room', reflecting the blood pooling under a neighbour's door that Edie and Marie in the novel section decide is probably 'paint or something'. As the narrator comments: 'Reality at large has never been my subject, but interiority always has been.' Lacey asks large questions about interiority, especially with regard to the subject of Christian faith. For some readers, it may be an alien idea that the sharply modern intellectual rigour on display here could be combined with religious conviction. How can a narrator who can play off Proust against Gillian Rose seriously expect to find consolation in the old myths about the baby in the manger and the man rising from death? It's a question Lacey acknowledges, partly as unanswerable: 'We want to speak of gnosis and mysticism without our phones listening to us and populating browser ad space with advertisements for Goddess Retreats and bogus supplements and acupuncture mats.' Even so, the narrator attempts an exorcism, employs an 'energy healer', is seduced by ideas about magic numbers. 'Symbolism is both hollow and solid, a crutch, yes, but what's so wrong with needing help to get around?' The question is not rhetorical. There's a deep ambivalence in this book about needing literary and philosophical 'help to get around', about whether we're allowed to want or need art, which is related to the narrator's lack of appetite and consequent emaciation. 'I was afraid of the line between basic needs and cravings, between living and lust.' The fear of slipping from necessity into pleasure shapes the distrust of fiction. What if storytelling is for fun? What if we don't really need it? What if only what's necessary is true, or only truth is necessary? Inevitably, the fictional half of this book refuses many of the satisfactions of a novel. Like a miniature homage to WG Sebald's Austerlitz, the present action is mostly the recounting of past events, so that most of the characters, times and places appear only through a conversation between friends. There are complicated, triangular relationships in the background, between characters who never quite take shape, whose voices are only – and unreliably – recalled. Third-person narrative always calls into being a narrator, another layer of artifice, and here the slippage between present, past and past historic tenses also constantly reminds us that this story is at once engaging and not real. The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing. They don't go away. You can go round again. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
