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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
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.
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.
