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Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A double loss: The Möbius Strip, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
The Möbius Book has been variously described as 'a hybrid work that is both fiction and non-fiction' and a 'memoir-cum-novel'. Catherine Lacey herself asserts that it is a work of non-fiction, but with a qualifying 'however'. It comprises two narratives, first- and third-person, and is published to be flipped 180 degrees. Ali Smith's How to be Both had a similar format, as did Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions. All three force the reader into making a choice and living with the consequences. This is not cosmetic, as The Möbius Book is about decisions and repercussions. Lacey writes in the aftermath of two break-ups: a romantic one with a man referred to as 'the Reason', and an earlier one with God. There are very affecting passages about the minutiae of separation and the disorientation that accompanies it. Lacey discovers that 'hope is visible in the objects in our homes'; and there is a touching bathos in finding in 'a whole pound of ground cinnamon' a down payment on a cancelled future. The religious and romantic losses parallel each other without being strained. Lacey archly dismisses the 'spiritual', while yearning for 'something just beyond the material, something about love and trust, something about something we don't have words for'. The two narratives have echoes between them. 'Let's beat this for good,' the Reason demands of their yet-to-be-consummated relationship. 'We're going to beat this thing for good, Edie had said, though Marie could tell from the pride in Edie's voice that she was repeating something the new guy had told her.' There is a significant teacup and a crowbar, 'left behind by our home's previous owner', mirrored in the other narrative by 'the teacup and the crowbar and the light just so'. But it would be a mistake to try to riddle out the connections. Lacey insists that fiction proves we can be 'changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did'. The möbius strip is invoked as having no beginning or end when Lacey discusses closures in life and work with a friend. But that's incorrect. A circle has no beginning or end; a möbius strip is one-sided – a dangerous proposition when writing about relationships theological or amatory. This is a raw, honest book, and perhaps that knotty, camouflaging carapace is necessary when being so naked.
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.'
