The Möbius Book (2025)
Why this one?
I loved Lacey’s 2023 novel Biography of X enough to put it in my favourites of the century so far, when that list challenge was doing the Bookstagram rounds, and subsequently started going backwards and quite enjoyed Pew too. I’m still meaning to get onto her first couple of novels but in the meantime this new and intriguing one popped up on Netgalley and I obviously couldn’t pass on it!
Catherine Lacey (1985- ; active 2014- ) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She studied at Columbia University, and was a founding member of a cooperatively owned B&B in Brooklyn, where she lived while writing her first novel, Nobody is Ever Missing (2014). It met with rave reviews and was included in many end of year lists. In 2017 she was included in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and in the same year she published her second novel The Answers (currently being adapted for TV by a team including Darren Aronofsky) and the nonfiction The Art of the Affair. A short story collection Certain American States followed in 2018. Both her third novel Pew (2020) and her fourth Biography of X (2023) were shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
She has a second short story collection, My Stalkers, on the way later this year, but before that we have The Möbius Book, due to be published by Granta in June 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
The Möbius Book is a neither straightforwardly Lacey’s fifth novel, nor entirely not. It is a work in two parts, one ostensibly fiction and the other memoir, in its printed form designed to be read in whichever order the reader chooses, with neither presented as the ‘correct’ choice. In the the digital ARC I read, the first part is the fictional narrative, which concerns two friends - Marie and Edie - who meet at the former’s flat in the wake of their respective painful breakups (Marie with her ex-wife K, with whom she co-parented two children; Edie from an abusive partner), both choosing to ignore the blood seeping through Marie’s neighbour’s door.
As the first section concludes, we get this book’s ‘acknowledgements’ (which includes a list of presumably influential artworks from multiple media) and then a repeat of the title page, dedications, etc. before embarking on a section that is coded more straightforwardly as memoir, with the narrator (Lacey, we presume) reflecting on her own breakup from a long-term relationship with a partner (named ‘The Reason’ in the book, but fairly clearly the writer Jesse Ball) which was trusting on Lacey’s part but in retrospect clearly (at the very least) emotionally abusive on the part of ‘The Reason’. In this section her response to this sudden and traumatic breakup is contrasted with her loss of faith, firmly held in her childhood but later suddenly abandoned and leaving her adrift, in that case resorting to self-harm via a form of anorexia.
It’s very evident that this is a book that’s not intended to be fully comprehended following a single reading. The title gives that away, obviously, but it’s clear from a first pass that there are good reasons for the implied intent that it should be read and reread in order to extract its full meaning and value. The two sections are in dialogue with each other, with recurring themes (loss of faith, both religious and romantic; abusive men; the void created by the end of relationships; the solace found in friendship and art; etc) and events (mystical animal-based experiences; meaningless sex as escapism) as well as questions asked by one of the other (while Marie and Edie contain elements of Lacey’s own experiences in their fictional selves; they are also outside of another couple’s tragic story, which itself closely mirrors events in Lacey’s story, albeit with a more physically violent denouement).
I’ve checked off a few of the points that I spotted on my single reading, but I’ve equally likely missed many more connections, interactions and points of deliberate questioning between the two sections. It’s a bold and ambitious concept, and one borne initially of a kind of writers’ block that morphed into this unusual structure as she began writing ‘diaristic' scraps’ that were never intended to become public. In the process of this, and as we see in a few specific examples in the book, she begins to question the origins of some of the themes and specific quotations from her own previous work, leading her to more openly interrogate the interrelationship between fiction and autobiography, particularly how what is revealed in fiction can seem to subsconsciously surface aspects of the author’s life in ways surprising even to the author.
Structurally, I was most obviously immediately reminded of Ali Smith’s How to be both, another book of two parts which can be read in either order. There are differences beyond the obvious (the interweaving of nonfiction in this case). Smith’s book almost rendersMy c the second reading redundant, so important is the impact on the plot of the section you read first, whereas The Möbius Book encourages, as its title suggests, a constant looping of reading experience, one which may well never be over. The decision of where to start is more consciously put into the reader’s hands in Lacey’s physical book, too, rather than being dictated (to a greater extent) by the edition you receive of Smith’s. Overall this is a more impressionistic, less plot-driven work and so this approach works - nothing is ‘spoiled’ by the time of a second read, only enhanced - and as a result is, I think, offering something substantially new and different as a result.
As ever, I very much enjoyed Lacey’s prose. It’s matter-of-fact and yet still somehow layered with hidden depths (extra important here). I also found a lot to enjoy in each of the sections. The fictional section was a nicely suspenseful self-contained novella, with what was going on ‘off-stage’ driving interest beyond the main characters’ self-reflection. The memoir section offered glimpses of Lacey’s own life and, as you would expect, therefore added insight into the origins of her books that I’ve previously read, as well as the aforementioned self-reflexive commentary on parts of them.
My criticisms are likely at least in part a result of my relatively limited engagement with the book in its intended form. A single reading doesn’t quite cover it, and has perhaps led to some less positive aspects lingering in my mind. Like a few other reviews I’ve read, I found the parts around mystical spirit animals and quasi-exorcisms a little tangential and distracting, not adding much to my experience of either section.
I also didn’t fully engage with any of the breakups on as deep an emotional level as I think was intended. I’ve mused on this a little and actually realised that in the Lacey books I’ve really enjoyed, there’s a kind of studied emotional distance provided by anonymous characters or hidden / multiple identities that has been a fundamental part of what I’ve enjoyed. While The Möbius Book doesn’t do anything so crude as entirely pulling back the curtain, it certainly goes in for emotional impact in a more direct fashion (particularly and obviously in the memoir part but I think also to some degree throughout). I don’t doubt that Lacey’s own experiences were traumatic and transformative (her ex sounds like a proper piece of sh*t, that’s for sure) but I struggled a bit with the leaps to universality that were implied in her description of breakups seemingly ‘in general’. It didn’t entirely resonate, and I found the repetition of the themes of solace in meaningless casual sex reading more as humblebrag than anything particularly enlightening in terms of the broader human experience.
Score
7
While I enjoyed the ambition here, and aspects of the experience, I think I’d prefer to draw back the curtain and dive fully back into Lacey’s brilliant fictional worlds without too much more of the encumbrance of autobiography in future.
Next up
I need to finish reading the Women’s Prize shortlist.
