The Möbius Book

by Catherine Lacey

The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an openhearted defence of faith's inherent danger.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Biography Memoir, Book Club, Contemporary

218 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 2025

About the author

Catherine Lacey is the author of six books. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She has been twice a finalist for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Jean Stein Book Award. She lives in México.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think breakups might be the single most interesting subject there is.

i went into this relatively blind, at least in terms of the structure, and so when i finished the first book (if you can call it that) and suddenly came upon acknowledgments less than halfway through i said "what the f*ck?" out loud.

other than that, from beginning to end, this book delighted and confused and challenged and interested and titillated me.

it has one big change, between two books of sorts, but somehow it is both ever-changing and always the same. it is about love and the lack of it, and faith, and trust, and violence, and spirituality, and the smallness of the world and its hugeness. it holds so many contradictions and all of them make sense and none of them do.

bottom line: that's my favorite thing about it.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

OMG, Catherine Lacey wrote a whole ass high concept memoir about how her ex Jesse Ball is a gaslighting, over-confident toxic boi who broke up with her via e-mail from the next room and made her require an actual exorcism in which a demon was extracted from her leg (yes: WTF). I am shooketh - put the kettle on, the literary tea is piping hot, and I'm unsure who looks the worst in this oeuvre (it's probably Jesse Ball though). Is this a hit piece that rather melodramatically vents grievances to a degree that puts the author at least partially in the wrong? Yes. Will the whole thing become a bona fide shit show for Ball once it's officially published and the internet will be eating this up? Oooooh yes. Does this text display interesting literary ideas in a daring form? Also yes, because Catherine Lacey is an amazing artist.

The first around 40 percent of this experimental memoir is a fictional story about two female friends, one of them divorcing her wife after having an affair - the whole drama is presented via conversations and in the style of a chamber play that illuminates how the situation extends to a web of friendships that goes back to college. While the two women at the center drink and mourn, they tell themselves that the blood seeping out under the door of the apartment next to them is probably something else... So all in all typical Lacey stuff, psychological writing that showcases human consciousness via specific ideas and atmospheres, a text that feels like a lucid dream, all that rightfully made the author famous - but I was frankly puzzled because.. isn't this supposed to be a memoir? Psych! "There's nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself", one character declares. The story ends, a new one begins as Book B.

And very close to the beginning of this non-fictional part, Lacey, the narrator, gives us the explanation: "(N)early every time I've written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn't know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, had been expressed in the fiction, just beyond my awareness." There's the author's explanation for the intricate connection between crafting fiction and processing one's life, and in this publication, we get both the fiction and the non-fiction part: The Möbius Book, doh! There will be plenty of papers trying to extract how Book A and Book B are interwoven, but this review won't be one of them.

Because I know you want to get back to the tea, so here we go. Two things first: I am a huge fan of Jesse Ball's (and Lacey's!) writing, but clearly, I don't know them as people. Then, yes, Ball's name is never mentioned in the book, but there are so many clues that it's impossible to miss: The time frames, him (at the time) being a writer and professor in Chicago with a cult following, his deceased brother Abram (for whom Ball wrote Census), even a whole passage from Autoportrait is quoted in here etc pp. Now Lacey/ the narrator of the memoir (let's not get into the autofiction debate) tells us that she divorced her husband for him, and six years later, he left her for another woman, telling Lacey that she doesn't love him anymore, as has been his habit: Telling Lacey who she (supposedly) is.

And then there's a whole catalogue of shit he is accused of: Gaslighting, manipulation, verbal abuse, body shaming, a violent temper, anger-induced self-harm, an ex accusing him of hitting her (which btw amounts to spreading rumours), the list goes on. Throughout, Lacey is referring to Ball as "The Reason", which is played in different contexts, but also directly points to the main shortcoming of this book (which is itself filled with rage and grief): Jesse Ball clearly isn't The Reason for everything, reasoning himself out every situation while being the root of all misery. Where is Lacey's agency? She's a whip smart feminist, what happened here? That would have been a question worthy of exploring in a lot more detail, but we mainly get her crying in various places and under various circumstances. Also, hasn't she been terrible to her ex-husband when she dumped him for Ball? What is the major difference to what Ball did to her in the end? Listen, I'm not judging or making excuses for Ball (a man I, as mentioned above, don't know at all), I'm just longing for more complexity on the content level, a complexity that is certainly there on the aesthetic level.

And then there's the religious component, or rather, the aspect of faith: Lacey talks about her religious upbringing in Mississippi, and how love also requires faith in the unknowable, and that's all good and well (I'm a Catholic, I get it), but when she went on to Mexican healers and exorcisms, she lost me. Not sure the way to get over a toxic ex is excessive public crying and magic, sorry. What I do understand is that Lacey is seeking an emotional end to the turmoil: "It was hard (...) to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren't exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative". That's life folks, and sometimes, it sucks.

So while I enjoyed reading the book, I also partly felt like I was nosing through the high concept version of literary gossip - a feeling I didn't have at all when reading, let's say, In the Dream House, which feels a lot less like revenge, and more like soul searching and an attempt to process what happened and why. This book will certainly cause quite some controversy.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book with two parts, with the first section being almost a play between two female friends discussing their failed relationships and the second section an autobiography of the author's separation from her partner
Will there be no end to your assumptions of what I want? I asked him, then I answered my own question: There will be no end to your assumptions about what I want.
We, both of us, we had hallucinated the other.

In The Möbius Book we initially find ourselves in a seedy apartment in New York, where Marie and Edie, two good friends, meet each other after painful break-ups. Edie is recovering from an uneven relationship with a month in Greece and sex with unnamed men met in parks, and Marie is mourning a marriage with her wife which broke down, preventing her to see her two children, meet around Christmas. And then there is not present K. a decades old friend of Marie who told about her relationship with Helena to her wife, coincidentally also their sister. Also there is a substance which seems to be blood trickling out from under the door of their neighbour. I found this part A of the book very well done and atmospheric, with dialogues that I could easily see acted out on stage.

Part B is very much autofiction and relates how Catherine Lacey comes to term with "The Reason" breaking up with her per email (I am speaking in this letter about the dissolution of our relationship as partners ) and making her sleep in the guest room of their shared house. The Reason is Jesse Ball, with sentences of his Autoportrait being literally quoted. The author also reflects on violent father, now incapacitated by a stroke, and how this has guided her choices in relationships and love. There are obviously a lot of echoes in Part A that derive from the events from Part B, including a lot of spiritual questions which in Part A centred around a dying dog in Athens and in the second part of the book more overtly to the Christian upbringing of the author, including how this induced her to not eating. There is a lot of crying in this section of the book, in public places (Manhattan is and has always been the best place I’ve known to cry in plain sight, so I did a good deal of that, too), in parks, during diners and during calls.

Leaving an earlier husband called Peter is barely reflected upon, there is a section about a friend called Sean losing his eye sight is so touching and tender, I would have liked more of that, but overall section B is about the gaslighting by Ball as perceived by Lacey during their relationship, exemplified in sentences like: If I had really been paying attention to him, he explained, if I had really loved him, then I would have known how dire the situation was. How had I not read his mind?

This feels very raw, and obviously this is autofiction and I don't know any of the people in the book, but the resulting picture is far from pretty, including breaking of a hand when smashing into the wall (I had checked my phone during a film he had wanted me to watch - that was why he’d punched the wall), remarks on gaining 3 pounds and mansplaining taken to the max (It wasn’t that he didn’t love me, he explained. It was that it had become clear to him that I didn’t love him anymore. This isn’t what I want so much as it is what you want, he told me, and when I said it wasn’t what I wanted he simply said yes, it was)..

Somatic therapy and energy healers, an exorcism of a demon from a right leg and a spiritual surgery, extracting a diseased soul, aided by Jesus and Lao-tzu and some bondage plus the best sex of her life with men she doesn't know seemingly offer a runway to healing. The last pages of the book have a relationship blossoming with a Spanish speaking Daniel whom per Wikipedia she married in 2024.

While the echoes of part A and part B are interesting, I felt slightly uncomfortable with what part B makes us as readers experience in almost a voyeuristic manner. As said, it feels very raw and personal, almost like a literary exorcism of sorts. Lacey her writing is impeccable, quotes below, but I think I would have enjoyed the book more if Part B was either less rooted in real life or had showed detachment and an analytical eye similar to what Annie Ernaux applies to events in her life.

Quotes:

Book A
She sometimes had the feeling she was something he had saved and therefore owned.

Marie knows that harming someone is the fastest way to become permanent in them.

You’ve always loved difficult things, Marie says, deep breath now, talking about Edie, but just as well talking about herself.

In love you place your life in another’s hands, and you dare them to ruin it.

She gave herself up without tension into friendship, respected her friends enough to allow them to change her.

A relationship is an act of faith - it’s a kind of magic or experiment, isn’t it?

Humans have needs and when their needs are met, sometimes they call it love.

There is no story that does not lead to another story

Book B
The more I tries to explain what had occurred, the more it felt like nothing had occurred.

Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait.

You can’t argue with it, can’t argue with your life.

Cities permit a certain amount of suffering in plain view as part of the etiquette of proximity, the privacies we afford each other in order to bear the burden of human density.

We know more about how to attempt to survive an aerial disaster than we know about meeting the end of love, the former being highly unlikely while the latter is close to certain.

How could you be Christian and not think of death all the time?

Part of what terrified me about the idea of loving another person again was how easy it has been for me to misdiagnose abject mistreatment as simply misexpressed love.

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the aftermath of a devastating split from her partner, fellow author Jesse Ball, Catherine Lacey began writing a memoir rooted in the circumstances surrounding that event. But a chance conversation with her British editor raised potential issues with the UK’s libel laws, so Lacey contemplated publishing a non-fiction piece in the US and a reworked, novelised version in the UK. What she ultimately produced is a rather more radical hybrid. It’s presented as a tête-bêche. A format that consists of two books bound together, designed so readers can flip them over and read either side first, or even move between the two. Texts are always in dialogue with other texts. But Lacey’s creative choices, the structure, the ways in which memoir and novella interact, trouble the notion of her non-fiction as representing objective, singular truth, explicitly underlining and playing with aspects of its intertextuality. It seems fitting the tête-bêche was primarily used in the nineteenth-century for devotional works - viewed from certain angles Lacey’s book, with its central themes of faith, doubt and spirituality, has a distinct devotional feel.

I opted to read Lacey’s memoir first – partly because it originally predated the fiction and partly for the usual voyeuristic reasons. On the surface Lacey’s confessional can appear disjointed, fragmented, unconventional. But, as at least one reviewer has pointed out, Lacey’s braiding together of scenes from her past with scenes from her present is a tried-and-tested technique. Lacey uses it to forge a connection between her Methodist childhood, her faith in God and later disillusionment, and the subsequent trajectory of her life with the man she dubs The Reason. As she struggles to recover from The Reason’s brutal rejection – he dumps her by email sent from an adjoining room – she wonders if he represents a compulsion, pointing to a pattern of some sort. Lacey’s acquiescence to The Reason’s demands, his dominant behaviour, his insistence that he knows her better than she knows herself, echoing her earlier “submission” to a supposedly all-seeing God. Her emotions in the wake of their breakup stirring unsettling memories of her rage-fuelled, unstable father and the trauma that followed the severing of her belief in God.

So, Lacey’s memoir shifts from partial reconstruction to charting, what resembles, a series of obsessive repetitions. Her actions after the breakup border on ritualistic, Lacey systematically removes all traces of herself from the house they shared, even peeling off her handwritten labels from storage jars – possibly symbolising an attempt to reclaim her very self, to destroy any remaining signifiers of a shared future. But rather than strive to distance herself from years of reliance on validation by external authorities, Lacey becomes embroiled in, what looks like, a frantic search for a substitute - for The Reason, and/or Christianity. Lacey’s account becomes increasingly aphoristic – so much so I found it quite a challenge to relate to her worldview. These aphorisms, their claims about reality left me with the impression that Lacey hadn’t evaded, indeed was clinging to a notion of the sacred that I found random, spurious. At one stage, this ersatz spiritual quest leads her to a shamanistic healer whose cleansing treatment involves the extraction of a demon from Lacey’s body. For me, Lacey’s framing of her experiences with The Reason position faith as something that rests on a distortion, a misreading of reality. There’s scant evidence that The Reason was anything other than rigidly controlling, their time together sustained by denial, an acceptance of everyday falsities. And yet Lacey is driven to recreate or reclaim her so-called faith in intimate relationships, eventually settling down with a new partner.

Alongside this Lacey delves into other forms of faith: in writing, in friendship. All of which feature in mutated forms in her novella – or perhaps the memoir is the mutation? The novella is a chamber piece revolving around a prolonged meeting between two friends, Marie and Edie. It’s mostly set in Marie’s dilapidated apartment where she’s recovering from the end of her marriage, estranged from her wife and children. Edie is also dealing with a failed relationship. In contrast to the memoir’s rueful air, the novella’s tense and anxious. This is reinforced by a curious sighting in the corridors of the apartment building, what might be blood pooling outside a neighbouring front door. There are overlaps between Edie’s situation and Lacey’s own, except that Edie’s partner’s brand of violence is more weighted towards the physical. Lacey also teases her readers by giving Edie’s ex a heart condition and a background of loss that mirrors Ball’s biography, identifying features absent from Lacey’s memoir. Coming after the memoir, the fictional narrative acted as a commentary or critique, Marie becomes a substitute for the memoir’s readers, both undermining and verifying elements of Lacey’s personal story; promoting a differing set of vantage points. Although Marie also displays traits that overlap with Lacey’s, highlighting the status of Lacey’s characters as authorial projections rather than versions of real people. Any impression of realism is further disrupted by instances of the surreal. Marie and Edie’s conversations include a Beckettian account of Edie’s night with a dying dog who communicates in a succession of gnomic observations – its religiosity presumably meant to invoke that infamous saying dog is God backwards? Meanwhile events in the neighbouring apartment take on the appearance of a classic revenge fantasy albeit shot through with Freudian angst.

To say I have mixed feelings about Lacey’s book would be an understatement. It’s definitely clever, inventive, and ambitious. I liked the way Lacey emphasized, what she’s termed, the impersonality of life. I thought her appraisal of the commonalities between abusive relations was moving and powerful, as was her depiction of an existence walking on eggshells. I admired her method of pairing fiction and non-fiction, inextricably intertwined like recto and verso. And I enjoyed puzzling out how the two pieces reworked and interrogated each other, casting doubt on the likelihood of establishing reliable perspectives. But there was a lot I found deeply frustrating, the broad sweep invocation of faith which is never sufficiently defined – the conflation of religious faith and faith in a relationship seemed especially dubious. The absurdist flourishes – dog, demon. Nor was I entirely convinced by the analogy between the book and a Möbius strip constantly looping back on itself. The concluding sections of the memoir more than gestured at a tidy-ish resolution – one that stirred comparisons with the incredibly irritating Eat, Pray, Love.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

We were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle. It was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren't exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Mobius strip of narrative.

This is a striking book by Lacey that takes two different narrative approaches to a central story of loss, grief and anger: on one side is a fictional piece involving two female friends who are both experiencing bad break-ups; on the other is a memoir from 'Lacey' (and I put that in brackets because as soon as one starts writing, there is always a distance between author and self, whether acknowledged or not, as experience is transmuted into story) based on her breakup with fellow author Jesse Ball.

The two narratives touch points around thematics but also with motifs, notably a crow-bar left behind in an apartment by a previous owner. These are angry female voices and the 'memoir' section recalls recent similar books by Rachel Cusk (Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation and Sarah Manguso (Liars) which negotiate their own relations between fiction and auto/biography.

There is something voyeuristic about the second half as we hear of The Reason's (the rather cutesy and capitalised term throughout for the narrator's ex-lover) violence and patriarchal sense of 'knowing' what the narrator thinks and feels better than she does herself, though she owns her own vulnerability and complicity with this dynamic. Toxic relationships seem to have much in common.

Lacey uses an extended conceit of loss of religious faith to figure the loss of a central love relationship, a metaphor which didn't really work for me. But with touches on her disturbed relationship with food (I was particularly incensed at the scene where The Reason points out she's put on three pounds and organises her eating and exercise schedule till this tiny amount of weight is lost) and the diverse, artistic milieu in which she moves and which nurtures her, there a grounding to the emotional heart.

There's a sense of watching how the raw material of the second section is transmuted into fiction in the first, making the two parts interchangeable and co-located, hence the Mobius strip - but their impetus was different for me as a reader. It's unavoidable, that sense of voyeurism in the second; but I was most struck by the imagery of the first, notably that haunting visual of the pool of blood seeping under the door of the neighbouring apartment: emotional intimacy is dangerous, lethal and yes, bloody, this seems to assert.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really innovative blended work of fiction and nonfiction. Catherine Lacey is, quite frankly, one of the best working writers today and her ability to reflect on the details of her life while simultaneously turning those details into fiction was such a wild ride of a reading experience. I went back and forth between the two parts of the book just to compare and contrast. Everything was just so specific and well written. A really smart and moving work of memoir about the ways in which faith is found and lost and maybe found again. The best way I can describe this work is deeply human - and that’s an understatement. Lacey’s work embodies multitudes, it’s quite fascinating to read. Definitely one of my favorites this year, from one of my favorite writers - it will have staying power in my memory.

[Carl (Hiatus. IBB in Jan) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Catherine Lacey is known for her ability to blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, frequently through experimental book structure and/or narrative style. In The Möbius Book, she meditates on her depression, worsened by a devastating post-COVID breakup. Deceptively structured as two novellas, Lacey plays with the word Möbius – a rectangular strip twisted and joined at its ends, creating a continuous loop in which each half becomes a reversed mirror of the other.

The novel is structured into Book A (fiction) and Book B (autobiographical), and begins with Marie in a phone booth, hanging up a call with her friend Edie, who urgently needs to talk in person. Upon returning to her apartment, Marie notices a puddle of what seems to be blood seeping beneath her neighbour's door, but quickly gaslights herself into believing it's a hallucination. Her paranoia spirals as she waits impatiently for Edie. When they meet, the two friends chat about their broken relationships while Marie broods in paranoia. They are not easy friends, being full of secrets and judgment. As the story progresses, Marie's delusion intensifies until a pivotal moment when Edie notices the puddle of blood, and both are drawn into a new reality – screaming with metafictional elements, as Lacey's life bleeds into Marie's, or perhaps the other way around, a Möbius. The narrative is atmospheric and reminiscent of a thriller, and the characterisation is brilliantly done. I enjoyed this first story, which in turn made me want to re-read Book A once finished.

Book B was more challenging to read than I anticipated. The emotional depth and raw vulnerability that Lacey pours into herself are both intense and emotional. The autofiction starts with her waking up in the guest room, in the attic, feeling like a guest in her own house. It’s in this moment that the reader is introduced to “The Reason,” her now ex-husband. From there, Lacey reflects on her failed relationship, her self-destructive tendencies, and her loss of faith. This autobiographical section evidences how she based her fiction, revealing the subliminal threads that connect both novellas in a literal Möbius loop, creating a fascinating blending of her real-life experiences forming the backbone of Book A’s fictional narrative. The Reason is manipulative, aggressive, and passionate. Gaslighting seeps in and out from both The Reason and “The Unreasonable,” which can be difficult to notice sometimes, especially when one is in the situation.

Lacey also examines her willingness to write fiction, though her reflections here struck me as deliberately ambivalent. When a friend asks if she’s writing any fiction, she confesses to feeling “punked” by the process and yet admits she can’t stop being "punked" (and this self-destructive nature is important to analyse her actions and motives). She’s caught in a Möbius strip of narrative: unsure whether she’s fracturing reality into fiction or fiction into reality. The only element that didn’t fully resonate with me was her exploration of lost Christian faith in childhood and her later search for spiritual meaning. As an atheist myself, I recognise elements of her struggle, but this part felt less grounded and didn’t translate with the same emotional clarity. Another reader noted his physical copy had a different order than my digital one – starting with Book B followed by Book A, which makes more sense as a novel, and perhaps I would have noticed sooner the interconnected themes and inferences Lacey makes, which makes more sense to me. Don't be afraid to switch the reading order, and I suspect you might have a better understanding of the novel.

Ultimately, The Möbius Book is a bold and uncompromising work that blurs fiction and reality, self and other, caring and indifference. Lacey’s prose is sharp, experimental, and emotionally charged, making for a reading experience both intellectually stimulating and disorienting. It’s a book that calls for attention, rewards rereading, and leaves you puzzled. I recommend this short and dense work of literature to readers interested in metafiction and toxic relationships written in unflinching narrative.

Rating: 3.5/5

Disclaimer: I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Quotes might differ slightly from the final printed version:


Book A

" In silence, they make a truce because each of them needs the other on this night more than they are able to admit. A special kind of disdain can grow out of this sort of need if one isn’t careful."

"Both Marie and Edie’s compulsion toward the past was chronic, and this compulsion toward the past was also a compulsion toward the familiar, and their compulsion toward the familiar had an ungodly velocity and was openly hostile toward their various other compulsions, desires, even basic needs."

"harming someone is one of the fastest ways to become permanent in them."

" you fucking monster, did you think no one was ever going to find out, how long have you been lying, K told me what they saw, are you crazy, are you actually crazy, don’t answer that"

Book B

" I woke in the guest room, the attic, a guest in my own home. I’d never slept a night in that room, and staring up at the white clapboard ceiling and walls, I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself."

" When my new friend, Robin, asked if I was writing another novel, I surprised myself when I said, I don’t want to write fiction anymore. I’m tired of being punked. We both laughed, and she asked what I meant, and I told her that nearly every time I’ve written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, had been expressed in the fiction, just beyond my awareness. But I know I’m not done. I feel sure I’ll punked again, because I hate writing fiction with the equal and opposite force of how much I love it. What a stupid, wonderful way to waste my life"

" Everyone told me that everyone was breaking up or breaking down or breaking through those days—these days, these days, everyone said—something in the ether, it seemed, was pushing them all to the edges of whatever they were in"

"Maybe The Reason had mourned our relationship through his anger—the slammed doors or thrown objects, or the time he called me a crazy, sexist autocrat for wanting to leave a light on in the stairwell for a female friend who was staying in our guest room, or that one time he punched a wall and broke part of his hand and could not reasonably go to the hospital given the risk of bringing the pandemic home to his asthmatic mother. He had to let his busted hand mend itself, which it did, crookedly, and painfully, though he rarely complained. I had checked my phone during a film he had wanted me to watch—that was why he’d punched the wall."

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struck up a conversation with Catherine Lacey during the paperback tour for her brilliant Biography of X, and she mentioned that she was putting down the final strokes on a book structured like a Möbius strip – a book without a beginning or an end, a book with only one side, that remains in one piece when split down the middle. The concept blew my mind at the time, and having finally read the book all these months later, I can confirm it is a work of formal brilliance.

The Möbius Book unpacks the loss of faith – in relationships and in the divine – through a narrative that is part fiction, part memoir, each suffused with the essence of each other so that they are self-sufficient wholes as well as parts building on parts. Depending on the side you begin reading from, the centre of the work makes itself known differently [I also liked that this meant the credits to all those who laboured to make the book happen exist at its core.] The interior lives of women – Lacey, her characters, and Lacey as a character in her own narrative – are the engine here, and it is very clear that our understanding is parti pris to their experiences: with all-knowing, all-talking dead dogs, with male anger and abuse, with demons exorcised from the leg, with heartbreak, betrayal, disorientation, and the physical manifestations of a spiritual or emotional loss – or awakening.

There is also the element of literary gossip: this is, amongst other things, also a sort of tell-all hit-piece about Lacey's ex, a famous writer whose work The New Yorker described as "at some oscillating coordinate between Kafka and Calvino", identified here simply as The Reason. The narrative has only one side – the other inaccessible to us – in a particularly well-wrought emulation of a möbius strip.

As with the shape it is moulded to, this book invokes endless questions, but perhaps its greatest preoccupation is exploring whether the void left by romantic love and religious belief can be filled by what we find in work, in art, and in friendships. Or, according to Lacey's website

Belief in abstractions is both the peril of the delusional and a necessity in love; how do rational people accept this paradox?

Whether or not readers find it engaging depends on how they connect to and interpret these questions, and how – if – they reinterpret them with Lacey as aide. While I delighted in the experiment and adored Lacey's prose style, I didn't come away from the narrative with quite the effect either Biography of X or Pew still have on me. On some level, this is a work that perhaps serves the author more than it does the reader: as a confessional, a conceptual stepaway, a cerebral exercise. For fans of Lacey, it will still be worth the while.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I met Avery at MoMA to see a Matisse exhibit, and she asked me how writing was going, and I asked her how writing was going, and we both admitted it wasn't really going so well lately. Our trouble was a shared one: we were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle. It was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren't exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey is a hybrid work of fiction and creative non-fiction/memoir - with two separate short works bound together back-to-back and inverted (tête-bêche), such that the reader is free to choose which piece to start with - like Leah Hager Cohen's 2024 novel To & Fro.

It seems from reviews to date, most readers have started with the fiction, which does come first in the PDF ARCs of the novel, digital publishing being at a disadvantage to physical copies in this regard, but I started with the memoir, which comes with the disclaimer: "This is a work of nonfiction. However, the author has used pseudonyms for a couple of individuals to protect their privacy and has reconstructed dialogue to the best of her recollection."

It begins introducing us to the main pseudonymous character:

Odd impulse to catalog these days, not that I can forget them, not that I can remember them clearly.
I woke in the guest room, the attic, a guest in my own home. I'd never slept a night in that room, and staring up at the white clapboard ceiling and walls, I felt I'd been shrunk down and shoved into a doll's house, and I knew then-again, or for the first time-how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself.
A man downstairs was The Reason I'd turned from inhabitant to visitor.
My phone rang. The Reason was calling me from the floor below. He wanted to know if I would say goodbye to him before I went to the airport.
What have I been doing all week, I asked, if not saying goodbye to you?

The Reason is clearly author Jesse Ball, and the memoir centres around the break up of their 5 year relationship, when Ball broke-up with Lacey in 2021, telling her this by an email sent from another room in the house they shared. Her tale also encompasses her divorce in 2016 from actor and teacher Peter Musante, who she had married the year before, leaving him for Ball, and the start of her relationship, post Ball, with another author, Daniel Saldaña París, who she married in 2024.

Ball gave his reason for breaking up, and excuse for finding another partner, that Lacey was no longer in love with him. This explaining Lacey to herself a feature of their relationship:

Later it became clear - The Reason had the right to explain my feelings to me because he'd spent six years telling me what I felt and who I was, and had quite often been correct. Usually the version of myself he sold me on was more positive than the one I'd previously held. He believed me to be smarter than I thought I was, more capable, more powerful than I had previously thought myself. I began to believe him, and yet that belief brought with it a strict obedience to this person who had, it seemed, created me.

Of course all of this is Lacey's one-sided, Möbius strip, account of their relationship, although it's one where she comes off as badly, for her passivity, as 'The Reason' does for his manipulative behaviour.

Lacey makes a, for me, rather unsuccessful link between her break-up with Ball, and the loss of her Christian belief in her later teens, having been brought up in a strictly religious family. As an example this section:

Our last autumn together The Reason and I were walking in Chicago when an odd silence settled between us. I asked him what he was thinking; he said he was having a conversation with me. About what, I wanted to know, but he didn't say; he already knew my thoughts on the matter, he said.

During my nightly prayers as a child I sometimes ran out of things to pray, and I felt so sure that He knew what I would have told Him if I could have conjured it. By lying there in His gaze, my devotion became clear and perfect; I was not just a tired child, lacking anything to pray about, but an immaculate being, so full of faith there wasn't room for anything else.

Except what she does not say is that there is a key difference: Ball is not actually able to infer Lacey's thoughts and is not interested in them; whereas God has is able to do so, but wants to have that dialogue with His children.

And the memoir documents how, after the break-up of her marriage, and without the anchor of her previous faith, Lacey takes refuge in somatic healing, witches and psychic druids.

It makes for an interesting, if rather overly personal, read, and the non-fiction format allows Lacey to set up the rationale for the fictional piece:

Fiction 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 over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don't entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

Turning the book metaphorically if not, for an e-ARC, physically to the fiction, it's worth noting both the, more standard, fictional disclaimer in the text: "Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental," and also comments Lacey has made on her blog that "The Möbius Book also includes a long piece of fiction (and no, it’s not auto-fiction nor a fictionalized retelling of the nonfiction)."

And the fictional story, while of a break-up, is very different. It's set at Christmas time, in the New York apartment of Marie, in a run-down block. Marie has recently broken up with her (unnamed) wife, with whom she has twin children, and is being visited by an old friend Edie, herself recovering from the breakdown of a, somewhat abusive, relationship and seeking refuge in random sexual encounters. Edie and Marie's close friend for many years (in Edie's case since childhood) K is an important but absent figures - Marie's husband is their sister, and it was K who alerted their sister to Marie's infidelity with another woman, which caused the sudden break up of Marie and K's sister's marriage. And meanwhile a mysterious pool of liquid - which smells and looks like blood, but can it really be that? - is seeping from under the door of a neighbour's flat.

There are some parallels e.g. on the loss of faith - Edie is a lapsed Catholic, and Marie describes her shock at K's action, to who she never wants to speak again, as her having lost her faith in who he is. There's an odd part where Edie receives theological messages from a dying dog.

And there is a very neat side swipe when K. is talking on the phone to Edie's former partner, to who Edie refuses to speak, and relaying messages:

K, leaning out the side door, shouted this proposal at Edie, who was crouched to study the acorns and dirt and pebbles.
He wants to know if he can dedicate his self-portrait book to you!
Edie walked slowly toward the house, unsure of how she'd respond until she spoke.
Tell him... it is extremely clear ... to whom his self-portraits are actually dedicated.

Lacey in the memoir quotes words from the memoirs of 'The Reason' - "I love being sad, and in fact, it is a weakness of mine to allow myself to be sad for too long" - which are directly lifted from Jesse Ball's Autoportrait, published in 2022, but dedicated to Lacey. And of the list of works Lacey quotes from directly, Autoportrait is conspicious by its absence from the 'List of Works Consulted' at the end of the non-fiction section.

Which all makes for a fascinating if voyeuristic look into the break-up of a high-profile literary relationship, but didn't feel particularly edifying.

And, for me, the Möbius strip aspect of the novel failed its key test. By starting with one part of their choice, the reader should (as is the case in the aforementioned To & Fro, or Ali Smith's How to Both, where the choice of starting part was decided by which version of the novel one picked up) both fin that the second part illuminates the first, and feel a desire on finishing the second to re-read the first. To & Fro does this particularly well, both narratives meeting in the middle. But here these felt like two distinct, if thematically adjacent works, and nothing more.

2.5 stars - rounded to 2 as I came to this with very high expectations.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two parts to this book, one fiction and the other non-fiction, which can be read in either order. The fictional section is about two friends, Marie and Edie, who meet at Marie's apartment after each experiences a painful breakup, Marie from her wife with whom she co-parented twins, and Edie from an abusive boyfriend. The other section is Lacey’s memoir about her own breakup in 2021. The breakup was delivered via a politely worded email.

The two sections are similar in subject matter. Both are focused on the causes and aftermath of breaking up with a long-time partner, as well as spirituality, anger, trust, and friendship. In the memoir, readers will find the red flags of an emotionally abusive relationship. Overall, I had a mixed reaction. I appreciated the non-fiction that involves self-examination more than the rather odd fictional story which is periodically interrupted by a discussion of (possible) blood stains coming from the apartment next door.

[makayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorites of the year holy

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I tell you I am now OBSESSED w Catherine Lacey, I mean I immeiately went out and bought her entire backlist.

This is the most beautiful blend of memoir and fiction, and tbh what I wish all authors would do. Instead of leaving us hanging, picking thru their fiction for fact, Catherine leaves the facts right at our fingertips. (And DAMN they're wild facts. Fk JB.) Audio was a blastttt to go w, hearing the anger and fear and humor and sarcasm and (I'll stop here but you get the point) in her own voice was especially powerful. 

I still haven't wrapped my mind around this completely (this means I'll likely be back w more thoughts after another listen❤️‍🔥). The blend of genres is so well done and her voice remains so consistent on each side that it was easy to get lost in the "story" either way—and in a sense that may be why I'm still feeling jumbled? To be clear, not a bad jumbled. Just...phew. 
I can't recommend this enough to anyone who enjoys memoirs on motherhood, who enjoyed Clam Down by Anelise Chen, All Fours by Miranda July and/or the Abandoners by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, transl. Lizzie Davis. 

Thank you bunches to Catherine Lacey, FSG, Macmillan Audio & NetGalley for the ALC in exchange for my honest review. 

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major thanks to NetGalley and FSG for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

𝘐𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯? 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘨.
𝘕𝘰.
𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦? 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥, 𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘧 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦.
𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺. 𝘏𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘵, 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦.
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦?
𝘔𝘦.
𝘈 𝘥𝘰𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦?
𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘥𝘰𝘨𝘴. 𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳.
𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦? 𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥.
𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺, 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘥, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵—
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘥𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘰𝘨𝘴.
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦?
𝘔𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘺 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘺.

Comedic. Heartfelt. Self-referential. Honest. Spiritual. Completely human. Refreshed after this. Inventive and playful, raw and emotional, blending memoir and fiction, tethering between kept-truth and tell-all. What is a writer to do when the emotions are at the hight of their intensity?

One of the most daring books to be published out of 2025 with the literary gossip but also experimental form this takes on. Would really love to have my hands on the physical copy as it’s incredibly interactive. And to each their own with how it will be read as everyone will take on a different experience whether you start with the memoir or the fiction.

Fiction is alive and well. My favorite of the year!!!

[kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Mobius Book is a unique treat as it is essentially two books in one. When The Mobius Book: Book A opens, readers are met with an intoxicating fictional story about Marie and Edie, two women reminiscing on their failed romantic loves while silently obsessing over the weird stain seeping under the neighbor’s door. The first book ends and as we venture in to Book B, Lacey provides the same sharp prose but this time, in the form of non-fiction as she discusses her recent and abrupt separation from her partner.

The mobius theme here is interesting and obvious; where does fiction or non-fiction end and begin? What is fictionalized and what is true? After all, even fiction leaks truth… Much of this book could be argued as auto-fiction and much of it felt like navel gazing (complimentary). I adore Lacey’s eloquent and complex prose that immediately pulls me in to whatever she is saying; often perplexing but always urgent and fascinating. In this instance, it was interesting to link the pieces of Book A with Book B and to sit in the anger and the grief of the story; almost like I shouldn’t be there but I couldn’t resist it.

So much is explored in this book including romantic and platonic love, faith, self-betrayal and abandonment, and the narratives that we create about our own lives. The Mobius Book is an absolutely brilliant, propulsive, and stunning piece of literature. I can’t wait to add the final copy to my library.

Thank you FSG for the early copy in exchange for an honest review. Available Jun. 17 2025

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I loved this. I love this idea - I think there’s so much potential with crossing genres, and I hope some people run with it. Much like biography of x, I just wanted it to be a little tighter. It feels like the stories get so close to their potential

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book defies expectations.

huge blessings to everyone who will read it and think about all that ever was or will be in the never ending cycle of life.

tysm netgalley what a treat.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Catherine Lacey really just does anything.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to give this 4 stars after all. I kept thinking about this books and why I liked the first part (fiction) maybe better than the second part (autofiction). I guess it was largely because the autofiction made me feel so uncomfortable at times. It just blew my mind how such an smart, seemingly strong woman could be in such a toxic relationship.Then again, I admire how Lacey writes about it so openly and intelligently and her wonderful renderings on faith, friendship, and art on top of that made me reconsider my early rating of 3 stars.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC

[Chr*s Browning]

Mom, come pick me up, they’re slapping a memoir/autofiction piece with vague philosophical musings together with a long short story/short novella that features similar images and was probably written as a writing exercise to get to the former, flipping one upside down so it looks like a Scholastic Book Fair 2for1 Beast Quest compilation and calling it a “stunning hybrid work” … the times we live in. Anyway, what I wanted to say:

All writers are narcissists - one need look no further than the Facebook comments of Kindle exclusive authors arguing about the legal merits of suing readers for saying their books read like AI to know this - but literary autofiction writers tend to be the worst of the lot. The desire to narrativize a life without Wikipedia-recognizable accomplishments is not foreign to me, but in Lacey’s work (of which the memoir is the work and the novella a mere companion - having read the latter first, it only exists in connection to former and has no real merits of its own, unless you like spare fiction in which case I’m sure NYRB has many better options, most in translation so you can feel more worldly for having read them - this is something I would imagine Lacey would do, or at least, in the words of the Mightyx2 Bosstones, the impression that I get) it reached a point where I started to think more about my own self-narrativization than the story Lacey was telling, and that’s for one simple reason: if this is what it looks like to be a writer, I’m glad I took the fire exit. There comes a time when a story has more drama than it deserves and somewhere around the fourth (or fifth, maybe sixth) new airbnb/friend’s house/allusion to a brief sexual encounter/pondering of how a “girl from Mississippi got here” (Lacey never writes like this, I’ll add, but this underlines everything she writes), I started to think you know, maybe a relationship born out of two respective affairs was always going to end like this, with the other narcissist masquerading as writer leaving you for a woman younger than you, you were silly to think otherwise and it’s silly for us to be here, reading mostly banal and expected fallout with few nuggets of wisdom to be gained (it’s groan-worthy to end with falling in love with someone who speaks a different language and thinking “wow … my whole life … language shaped how I interacted with the world … now I learn it all again … just as I learn love” - oh my god! grow up! you reduced your new partner to another vehicle for yourself! i don’t care anymore!). Maybe that’s moralizing after reading too many Facebook comments on posts served to me by an algorithm that hates us all, but also by the end of this I was just tired. Tired of Lacey, yes, but also of myself, for having been this way, for being this way, for thinking everything that ever happened in my life was a moment worth remembering because it served a larger narrative of the self; reading this book did not make me stupider, but it did make me wish I was stupider and just lived the days as they came. But then the noble savage normie is equally a construct of the self-narrativization complex, so it’s really just turtles all the way down. There are so many people in the world leading so many different lives (and so many similar lives) and this is the one I spent three days with intermittently, and I wouldn’t again. Some lives should be led and not written on, and maybe in that silence they’d be able to find what they were actually chasing the entire time. I don’t know that I’ve found a path to that quite yet, but I do know Lacey hasn’t. The narrated life doesn’t necessarily equal the self-examined life.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOVED the nonfiction half, the fiction half (which i read first) felt kind of underbaked, but i'm still pondering it in the context of the full book. so much to chew on here about relationships, friendship, what we put faith into and why, how we tell stories. good stuff. also fuck jesse ball

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself.

Perfectly imperfect and bittersweet. There’s something strangely comforting about witnessing a mid-metamorphosis writer struggling with form, inviting you to sit with the uncomfortable, with the fact that there’s no clear inside or outside. One book loops seamlessly into the other, making you wonder if you’ve also been the unreliable narrator of your own days.

By resisting artificial closure, The Möbius Book becomes the form it needed to be: messier but somehow more truthful than a polished, argument-driven piece.

Or maybe that’s just my complicated feelings toward Maggie Nelson’s post-analytical, thesis-driven, surgically precise language creeping in—contrasted with Lacey’s willingness to lean into the blur of life-writing and memory distortion, to undermine self-exposure with self-erasure.

TL;DR: I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

[endrju]

A dead dog-god holding forth in wise riddles, an anorexic lapsed Methodist, exorcisms of a ghost of an old man with red pants from the abdomen and a demon from the right leg, among others, are the figures that help Lacey speak of grief of leaving or being left by a loved one, be it human or divine. It's not Biography of X though.

[Lieke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just wish Catherine Lacey was my friend. Or lover. And I will perpetually love this never ending book with all its beginnings and peepholes and gateways to many inner and outer worlds. (Not to mention the cat named Banana Bread <3)

- Hopefully there’s some Dutch publisher out there who will go publish her again.

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

we love playing with form and combining fiction with nonfiction! thank you to fsg and netgalley for the advanced digital copy!

i started with the fiction side, which is a conversation between two longtime friends reflecting on their relationship struggles. i thought this was a great way to set things up as it really piqued my curiosity to see how the themes introduced would relate to the nonfiction side. the prose was sharp and there was a sense of foreboding throughout the fiction piece, that seems to be typical of lacey’s style.

with the nonfiction, it was really cool to get some background information about catherine lacey’s life and to see how it’s informed her previous novels. her descriptions of what she went through in her marriage and divorce are harrowing, and her reflections on spirituality added an interesting angle (maybe it’s just because i read both books this month, but i can’t help but be reminded of the dry season by melissa febos, which also ties spirituality into romantic separation). i especially enjoyed hearing her musings on the writing process and how she feels about writing about sexuality.

makes me excited to get to the other books of lacey’s that i haven’t read yet!

[Sam Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since Lacey sets The Möbius Book as the reader’s choice, I started with part B. In this half, the author recalls her relationship with her then-romantic partner, The Reason. She punctuates this section with her unravelling Christian faith, simultaneously assessing how the religion her exacting father raised her in, à la the Methodist perfectionist tradition, and The Reason over promise. She places her faith in both because they offer a lens to understand the world, a sense of safety, and love. In the end, The Reason and her religious belief hollow her out.

Lacey sets part A in an apartment. There, Marie and Edie dialogue over ideas central to romantic relationships and marriage, such as giving oneself through built trust and the process of healing in order to trust and love again. Contrary to other reviewers, I didn’t find the didactic discourse as interesting as part B; I expected Lacey to craft a fictitious section with movement as we encountered in Biography of X. I don’t so much mind the experimental “let’s not create an ending” angle because, per Lacey, endings are difficult and middles are easy. However, this narrative möbius strip “that resist[s] . . . completion” is not as balanced in the mortaring together of the two halves as I hoped. For this reason, I rate The Möbius Book 2.5 stars. I wonder if reading A before B would have mitigated this.

Conversely, the unflinching divorce memoir worked for me. I understood her choice to marry her past confidence in her religion and partner, both of which offered certainty in their respective ways. Yet she abruptly reaches a moment when the known facts become unreal, and the only way forward is to discover better facts. Her childhood authority figures and church teach a works-based salvation that harshly shames the unpolished sinner and lacks an assurance of saving grace; The Reason manipulates, gaslights, and deems his narcissism as love. She recognizes her wrongly placed trust. The unrestrained content in this section, written in Lacey’s restrained, somber tone, paired well.

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.

[claire]

unfortunately i read this during arguably the worst month of my life but somehow i managed to enjoy it!

full review to come LOVE YOU FSG!!!

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Catherine Lacey has a NEW BOOK! And it's The Möbius Book! And I got an ARC! And it's chaotic!

I think it's safe to say you never really know what you're going to get with Lacey, and this is no exception. A hybrid book, it includes a fiction half and a nonfiction half, inverted, so you choose what to read first, then flip it to read the other. I'm down!

"I, too, was tired of people telling me there were good things in my future, and though I distantly understood they were right, I didn't care about that future goodness, as I was living so intensely in the present that the future had no meaning. It did not exist. It did not exist at all."

I purposely read the nonfiction part first, because it was on the back side of the book, and it is a bit of a dive into Lacey's relationship with The Reason, also known as writer Jesse Ball. This was an awkward read for me, maybe because I've liked Jesse Ball a lot. And we're obviously getting only Lacey's side of the Möbius strip, wherein Ball is portrayed as a jerk...though Lacey doesn't come off great either. Where Ball is manipulative and frequently suggests he knows her well enough to tell her how she feels, Lacey doesn't exactly challenge him on any of this. This passiveness (and pining for him post-breakup) were grating.

Added to this narrative is Lacey's "breakup" with Catholicism as a child, which I guess is supposed to read adjacent to her breakup with Ball. I didn't totally see it...maybe in terms of both breakups involving betrayal? In any case, this part of the book is a very personal account that shares allllll the tea, and what I'm honestly most interested in is just how much it will rock the small literary world?!

Flip over to the fiction part for a story that also involves breakups but is more about platonic love. Two women commiserate over their relationships ending (one due to abuse, the other infidelity). They also talk about faith. One of them talks to a dog, at some point. And most interestingly, there is a pool of blood showing under the neighbor's apartment door they keep absentmindedly wondering if they should do anything about.

To be honest, I had a hard time keeping these characters straight. Part of me was trying to tie the story back to the nonfiction part...and getting frustrated when I really couldn't. These read like two separate pieces that are only vaguely thematically connected. Really, I was mainly interested in that damn pool of blood under the neighbor's door. It's the strongest piece of character development in the whole piece, imo, that neither of these two women choose to act on what they see. Maybe this is adjacent to Lacey's passivity in her relationship with Ball. Like, even just to call in a wellness check if they're too afraid to knock on the door or otherwise involve themselves. It's a pool of fucking blood! Do something!

I like Lacey's attempt to try something more hybrid here, I just don't know that it works. If the connection between these two stories has gone over my head completely, I stand corrected, but...

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS BOOK. wow. so real. so raw. leaving me speechless… strange how it was originally gifted by someone (who shortly afterwards became my Reason of a sorts) to read together right after it’s publication, but that didn’t happen & other things did later… & just felt the urge that I couldn’t resist to pick it up now… love the experimental quality too, the fiction & nonfiction mix, & Lacey is simply a favorite fantastic writer.

still processing & will probably pick it up again this month or in the new year, but these words in Lark’s review are speaking so much of what I want to say right now, so sharing here as I lack how to describe how needed this book is & meaningful to me at this moment:

“Sometimes a book comes along that feels deeper and more true than the words it's written with. I felt that about this book, this barbaric yawp of a book. The rage, the reckless rage, the self-destructive rage, the impotent rage because the man you're enraged with is smugly safe in his perception of the world and it's a perception that has already discounted you, has always discounted you, has already and always thought of you as an extension of his own self. To learn that you were always a mirror and no more. The funhouse, the horror, of seeing that truth, after thinking for years that you were seen. That you were loved. The language and the meanings shattered inside me as I read. I felt it deeply, as something true. A recognition.”

[Gigi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This made me wonder how much better contemporary literature would be if writers made enough or could support themselves or be supported effectively where they didn’t have to crank something out every two years in order to live. CL is a good writer, we’ve seen that, that’s not the issue. It’s that this felt very undercooked, like Catherine has given herself a half hour to cook up a very conceptual meal and now that everyone’s seated she won’t stop breathlessly talking about cooking techniques and quoting the Desert Fathers’ writings on tablescaping in hopes that no one actually tastes the bland food in front of them, even if they happen to chew it. Maybe that’s how autofiction is starting to feel in general, a decade plus in. I never know what it’s trying to prove by insisting on being so tedious. This particular incarnation of it is certainly dull, full of generalities and aphorisms, and sentences from Catherine and others that would go great on a magnet.

It’s a humorless mess generally, and I don’t mean it’s not funny, it’s more that it has no self awareness—it doesn’t hear itself, its absurdity, its complete lack of melancholy or even mood. The work is grounded by these a handful of very effective concrete, insane details about this woman’s relationship with her abuser, and I’m not saying I needed the book to be entirely that, but it just spirals out from them into generalities, truisms, and mush about conceptual vagaries padded by quoting other writers and various bits of traveling about and meeting up in various cities (you know the ones) with her fellow writers and artists all complaining about the difficulties of the creative class, including my favorite, the guy in Chicago ”who plays piano for a living.” It’s fine, I’m happy for him, but it’s just these seem like the only kind of people she knows and it’s starts to feel like an unintentional bit. My conceptual
painter friend was very sad, my novelist friend told of her writer’s block in the Matisse room, my Italian editor and deep personal friend... (At the Tolstoy museum, we sat and wept.) So I just wonder what could have happened if the book did the opposite of that when it spiraled out from the concrete, insane details, and then I wonder what would happen if good writers didn’t have to crank out a book every two years.

The fiction section is listless, contrived ephemera, and not even worth discussing.

This bummed me out man. And like, not in the way it was supposed to.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa! I liked this a lot. Catherine Lacey explores loss of faith (both biblically and in relationships), platonic friendship, writing and art making, the affect of physical space (dwelling) on ones personhood. She does so very tenderly in a style that reminds me very much of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The book is broken into two distinct sections A and B. Section A follows two close friends who are reconnecting after they have both been through significant breakups. As they reconnect they share stories that they experienced separately and together. Section B follows one woman after a breakup and it's broken into many vignettes that take place both after the relationship and before. Section A feels a bit more conversational whereas Section B is a bit more stream of consciousness - although both are exploring interiority. Our narrators (maybe Lacey herself) are grappling with what it means to know someone and to know oneself - to what point do we abstract our own memories to create a particular narrative? How much trust ought to be given to our own abstractions? Big things to think about that can sometimes be quite nice to think about.

My favorite line in the book and maybe my favorite line I’ve read lately is “…I cried discreetly in a coffee shop, and later a bookstore, a park, a museum, a pharmacy, then I stopped crying for long enough for Jackson to take a photo of me smiling beneath autumn leaves, and though I tried to repress it, I could not help but weep while crouching to pet a strangers dog.” Oof knife to my chest!! Incredible!

Another breathtaking one “Shedding books is something I hate doing, as a shelf is a kid of diary, a map of past and potential self.”

Reading both of those sentences and many others made me feel like Lacey was in my own head, and I think that feeling rocks.

Really thrilled to have read an advanced copy of The Möbius Book and eager to read more of Catherine Lacey’s work. This was my first read from her and I don’t know what took me so long. The Möbius Book comes out 6/17/25.