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

Two books for the price of one – an enigmatic novella (from the author of four previous novels: the last two of which “Pew” and “Biography of X” I have read) and a honest as well as accusatory and voyeuristic memoir which makes at times for an uncomfortable read, particularly for those like me who are (perhaps now were) fans of the fiction of Jesse Ball – Lacey’s partner from 2016 to 2021 (between both of their first and second marriages).

[Indeed, my review of “Pew” had an entire section reflecting on how “Pew” appeared to be in dialogue with Ball’s work (both being informed by his earlier novels like “Silence Once Begun” and “Census” and informing his later one “The Diver’s Game”).]

Returning to this book, the paper version I understand has two sections – each printed the other way round to the other, so that the reader has the choice which to read first. In the e-version I read the novella came first but I decided to invert the order.

The memoir beings in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of Lacey’s relationship with Ball - who is called “The Reason” (introduced as “A Man Downstairs was The Reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor”) – a break up accomplished by way of an email sent from one part of the house to the other in which Ball deigns to explain to Lacey what she has been doing wrong in their relationship, a piece of behaviour which it quickly becomes clear is of a pattern with the emotional and psychological abuse and rage-underpinned coercive control that Ball has exhibited throughout their relationship. Readers of Roisin O’Donnell’s brilliant Women’s Prize longlisted “The Nesting” will recognise much of Ball’s appalling behaviour and also see through Lacey’s eyes the way it traces across to his historical tendency to resort to physical violence outside the marriage (for example in street confrontations) and the way in which he cultivates the devotion of his students. Yes, it's one sided (of course it is - see the title) but anyone familiar with abusive relationships (or perhaps I should say who has taken the time to recognise them in those around them) will see very familiar patterns.

For those like me who have read Ball’s work (and as an aside quotes taken straight from Ball’s “Autoportraits” and Lacey’s “Biography of X” appear in the novel) we gain a new and disturbing perspective on the man behind his writing – what the New Yorker described in 2019 as his “spare strange [language]” with its themes of “human savagery, often state sanctioned and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance” (“The Diver’s Game” which David Heyden in the Guardian called a “parable about duty, morality and violence” sprang to mind for me).

The silence and effective absence of the narrator in Lacey’s “The Pew” also for me was subject to reinterpretation.

Most affectively for me - Lacey’s own New Yorker short story “Cut” with its embedded poem “if you’re raised with an angry man in your house/there will always be an angry man in your house/you will find him even when he is not there/and if one day you find that there is/no angry man in your house/well, you will go and find one and invite him in!” became an Instagram (and other Social Media) meme (just try Googling it) and Lacey tells us of the “tacit belief between us that the fictional poem had nothing to do with him, or our home” just as of course we realise it has everything to do with it.

Much of the rest of the novel deals with the aftermath of the breakup – Lacey conflating it with her loss of the fierce Catholic faith she had as a child (in which her devotion and literalness in faith went beyond even her devout family) and as she examines the seemingly broken world around her (seeming to her that all her friends are going through their own – often relationship breakdown based – traumas and difficulties) she seeks out alternative sources of consolation and truth both in serial sexual relationships and in quasi-spiritual ways including somatic healing, psychic druids and witches, culminating in an exorcism of a “little furry demon” from her leg (yes – really).

Unlike some other readers (believers and non-believers) this part – despite its bizarreness - worked for me (albeit not necessarily in the way the author intended) by giving a sense of someone who has lost the one Truth and is seeking desperately to re-find it both in and outside relationships (and even in the author’s case through her fictional writing).

And this leads to the relationship to the fictional part of the book. Early on in what I think is a key text in the memoir we are told “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, has been expressed in the fiction, without my awareness.”

And the novella becomes then an example of that – the fiction that she may perhaps have produced purely in isolation had she chosen not to reveal the mechanics of the break-up, her childhood loss of faith and its new manifestation in spiritual searching, and the circumstances of her relationship via the non-fiction of this book.

In brief it is based around two friends – Marie (reeling from being expelled from her marriage with her wife in which she had two twin children – not genetically though related to her), her longtime friend Edie (also in the aftermath of a broken – in her case abusive – relationship, and now seeking solace in random encounters) who meet in Marie’s apartment to pick over their relationships. A third absent presence is K (a friend of both for many years – Edie for much longer) and the brother to Marie’s wife (in fact the matchmaker there), who was the one who discovered Marie’s infidelity which caused the breakup and now is acting as some form of intermediary.

Meanwhile though, and more in Lacey’s enigmating writing style, a pool of blood symbolically emerges from under the door of the neighbouring apartment, even while both Marie and Edie chose not to really examine its implications more thoroughly (perhaps as we as readers chose not to really examine Lacey and Ball’s writings). Less convincingly Edie relates at length her encounter with a dying dog who becomes an unlikely source of theological musings.

Certain devices we know from the memoir (a crowbar left behind by a previous inhabitant. Gillian Rose’s musings on the role of the “body, soul and Paraclete” of each party in lovemaking) recur alongside the obvious thematic resonances of relationships, break-up, aftermath and loss of/then seeking after faith.

And Edie’s former and abusive partner wants to dedicate to her his book of self-portraits (even though Edie knows full well who he is really dedicated to – i.e. himself) and of course Ball dedicated his own “Autoportraits” to Lacey.

The book overall is not entirely successful in either part – it is not so much (as the author implies in the passage in which I open my review and which gives the book its title) the lack of endings, but actually in each case the entire concluding part of the section: the talking theological dying dog should have been dropped and the furry demon exorcised from the text rather than the author’s leg. Both are metaphors for storytelling in the widest sense and for fiction but both simultaneously over the top and over laboured.

But I do think this book is a fascinating approach to fiction, memoir and auto-fiction and one which sheds new (and uncomfortable) light on both Lacey and Ball’s novels.

I came to 'The Möbius Book' with high expectations after 2023's fantastic 'Biography of X' and while it didn't quite live up to its predecessor, there is a lot her both to admire and enjoy. First, the structure, separated into a more straightforwardly and uneasy fictional narrative and a second more autobiographical text, invites the reader to draw comparisons and think deeply about the nature of narrative authenticity. Second, both narratives are short, revealing, quite wounded and vulnerable, but Lacy's lightness of touch enables her to avoid solipsism and self-indulgence. It's a book about writing, full of asides like "What I think I’m doing when I write a novel and what I later realize I’ve done is so out of sync that I’ve felt repeatedly shocked and sometimes embarrassed at how I’ve tricked myself once again". If you don't like that kind of thing, avoid this book. If you do (and I do), it is worth your time and may stay in your mind for a while after you finish. It's a slightly unnerving read and the all the better for that.

"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.

For me, The Mobius Book was about male anger and male control, and it's terrible impact on women.
It's mostly about endings: the brutality of endings, the neccesity and tragedy of endings, making sense of endings.
In this book, women inexplicably allow themselves to be controlled and gaslighted by men, in the mistaken belief that the gaslighting and control is actually love.

In The Möbius Book, Catherine Lacey delivers a striking blend of memoir and fiction—a meditation on love, loss, and the looping nature of identity. Written in the aftermath of personal upheaval, the book blurs the boundaries between narrative and reflection, inviting readers into a form as infinite and mysterious as the Möbius strip itself. With her characteristic clarity and poetic restraint, Lacey examines the emotional residues of heartbreak and the ways we seek meaning through memory, belief, and reinvention. It’s a bold, shape-shifting work—part confession, part philosophical inquiry—that deepens with each turn.

The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey is an absorbing and compelling read. Vulnerable, raw, honest, thought-provoking and interesting. I think fans of writers such as Sarah Manguso, Deborah Levy and Ali Smith would enjoy it.