Eventually the twists and turns change something inside you. You absorb the wisdom and the capabilities with which others have surrounded you, or you react to what is lacking, and you move away from what is hard and toward what you need.

"Something is happening inside Edie, something outside the reach of language, and she first thinks it must be the dog again, but it isn't the dog. It was Edie, whatever or whomever Edie is, and finally a real fact about faith is coming to her..."

Someone in your life is who you want or don't want, or someone is the reason you have to want something else. You keep moving, Faith was "too intense for her to even mention — a hidden thing, more privately held than her own naked body." But then, maybe, it changes. There's a flip side. The tangle is how it reveals itself and remains a mystery.

This book is comprised of two seemingly unrelated sections wedged together. Book A is fictional and Book B is non-fic/memoir.

Book A, the more readable and interesting of the two, is about 40% of the book in total and is set between two women struggling to come to terms with failed relationships, while a sinister event takes place next door, about which the two only have an inkling. This section, Book A, should have been expanded into a full length novel.

Then Book A ends; full acknowledgments, then you flip the book 180° for Book B. It’s the two-books-in-one tête-bêche binding (see: Murakami’s Wind/Pinball). I read an eARC so unfortunately did not experience the flip fun.

Now, for me, Book B exemplifies this new genre of pretension (“high concept”, as another reviewer quipped) in literary fic/memoir that I have been seeing to crop up in the last couple of years. Especially seen in many “highly anticipated” books to be published this year or the next. Some elements of this kind of “high concept” genre include the disaffected or impersonal writing style, quirky punctuation/dialogue seen as “groundbreaking”, and when attempts at being perceptive just fall so incredibly flat. Side characters aren’t fleshed out and serve for the main character to draw conclusions about themself. Scenes are sketched out hazily and revolve around faux-insightful one-liners.

Ultimately, this book suffers from surfing the trendy prose wave. And a lack of quotation marks.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the ARC.

A formally experimental project with two covers and no fixed beginning, The Möbius Book is equal parts memoir and fiction—each informing and reflecting the other. The memoir half chronicles a real-life relationship: it begins with love-bombing and gradually spirals into emotional abuse. It captures the raw aftermath— Lacey’s incomprehension, her search for stability, for faith, for a way to keep writing when life’s mess bleeds into everything. The other half of the book is about three college friends as one of them returns from a long absence and whose recent past echoes Lacey’s own. The book is a meditation on storytelling, trauma, and doubleness—a fascinating, demanding read. I tandem-read the book with my friend Martha and, honestly, I worry I may have scared her with how obsessive I became. Especially with the memoir part. I tracked down a frankly absurd number of people referenced in the book and a wide constellation of adjacent publishing-world characters. Yes, I’m a gossip—but also the writing invited that.

In her write-up about it, Martha quoted Lacey who shared the book was an object of rage, and you feel it. If her goal was to convince you there’s a side worth rooting for—mission accomplished. Jesse Ball, write your own book. And I don’t feel even a little bit guilty saying that. As someone who's been on the wrong end of a disorienting, psychologically brutal breakup, I found myself cheering for Lacey all the way through. I think women are expected to be gracious and wise in our victimhood—and I loved that this book is very much not that.

As Lacey moves across the country in the wake of it all, staying with friends and trying to pull herself together, I was struck by how much love she’s offered—and how much she’s able to accept. Her artist and writer friends are also falling apart, each in their own way. I found myself wondering: is this a function of age (the obligatory midlife unmaking)? Or is it something about the artistic life itself—this open, porous quality that makes you especially susceptible to heartbreak? Is the same thin skin that makes you an artist the thing that leaves you vulnerable to messy, magnetic people? Is the job of an artist to be open to accept questionable romantic advances the same way they make themselves available and willing participants in odd exorcisms… all in the name of conjuring a super-human version of themselves, the one that creates SOMETHING out of NOTHING?! Or is that just what it’s like to be human?

This book was the third for me in recent memory (the other two were Notes to John by Joan Didion and Pathemata by Maggie Nelson, both of which I reviewed last month)... where I got a front row seat to a favorite writer’s brain and heart at work. In all three cases, the experience was a little discombobulating – I am not sure what to do with all this humanness you are sharing with me?! – but of all three, I felt that this one was the most generous and satisfying to a reader, because of the fiction section that lives side by side with the memoir. I read that part almost as a “let me now show you where all this life GOES once the writing floodgates open”... and maybe I am not correct to diminish the import of the section this way… but to me it read a lot like sketches, early drafts of how that type of novel might go and how the lived experiences of the memoir make their way into the core work, eventually.

The passage from this book that you will probably start seeing quoted and re-quoted:

Nearly every time I’ve written a novel, something happens 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, just beyond my awareness.

On a craft level, I think that this book is a master class on the question of how to write fiction that is personal without being autofictional. How the energy and minutia of lived experience makes its way into prose, how the made-up fictional story sometimes brings to light truths that are undetectable in real life – even if you are the master of perception as Lacey is.

As Martha mentioned, this book may feel a little too opaque if you are not familiar with Catherine Lacey’s work. However, if this discussion triggers something in you, please read Pew and/or Biography of X first / too.

Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the e-ARC!

I am so sorry to the author and publisher but this was a DNF for me at 24%. I was finding it incredibly hard to care about Marie and Edie and K and Marie's wife and their relationships to each other. I wanted to hold out for the non-fiction portion, but I just could not get past this first part. It was a bit boring, running around in circles to avoid the main issue. Maybe I've just been reading too much action lately, but this was not it for me.

However, I do love Catherine Lacey's prose, so I will definitely be reading others by her!

catherine lacey is doing interesting things here, and i appreciate her diving into her fascination with the mobius loop and how she was able to apply it to her book.

one part fiction, one part real life, two stories but one.

i think this book is one to reread to catch every nuance, and best read at least once beginning with each "end" (though there is no end) of the story.

if my partner ended our relationship via email i too would put my pen to paper because WTF!

A very interesting two-part book from Lacey, half novella and half memoir. I preferred the novella half, which feels restrained and thoughtful, sort of meditative in its movement in and out of memories. The memoir is very interesting because it deals a lot with the relationship Lacey had to another writer, and with some other very personal things, especially her loss of faith. The intersection between these two sections ranges from subtle (moods, ideas) to very direct (repeated images and anecdotes). I liked this a lot.

I have previously loved Catherine Lacey’s novels Pew and Biography of X, so I was very curious to read this memoir mixed with a novella-length fictional story that mirrors Lacey’s own feelings about her life and breakup. As an artist, I think she’s incredible at the craft of writing - her formal innovations and skills the sentence level are admirable. I’m not sure I always love a memoir that people would describe as “raw” (I think I would prefer more distance and reflection), and I don’t know that Lacey was always totally successful mirroring the dissolution of her relationship with her loss of faith as a teenager. But the structural experimentation elevates the book, and parsing out the novella - its shared vignettes, its increasing oddness, its thematic resonances - adds a lot of texture to the more straightforward memoir section. In the e-ARC I have, the novella comes first, and I wonder if I might have found it more generative to read it the other way?

Thank you so much to FSG Books and NetGalley for the eARC of this truly inventive work by Catherine Lacey that I know I'm going to return to again and again (have already ordered hard copy). As an MFA student who is starting to write both nonfiction and fiction concurrently, I've become fascinated by the threads connecting the two genres, especially when one writes fiction that is, in even the tiniest way, "inspired" by one's life. The Möbius Book is half novella, half novella-length memoir centered around Lacey's traumatic breakup with a toxic partner. The two halves are designed to be, yes, a Möbius strip—I started reading this several months ago, read the novella first, took an extended break, read the memoir section, then re-read the novella to close it all up, making it much easier to see the connections between the novella and the memoir.

However you approach it, the whole experience is brilliant and cannot be missed. I highlighted the memoir section like a mad woman. Like Lacey, I am currently understanding what it means to be "punked" by one's writing that one thought to be completely fictional: "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."

Highly, highly recommend, especially to other writers, and especially to writers working in both fiction and nonfiction.

An incredibly thoughtful exploration of faith, identity. partnership and grief. Catherine Lacey’s The Mobius Book is a memoir told in two parts, focusing primarily on her post breakup experience. The dialogue in part A was raw and extremely well done.. Part B is much more voyeuristic and slightly uncomfortable.

“In love you place your life in another’s hands and date them to ruin it.”

“I cried discreetly in a coffee shop, and later a bookstore, a park, a museum, a pharmacy…I could not help but weep while crouching to pet a stranger’s dog.”

A hybrid fiction/memoir piece with no real beginning or ending, Lacey’s latest work encompasses basically everything I love in a book: complicated friendship dynamics, relationship dissections, discussions about craft and art and artists, questions of faith, queer identity, mysterious pools of blood, dyke drama, etc. The structure of the book offers readers the opportunity to interpret and reinterpret the stories almost endlessly. This doesn’t feel like a trope or a gimmick, but a highly crafted formal experiment. And the writing, of course, is beautiful. Lacey’s writing is so precise that I could feel every emotional revelation like it was happening in my own body. It’s the kind of art where I was living alongside the narrators, learning with them, experiencing the world with them. The Möbius Book is truthful without being sentimental; direct without being cruel. Lacey is one of our most honest and inventive authors and this book is more proof of that!

This book begins with two friends, both newly out of long-term relationships, meeting at one friend's apartment. As they talk about their lives and their friendship, one of them is continually worrying about what she thought was a pool of blood coming out of the apartment next door.

Then the book switches to a first person account, a woman was left by her partner, a man who has emotionally abused her for years, or at least a man who treated her with a callous disregard. The narrator recounts her history with the man, who she calls The Reason, as she works through the end of the relationship, her work, her past and her possible future. The novel doesn't twist back into the original story, but we see how a writer uses life experience in her writing, with events she recreates in her fiction, changed in various ways.

Catherine Lacey is a brilliant and intelligent writer and it's a lot of fun to see how the second section is reflected in the first. Of course, some of the interest in this book is that it details the real life dissolution of the relationship between Lacey and another writer, Jesse Ball. In this, it feels akin to Sarah Manguso's Liars, and Manguso is mentioned in this book. This is an odd hybrid of fiction and memoir which works in surprising ways, showing how art is created out of life experiences.

📚The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey-Publishing June 17th, 2025 by FSG.

The Mobius Book is a hybrid work of fiction/non-fiction that looks at the breakup of a long relationship, and how that changes us. Lacey, a writer knowing for playing with form and structure gives the reader a book that is divided into two parts. Each section could easily stand on its own.

What blows me away about Lacey, is the complexity of words and sentences she delivers to make a compelling story. In a way her writing reminds me of minimalism writing-Short sentences, but every word and sentences packs a punch. Using these shorts forms of prose, Lacey lets the reader into her heartbreak, just enough to make you feel what she is feeling. Great work of fiction/non-fiction.

If you have never read anything by Catherine Lacey, you should start!!

Thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for the chance to read this before publication.

#booksaredeadly #books #fsg

This is the first book that I believe I have read in the genre of “auto-fiction,” and while the writing is interesting in a strange way, I think I just prefer a more linear format. The Mobius title leads me to believe that you can't believe what is true and what is fantasy, so I kept reading trying to figure out which was which. I get it that part 1 is supposedly fiction, and part 2 is non-fiction, but since a Mobius strip has no beginning or ending, I was not really believing anything I was reading -- there are lots and lots of characters to keep up with, too. But kudos to Ms. Lacey for writing in a format totally different to anything I've previously read! Thanks to NetGalley,,the author and Farar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC and the opportunity to read and review this book

Two books in one: part memoir, part fictional short story (each book accessed from the opposite cover. Literally flip the book like a möbius strip.) The memoir was, for me, most compelling in its depiction of growing up a devout Methodist (me) in rural Mississippi (me). Lacey’s faith-based questions illuminated my own confusing relationship with organized religion in a way I don’t think literature has before. Lacey also describes leaving a negative relationship and processing her experience in its aftermath.
The fictional story spoke to me in its symbolism. Marie’s friend leaves her awful relationship and comes to visit Marie in her apartment. I *think* Lacey was fictionalizing her real life breakup. In these characters, she killed the bad man (Marie’s neighbor was possibly murdered?), left the bad man, (Marie’s friend ends her dysfunctional relationship), and became the bad man (Marie confesses to the reader that in her same-sex marriage, she joked about how, since she didn’t carry the twins she and her wife had, didn’t nurse them, that she was permitted to be the “absentee father”. She seals the deal with a years-long affair and her wife ultimately takes the kids and leaves her). I would liken The Möbius Book to a piece of art, less a book to casually read. Very strong addition to the Lacey cannon.

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 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. Catherine 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 mind.

he subliminarity of Lacey’s writing often offers more than what’s on the surface. Mobius is a retangular shape, twisted and connected by its extremities, creating a reverse mirror of the same shape, but which part is the mirrored one?

More thoughts to come.

Rating: 3.5/5

In The Möbius Book Lacey creates a somehow never-ending story. The book, split down the middle, has a fiction and non-fiction part, which if you would reread it, would keep revealing things about each other each time. Although an impressive experiment, I found myself stuck in the fiction story. The characters, the stories they were telling each other and themselves, and a pool of blood kept haunting me after finishing it. Whereas the non-fiction part felt like a peak behind the curtain, which I actually didn’t want. Although there were incredibly beautiful lines and I raced through it, I feel like the memoir-like narrative felt like an explanation of the fictional story. After reading three of Lacey’s books, and wanting to read her entire oeuvre, I think a reader can already somehow look inside her head or have a (false) sense of being close to the author. The non-fiction part somehow felt like an unnecessary confirmation of that feeling.

Either way, Lacey proves again that she knows how to write and captivate her reader, how to build suspense, and how to make something incredibly haunting.

This was a DNF, but mostly because of me. Stories of introspective female relations are not for me. But I've read until 50% of the book and I enjoyed parts of it and appreciated that it was sharp and insightful. However, it really wasn't for me.

One portion of the book is a conversation between Marie and Edie about failed loves (and a mysterious stain outside a neighbor’s door). The other part is a memoir where the novelist, after a sudden breakup, begins to trace her life through her friendships, relationships, travel, reading, and memories. Each part is a continuation and a reflection of the other.

As with every memoir, the “truth” may lie somewhere outside the writer’s ability to observe and record. In other words, a memoir is true for the person who wrote it, just as our memories are true for ourselves. (And yet we have inevitably discovered at some point that relatives or friends may recall events in a far different way.) And perhaps fiction is just a different way for us to see truth.

My favorite quote from the book … "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."

I loved this book. I will work to correct my failing of having never read any of her novels.

Catherine Lacey has provided for me opposite poles between one of my least and one of my most favored books. Here, she generously opens herself, describing in both fact and fiction the wrenching she experienced following an unexpected breakup with a person she "shared a mortgage with." Living in the guest room of the house she had shared with "the Reason" she is inconsolable, finally moving out and cross country. Matching the reality with the fictionalized is a master class in creation.