I really liked this. Seeing bits of Lacey in Edie was an interesting re-calibration of the magnitude of divorce. Lacey’s autofiction side depicts the devastation through a personal narrative while the fiction side in the third person creates a distance. This recontextualizes the magnitude/importance of one’s own personal life and sufferings. Do we really care that Edie has gotten out of a bad relationship? In reading the autofiction, I was devastated and angry for her/Lacey.

The mobius strip aspect of it is still something I’m puzzling out. In the autofiction side Lacey writes, “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”. There’s a lot of recurring thought about beginnings and endings, of relationships especially. The narrative is a set of prompts that resists completion, a trying to understand beginnings and endings from the very middle. As well as how a book is meant to have an ending, but the form makes it so that there isn’t really one. We end right in the middle of the physical book! So we’re always starting the same stories again. Much to think about, will be ruminating. Big fan of this endeavour!

"Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened..."

I fell in love with Lacey's writing reading Biography of X a couple of years ago. I believe I used the word "genius" when talking about her (I looked it up, I did). And that stands true with her latest, The Möbius Book.

Told in two parts, a memoir and a novella, The Möbius book is a story of unravelling and coming back together. In the novella, we meet two longtime friends, spending Christmas together in the wake of the end of their respective relationships. They discuss the past, love, and relationships, all while being haunted by a pool of blood (or is it paint?) slowly coming out of the apartment next door. In the memoir, Lacey describes the fallout of her longterm relationship with a man that she refers to as The Reason and the conversations she has with friends in the wake of the breakup.

I read the novella first, as this was the way that the eBook was structured, but theoretically you can read them in either order. I found it interesting having the big themes of the memoir presented in more theoretical, fictional conversations in the novella before Lacey herself expounded on them in the memoir (though I suppose, isn't the whole book truly Lacey?). At several points she draws attention to the line between fact and fiction in fictional writing, especially when a poem of hers, included in a novel, goes viral and is attributed directly to her, rather than the character in the book. With The Reason she laughs off the seeming similarities with her own life but also privately questions whether that line can be so clearly drawn. These types of dualities exist throughout the memoir, which is not surprising for a book about a relationship with a gaslighter.

I also found the discussions of faith, in both parts, incredibly poignant. In the memoir, Lacey constantly draws upon her childhood evangelism, discussing how it structured her life. She compares this, even indirectly, with her faith in love and relationships. She often uses language relating to faith when she discusses romance. She even has what can be called an exorcism at one point in the story.

Lacey is a skilled writer. I found myself underlining many phrases in the book simply for the sheer skill of their construction. Overall, I think I preferred the memoir to the novella. However, I do think that this opinion could shift if I read the novella again in the context of the memoir. What seemed almost random and disjointed at first read might be more grounded with a re-read. A little part of me wishes she had taken the "Möbius" concept a little further, weaving the two parts together a bit more. But perhaps there is more of a connection there that I am missing!

Overall, I inhaled this book. I think i will continue to think of it for awhile.

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

we love playing with form and combining fiction with nonfiction!

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!

A challenging, mesmerizing, emotional read that challenges both how we engage with narratives and how they engage with themselves.

Since Lacey sets The Möbius Book as the reader’s choice, I started in 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. This didactic section was not 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 endings are difficult and middles are easy. However, this narrative möbius strip “that resist[s] . . . completion” is not as balanced in the mortaring together 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 untrue, and the only way forward is to discover better facts. Her church teaches 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. I shared this review on GoodReads on June 16, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7638710124).

Lacey weaves her nonfictions into her fiction with thoughtful consideration toward how stories shape new meaning. Split into two parts, The Mobius Book almost has a spiritual quality that promotes reinvention and renewal, how writing unearths our greatest resolutions and revelations. Similar to that of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography series, The Mobius Book stands as its own relic attesting to the magic of what stories and books can achieve.

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