Catherine Lacey is a fascinating writer. This book is written in two halves but both are about the same thing, the end of a relationship. Lacey describes the nuances and complexities of the relationship and how she lost her sense of self. Much of the book is about her friends who helped her in the aftermath of the breakup. Her style, insight, and voice carry this book. I connected more to the first person account than the third but both were compelling and beautifully written.

I adored every second I spent with The Mobius Book. I’ve been a Lacey fan since reading Pew a few years ago, and this book did not disappoint. Somehow, Lacey has grown even more talented as she explores themes from her other works and illustrates how complicated and cyclical life can be.

This book plays with genre, style, and narrative in ways that feel completely exciting. At its heart, this is a story broken into two halves about what it means to lose your faith, lose your partner, and lose the life you’ve built for yourself. I think it’s best to go into this one blindly so that the midpoint of the book hits as hard as possible.

All this to say, I highly recommend.

“‘There is no story that does not lead to another story,’ Edie thinks, or maybe it was the dead dog speaking again.
‘Which makes you wonder, then, what all these stories are for?’ Edie doesn’t quite whisper to the empty room.”

Thank you to NetGalley, FSG, and Catherine Lacey for this ARC. All opinions are my own.

I love Lacey and I love this book. Heck. So many feels in this one, it felt so real and just completely resonated with me. Really appreciated the playfulness of form too. Book A would be cool published as a perfect standalone in a review magazine. This book made me even more of a Lacey fan. Bravo, honestly!

Thank you for the ARC! This is the first Catherine Lacey book I have read and I really enjoyed it - both Edie and Marie's story and the authors mobius story. Although I'll admit I had difficulty putting them together and thought both were better off as stand alone pieces.

Lacey was able to illustrate a life well loved and lived, full of mistakes and strong, unromantic relationships. I want to seek out more of her writing.

The Möbius Book is Catherine Lacey’s sixth book and a blending of both fiction and nonfiction. The execution is well done, the format is innovative and compelling, and I was pulled along reading past my bedtime trying to understand how to folded and tied together. Very much a book about the interior lives of women, the whole thing had me in mind of Sheila Heti’s writing—whose work I find to be hit or miss. Certainly if it had been much longer it would not have kept my interest for a significant amount of time. There’s no denying the talent of Lacey—I’m just not sure I am the correct audience for this precise book. Nevertheless, I adored her debut Nobody Is Ever Missing and I continue to look forward to more writing from Catherine Lacey.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Catherine Lacey for access to an ARC. All opinions are my own.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. After a six year relationship, the parter of the author says he’s leaving her because she has obviously fallen out of love with him. Is this true? This loss sends her into a spiral of trying to move on, but finds herself wandering the streets of New York never far from openly weeping. It also causes her to stop eating, which brings her back to her youth and history of food struggles, which also brings her back to her strong religious beliefs when a child. The book seems, among many questions, to be about can you replace religion with work, art and lifelong friends.