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.

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.

At the heart of this raw and moving narrative is a central question about faith: its collapse, its absence, and how one rebuilds a sense of self after profound losses, first in God, then in romantic partnerships. Lacey’s work is cerebral and exacting, often probing the structures that shape human relationships. This book takes a dual approach to breakups. The first half unfolds as a fictional dialogue between two friends in a run-down New York apartment, both reeling from the end of relationships. The second shifts into a more memoiristic register. I found this slim book remarkably forceful. Or perhaps it only felt slim, given Lacey’s precision and rhythm, which make it hard to stop reading.

One of the most affecting aspects of the book, for me, is its portrayal of friendship. Lacey captures how friends show up through messages, opinions, shared apartments, books, and even bricks offered to be thrown against a wall in an attempt to exorcise a grief that is physical and unrelenting. (There is also a literal exorcism.) That texture of friendship stayed with me long after I finished reading. If books are meant to leave us with takeaways, which may not be the point, this was mine: faith falters, romantic love ends, but friendship remains.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the advance copy.

Beguiled by Biography of X, I was ready to go on whatever journey this book took me on without expecting anything but a good time. Once more I read cover to cover (or however that’s best described here). An investigation, a postmortem, a reminder that adults can do the trashiest, most audacious things when a relationship ends and takes with it your faith in a higher power. Engrossing and singular and worth your time.

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. <I>The Mobius Book</i> 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

There is nobody writing prose right now more beautifully or poetically than Catherine Lacey. I am in awe of how beautifully she strings words together to evoke just the right feeling. The Möbius Book is a perfect example of this; I highlighted more sentences in this book than I have in all books this year. The first part of the book is a story (presumably fiction written in 3rd person); the last half of the book is memoir. The two parts are joined in theme, feel, and shared experience. It is a book about love — lost love, a failed love, imperfect love, and hope for love, and through this the author explores herself, nudging to reader to also explore themselves and all selves. At times it’s a sad read, but overall it is hopeful, reminding us all of the beauty in, despite the pain of, love.

I appreciate Catherine Lacey’s writing so deeply, few writers explore interior lives the way she can.

When I reached the second half of The Mobius Book, I was struck by how much it reminded me of The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck. I mean that in the most complimentary way. Steinbeck conceived that work as a double-entry book: manuscript pages on the right, a work diary on the left. The two were meant to be intertwined, with the creative process running parallel to the novel itself.

You get a similar sense from Lacey’s work, it feels as if a second story was percolating just behind the first all along. Like Steinbeck, she’s humbled by the work and the process. Steinbeck eventually published his manuscript and diary separately, at the urging of his editor.

Lacey avoids that division. She never directly references the first story in her second act but instead deepens it, reaching further into the emotional details of the narrator’s life. Her struggles with faith, body and love are universal - I don’t know anything about her personal life, but her two protagonists lived to the best of their abilities. And that’s all any of us can really ask for.

It is an important, quietly ambitious work.

ARC provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux via NetGalley.

I read the first 130 pages in just a couple of hours, and I really enjoyed them. However, while the initial concept of the book intrigued me, it felt a lot like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a book I did not like because it just felt self-indulgent. I just couldn’t care enough about her breakup.

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.

Really strange and unsatisfying. Felt like a hit piece against a toxic ex, but given no reason to care. The two parallel narratives felt disconnected, and the author did not let us into her own healing journey with a new partner.

2.5 stars! i fear that this book just wasn't quite for me, though i did like quite a few aspects of it.

now i’ll start with the things i loved. i really liked that this book straddled the line between fiction and nonfiction. lacey really played around with form and structure in this book, and i liked that the book sort of ouroborosed itself in the middle to make the book into the titular mobius strip. i liked the fiction section and the moody atmosphere it created— i loved the slow creep of the blood behind the neighbouring closed door as the characters grappled with the greater struggle of losing faith in others, in religion, in the surety of the order of things. when the ground drops out from under you, when the order of things is shattered, how do you pick up the pieces?

things started to fall apart for me in the nonfiction section, as yes, whilst i did sign up for a memoir i felt as if i was thrown into the middle of a conversation with none of the context. this second part felt raw and oddly voyeuristic— i felt like i was reading someone’s journal or eavesdropping on a group of friends venting about their lives. it was just odd to be dropped in on little vignettes of lacey’s life, and i felt disconnected from it all. while i did struggle to connect with the book in this section, i did enjoy lacey’s further musings on faith and fiction in this part.

overall, i did enjoy that this was an experiment in form and i did like the interplay between fiction and reality, but i ultimately had issues with connecting and engaging with the story in its entirety.

thank you as always to netgalley and farrar, straus and girroux for the arc !!

This book is a nesting doll of narrative. It is like a piece of paper crumpled over again and then resmoothed. The job of the reader is to make up the bigger picture from the markings left behind.

The opening of the novel has the quiet tension and unease I enjoyed so much in Lacey’s novel Pew. A call in a dirty phonebox followed by blood seeping from underneath a neighbour’s door.

The narrative unravels with a very uneasy & very human drama. It probes relationships, violence & perspective with a light hand.

I enjoyed this novel and got through it relatively quickly. However, I couldn’t help but feel like the fragments could have created a more powerful mosaic for the reader, to forge a punchier novel in the style of Pew.

Would absolutely recommend to people interested in literary works on friendships, relationships and the role of narrative as something that bridges fiction, objective reality and personal perspective.

Fascinating book that originally starts out seemingly as a fiction book focused on a couple's dissolution, but then halfway through switches to nonfiction as the author decides she doesn't want this to be fictional anymore, she wants to talk about what actually happened. The two halves of the book loop into each other and create a fascinating reflection of each other. Definitely worth your time when it comes out this June.

I’ll admit a little bias here, because I might be a Catherine Lacey fangirl. Well, can you blame me, when she keeps churning out hit after hit?

I was super hesitant about a memoir-type story, because I typically don’t care for those, but I would have known to trust Lacey because The Möbius Book was phenomenal. The kind of book you read in one day because you don’t want to put it down, even though you know it’s the sort that you’d like to sit with, slowly, and let sink in. But that’s what rereads are for!

Lacey is so painfully relatable. Even though we have little in common and seemingly very few shared life experiences, I found myself nodding my head constantly throughout her stories, both halves, agreeing with her emphatically because I understand her feelings perfectly.

The format, the way the two halves of the book twisted into each other, was absolutely brilliant. I can’t wait to grab a physical copy to highlight and tab all over the place.

The first book in quite a while that I had to read in a single day because I couldn't pull myself away - a riveting hybrid-form text about the dissolution of a relationship and the clarity only gained in its wake. Love Lacey on a sentence level as well, just masterful work.

I absolutely loved this book. There are two parts to it which I didn’t know going into it and I was a little confused. Part 1 is a fictional short story and Part 2 is a memoir and I especially loved part 2 but feel like I kept thinking back on the opening story as I was reading the second part which was cool.

This was my first intro to Catherine Lacey and I’m so impressed. I was writing down so many beautiful quotes and thoughts and loved the pace of her storytelling, pretty amorphous but as you look back there is an obvious through line. Themes of heartbreak, grief, religious upbringings and lingering spiritual inclinations - all of which felt so relatable to me. That liminal space between letting go of everything you know without knowing what comes next. And leaning on others while you find your shape!

“Haven’t you ever tried to love or take care of someone despite being given ample reason that they cannot or do not want to receive your love or care? A faith it could go differently. An amnesia of how it’s gone.

Haroula thought for a moment, very still, then handed me a a half orb of orange. No, she said. Why would I do that?

Ah. Yes. A good question, I thought, a better question than mine.”

“It seems that optimism is free and pessimism costs you something.”

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book!