“There’s nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself,” says one woman to another in The Möbius Book, acclaimed novelist Catherine Lacey’s new hybrid text, a book that juxtaposes fictional storytelling with lyrical memoir to stunning effect. The character speaking these words is pointing to the human impulse to fuse lived experiences with the imaginary in a subconscious effort to confer significance onto otherwise meaningless events. The book consists of a novella and memoir printed in reverse and can be read in either order, and thus The Möbius Book literally embodies this process.
The novella describes a night in a rundown neighborhood of an unnamed city when a woman living alone, bereft after a recent breakup, is visited by an old friend. The present action is dominated by speculation about what must be blood seeping into the communal hallway from a neighbor’s apartment, and Lacey achieves a creeping sense of dread that’s reminiscent of the work of Brian Evenson and Samanta Schweblin. But first we first see two people trying to reconcile different versions of their shared history in the aftermath of extreme fallout, casting their younger selves in sharp relief as they grapple with misbeliefs about their culpability in the shapes their own personal narratives have taken.
The conversation between the two women focuses on ideas about having and losing faith—and maybe finding it again—particularly as related to both religion and the nebulous space created by mutual romantic love. “A relationship is an act of faith—it’s a kind of magic or experiment, isn’t it?” asks one character, putting words to the book’s profound questions about relationships and structures that are completely intangible and therefore constructed entirely out of a commitment to believing in them. And the memoir section also begins with Lacey herself similarly unmoored from the life she once knew, enduring the effects of a sudden separation that threatens to entirely overwhelm her sense of self. Her breakup also ultimately prompts a reckoning with a loss of religious faith earlier in her life that similarly derailed her conception of the future.
Ideas and objects float between the two narratives until their boundaries begin to dissolve, just like on the Möbius strip of the book’s title. A teacup, a crowbar, a Christmas holiday spent alone: each of these—along with many other items, settings, circumstances, and ideas—come to carry networks of meaning that drift across both sides of the book, as the juxtaposition of memoir and fiction adds a layer of complexity that deepens the central conceit. The reader becomes a detective parsing truths veiled by the imagined and (re)constructed, and the writer then is akin to a puppeteer lurking behind the curtain but still participating in the same performance as her marionettes.
“I began to wonder if this has always been the reason I’ve written anything at all—to break reality down into a story, or to make a story into a reality,” Lacey explains after a rumination on the role of fiction writing in her life being that of some kind of trick she unknowingly plays on herself each time she composes a novel. The idea is that the self is suddenly revealed through the act of imagination, swept up in “the many strange undertows that can develop beneath the surface of a text,” just as a man depicted in the novella is pulled out to sea in dangerous waters in a moment of reckless ecstasy. There’s a question of faith here as well, but this time the concept is oriented toward the value of invented stories and their place in the human experience.
For those of us who’ve lost faith in fiction at some point in our lives as writers or readers, Lacey’s highwire act of juxtaposition in The Möbius Book serves to rekindle our conviction in the value of its ability to reveal rather than to obscure the mysteries of human life. “At most, a religious service might change its attendants, just as art can change its viewers,” she writes, “and perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.” And in this multifaceted and endlessly rewarding text, breakdown comes to represent not only rupture but also the tenuous beauty of belief in something entirely imaginary, even after it’s already been lost.
FICTION
The Möbius Book
By Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published June 17, 2025
This was beautiful Admin. Thank you for your reflections.