In her new hybrid work, The Möbius Book, Catherine Lacey sets a novella-length piece of fiction next to a memoir, calling them “Book A” and “Book B.” Book A, the fiction piece, follows longtime friends Marie and Edie through a long night as they try to comfort each other, both having suffered a bad breakup, while a pool of blood spreads from the neighboring apartment into the shared hallway. Edie has returned from traveling after leaving an abusive relationship. She still seems to be mid-crisis, living a pattern of one troubled relationship after another. Marie too is in crisis: Her wife has kicked her out, and she’s renting a barely furnished walk-up apartment in the city.
The story moves between viewpoints, sometimes abruptly, and we learn the details of Edie’s abusive relationship. Edie and Marie were also once best friends with a person referred to as K, the sibling of Marie’s ex-wife. K now refuses to speak to Marie, but they serve as an intermediary between Edie and her abusive ex-partner.
Much of Book A is given over to Marie’s and Edie’s memories about recent and past relationships. Even with such interiority, the story has a theatrical feel, with its bare-bones setting of the temporary urban apartment, its lack of context and the threat of some calamity next door. The reader is dropped into this night and its stretches of unadorned dialogue.
Book B moves into a memoirish first-person narration, recounting the breakdown of Lacey’s relationship with a man she calls The Reason and her peripatetic life afterward as she stays with an array of friends, recovering. From the first pages, it’s clear that her ex was controlling and abusive: He frequently told her what she thought, said they didn’t need to converse because he knew what she was thinking and sometimes acted violently.
Book B’s narration feels like discursive conversation with an eloquent friend. Lacey drops in memories and anecdotes as she tries to reconcile this difficult breakup with other pieces of her life—her conservative Catholic upbringing and later loss of faith, an eating disorder, a season of crying uncontrollably in New York City.
Books A and B are bound upside down in relation to each other, with A beginning at one side of the book, and B beginning at the other. The two parts occasionally echo each other across pages and time—the Lacey of Book B is akin to Edie of Book A—offering Möbius strip-like views of a life. Experimental in its style and heartfelt in its tone, The Möbius Book asks readers to take part in its experiment by choosing whether to begin with A or B. Fans of Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Lacey’s 2023 novel, The Biography of X, will find much to admire here.