A Möbius strip is a looped, one-sided surface without boundaries, which a 2021 Scientific American article describes as “an artist’s reverie and a mathematician’s feat.” It’s a non-orientable surface; within it, clockwise and counterclockwise are indistinguishable, and any object taking a journey on the surface of the strip will, if it goes far enough, end up back where it started.
The Möbius Book (FSG), Catherine Lacey’s visceral, slippery new work, has identical, flipped covers and two discrete but linked parts, so that readers will have different experiences depending on which portion they read first. Open it on one side, and you begin a novella in which two friends, Marie and Edie, spend Christmas in Marie’s apartment—both in the wake of breakups, Marie with a wife she has betrayed, Edie with an abusive man—while, in the apartment next door, a pool of what appears to be blood seeps from under the door. Flip the book over and you start a memoir of the nomadic months Lacey spent staying with various friends following her real-life breakup from her unnamed former partner, a well known writer who, Lacey writes, ended their relationship via an email he sent while they were both in the house they shared. (A representative of her former partner didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The book’s halves meet in the middle with two identical acknowledgments, works cited, and mastheads listing the FSG staff that worked on the book.
Following her breakup, Lacey went a year not writing any fiction at all. “That was the first time in my adulthood that that happened,” she tells me. Instead, she was working on the earliest kernels of what would become the memoir portion of The Möbius Book, which began as entries in the “mess” of a journal she keeps compulsively. Initially, she thought it might take the shape of an essay; later, once she connected her current experience to her adolescent loss of faith, having been a devout child raised in the Methodist Church—a topic she’d been attempting to put to words since she was in her early 20s—she realized the project might need a little more room to breathe.
The first draft, she says, was “longer, it was a bit angrier, it was a bit more in the heat of that first moment.” After an inconclusive meeting with her editors in the fall of 2022, she put it aside. When she returned to it about a year later, she thought she might scrap the memoir completely and rewrite it as a novel, and at a residency in Switzerland, she wrote the entire novella in three weeks, the characters arriving as “a crucible for two years of thinking about relationships, religion, all this stuff.” The fiction, she says, rather than replacing the memoir, shed “the right kind of light and complication” onto it. The result is a brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human.
Lacey in conversation is open, generous. When I reach her via Zoom she’s at her home in Mexico City, which she shares with her husband, the novelist Daniel Saldaña París, who makes a late-stage appearance in the memoir portion of Möbius. For the last few years she’s been learning Spanish, an experience that has returned her to a “childlike” state of heightened misunderstanding. “I’m very much in the middle where you hear stuff and you’re like, Yes, that’s what I mean. But you can’t get it to come out of your mouth.” The process, she says, is “changing the way I’m listening to people, and changing the way I’m thinking about how we communicate ourselves.” Fruitful territory for a writer who’s been exploring identity and connection since her very first novel.
Vanity Fair: There are overlaps that ripple across the memoir and the novella, some that are more hazy and thematic, and some that are very concrete. For instance, someone calls Marie “easy to love,” which is something one of your friends says to you in the memoir portion. Did those bubble up subconsciously, or did you go back and put them in afterwards to thread the halves together?
