Catherine Lacey’s newest book, The Mobius Book, is part memoir and part fiction. The novel’s curious format, structured as two separate but connected stories that begin at each end (reader’s choice on where to begin), is inspired by the mathematical concept of a Mobius Strip. A Mobius Strip is a surface with only one side and continuous edges, which can be made by joining a strip of paper at each side and making two half turns—it’s a mathematical phenomena that challenges our conceptual understanding of time and space, and in observing it the viewer cannot differentiate the clockwise and counterclockwise turns. Its not a far leap to imagine how this Mobius Strip is a metaphor for Lacey’s project: a book about a breakup in which two people separate, but also a book about the infinite feedback loop of relationships, and the fluidity of beginnings and endings.
Beginning the novel, the reader can open to a sort of memoir in which a narrator who closely resembles Lacey describes the aftermath of her breakup with “The Reason”, a man whom she shared a home with and believed to be her life partner; or the reader can flip the book upside down and begin with the story of a woman, Marie, who discovers a pool of blood outside her neighbors apartment as an old friend arrives for a visit. Marie’s story is a beautifully constructed novella about two women relating the romantic failures of their lives: marriages that have fallen apart, affairs, heartbreak, and even teenage flings that feel consequential decades later. Marie, still reeling from her recent divorce and the betrayal of a close friend that precipitated it, never asks her friend who’s come to visit if she also noticed the pooling blood in the hallway, beginning to suspect it might be a manifestation of her own damaged psyche. The novella is a thoughtful and evocative exploration of grief and relationships, rife with metaphors and symbols that lurk under the surface.
I began with Marie’s story as I opened the novel, and recommending beginning with one side would defy the significance of Lacey’s playful but significant formatting, but I did enjoy arriving at the pseudo-memoir portion of the novel with Marie and her creeping dread in mind. The memoir portion begins with the narrator waking up in her attic, as she describes, “a guest in her own home.” From there, she details the dissolution of her long term relationship with this unnamed man, referred to as “The Reason”. The Reason is a titanic force in the narrator’s head, he was a controlling and domineering partner and shaped much of the way that the narrator conceived of herself: she’s long accepted his sweeping proclamations about her character as truths. A big part of unwinding herself from The Reason is also unwinding these fictions he’s told her about herself, which proves to be quite difficult, or as Lacey describes, “The Reason’s name had burrowed into everything, like glitter in shag carpet.”
The narrator begins piecing her life back together in these strange circumstances (the breakup was initiated by The Reason through an email informing her that he had met someone else), and like Marie, living with the dread and anxiety that accompanies a separation. The two halves of the book share symbols and images, and are bound by their thematic strands of spirituality, friendships, and the merging and unmerging of identities. Lacey’s book is a formally inventive work of autofiction that explores relationships and the complexities of their undoing.