The Möbius Book
-
- USD 13.99
-
- USD 13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub
Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and painfully true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. But through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, she charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and a heartbreaking—and heart-mending—exploration of endings and beginnings.
A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s power, and inherent danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Lacey (Biography of X) reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender. Reeling after a breakup, Lacey set out to process it with a "Möbius strip of narrative": the book's first half is fiction, and the second—printed backwards and upside-down, requiring readers to physically turn the book over—is memoir. In the first, a woman named Edie visits her friend Marie near Christmas. Marie has just noticed a pool of blood seeping from under the door of the neighboring apartment, but the friends merely drink tequila and reflect on their mutual friendship with K, a religious conversation Edie had with a dying dog, and the recent end of Edie's abusive relationship. Eventually, a cop comes to investigate the blood. The second half sees Lacey pick apart her own breakup: in the wake of an email in which Lacey's partner told her he met someone else, she recalls her strict religious upbringing, the function of fiction in her life, and her experiences with spiritual healers. Lacey's writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite ("A trust betrayed is always a shock. That is the hazard of trust"). Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author's fans will be glad they took the plunge.
