I read the first 130 pages in just a couple of hours, and I really enjoyed them. However, while the initial concept of the book intrigued me, it felt a lot like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a book I did not like because it just felt self-indulgent. I just couldn’t care enough about her breakup.

I met Avery at MoMA to see a Matisse exhibit, and she asked me how writing was going, and I asked her how writing was going, and we both admitted it wasn’t really going so well lately. Our trouble was a shared one: we were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle. It was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren’t exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative

Two books for the price of one – an enigmatic novella (from the author of four previous novels: the last two of which “Pew” and “Biography of X” I have read) and a honest as well as accusatory and voyeuristic memoir which makes at times for an uncomfortable read, particularly for those like me who are (perhaps now were) fans of the fiction of Jesse Ball – Lacey’s partner from 2016 to 2021 (between both of their first and second marriages).

[Indeed, my review of “Pew” had an entire section reflecting on how “Pew” appeared to be in dialogue with Ball’s work (both being informed by his earlier novels like “Silence Once Begun” and “Census” and informing his later one “The Diver’s Game”).]

Returning to this book, the paper version I understand has two sections – each printed the other way round to the other, so that the reader has the choice which to read first. In the e-version I read the novella came first but I decided to invert the order.

The memoir beings in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of Lacey’s relationship with Ball - who is called “The Reason” (introduced as “A Man Downstairs was The Reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor”) – a break up accomplished by way of an email sent from one part of the house to the other in which Ball deigns to explain to Lacey what she has been doing wrong in their relationship, a piece of behaviour which it quickly becomes clear is of a pattern with the emotional and psychological abuse and rage-underpinned coercive control that Ball has exhibited throughout their relationship. Readers of Roisin O’Donnell’s brilliant Women’s Prize longlisted “The Nesting” will recognise much of Ball’s appalling behaviour and also see through Lacey’s eyes the way it traces across to his historical tendency to resort to physical violence outside the marriage (for example in street confrontations) and the way in which he cultivates the devotion of his students. Yes, it's one sided (of course it is - see the title) but anyone familiar with abusive relationships (or perhaps I should say who has taken the time to recognise them in those around them) will see very familiar patterns.

For those like me who have read Ball’s work (and as an aside quotes taken straight from Ball’s “Autoportraits” and Lacey’s “Biography of X” appear in the novel) we gain a new and disturbing perspective on the man behind his writing – what the New Yorker described in 2019 as his “spare strange [language]” with its themes of “human savagery, often state sanctioned and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance” (“The Diver’s Game” which David Heyden in the Guardian called a “parable about duty, morality and violence” sprang to mind for me).

The silence and effective absence of the narrator in Lacey’s “The Pew” also for me was subject to reinterpretation.

Most affectively for me - Lacey’s own New Yorker short story “Cut” with its embedded poem “if you’re raised with an angry man in your house/there will always be an angry man in your house/you will find him even when he is not there/and if one day you find that there is/no angry man in your house/well, you will go and find one and invite him in!” became an Instagram (and other Social Media) meme (just try Googling it) and Lacey tells us of the “tacit belief between us that the fictional poem had nothing to do with him, or our home” just as of course we realise it has everything to do with it.

Much of the rest of the novel deals with the aftermath of the breakup – Lacey conflating it with her loss of the fierce Catholic faith she had as a child (in which her devotion and literalness in faith went beyond even her devout family) and as she examines the seemingly broken world around her (seeming to her that all her friends are going through their own – often relationship breakdown based – traumas and difficulties) she seeks out alternative sources of consolation and truth both in serial sexual relationships and in quasi-spiritual ways including somatic healing, psychic druids and witches, culminating in an exorcism of a “little furry demon” from her leg (yes – really).

Unlike some other readers (believers and non-believers) this part – despite its bizarreness - worked for me (albeit not necessarily in the way the author intended) by giving a sense of someone who has lost the one Truth and is seeking desperately to re-find it both in and outside relationships (and even in the author’s case through her fictional writing).

And this leads to the relationship to the fictional part of the book. Early on in what I think is a key text in the memoir we are told “nearly every time I’ve written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, has been expressed in the fiction, without my awareness.”

And the novella becomes then an example of that – the fiction that she may perhaps have produced purely in isolation had she chosen not to reveal the mechanics of the break-up, her childhood loss of faith and its new manifestation in spiritual searching, and the circumstances of her relationship via the non-fiction of this book.

In brief it is based around two friends – Marie (reeling from being expelled from her marriage with her wife in which she had two twin children – not genetically though related to her), her longtime friend Edie (also in the aftermath of a broken – in her case abusive – relationship, and now seeking solace in random encounters) who meet in Marie’s apartment to pick over their relationships. A third absent presence is K (a friend of both for many years – Edie for much longer) and the brother to Marie’s wife (in fact the matchmaker there), who was the one who discovered Marie’s infidelity which caused the breakup and now is acting as some form of intermediary.

Meanwhile though, and more in Lacey’s enigmating writing style, a pool of blood symbolically emerges from under the door of the neighbouring apartment, even while both Marie and Edie chose not to really examine its implications more thoroughly (perhaps as we as readers chose not to really examine Lacey and Ball’s writings). Less convincingly Edie relates at length her encounter with a dying dog who becomes an unlikely source of theological musings.

Certain devices we know from the memoir (a crowbar left behind by a previous inhabitant. Gillian Rose’s musings on the role of the “body, soul and Paraclete” of each party in lovemaking) recur alongside the obvious thematic resonances of relationships, break-up, aftermath and loss of/then seeking after faith.

And Edie’s former and abusive partner wants to dedicate to her his book of self-portraits (even though Edie knows full well who he is really dedicated to – i.e. himself) and of course Ball dedicated his own “Autoportraits” to Lacey.

The book overall is not entirely successful in either part – it is not so much (as the author implies in the passage in which I open my review and which gives the book its title) the lack of endings, but actually in each case the entire concluding part of the section: the talking theological dying dog should have been dropped and the furry demon exorcised from the text rather than the author’s leg. Both are metaphors for storytelling in the widest sense and for fiction but both simultaneously over the top and over laboured.

But I do think this book is a fascinating approach to fiction, memoir and auto-fiction and one which sheds new (and uncomfortable) light on both Lacey and Ball’s novels.

Really strange and unsatisfying. Felt like a hit piece against a toxic ex, but given no reason to care. The two parallel narratives felt disconnected, and the author did not let us into her own healing journey with a new partner.

2.5 stars! i fear that this book just wasn't quite for me, though i did like quite a few aspects of it.

now i’ll start with the things i loved. i really liked that this book straddled the line between fiction and nonfiction. lacey really played around with form and structure in this book, and i liked that the book sort of ouroborosed itself in the middle to make the book into the titular mobius strip. i liked the fiction section and the moody atmosphere it created— i loved the slow creep of the blood behind the neighbouring closed door as the characters grappled with the greater struggle of losing faith in others, in religion, in the surety of the order of things. when the ground drops out from under you, when the order of things is shattered, how do you pick up the pieces?

things started to fall apart for me in the nonfiction section, as yes, whilst i did sign up for a memoir i felt as if i was thrown into the middle of a conversation with none of the context. this second part felt raw and oddly voyeuristic— i felt like i was reading someone’s journal or eavesdropping on a group of friends venting about their lives. it was just odd to be dropped in on little vignettes of lacey’s life, and i felt disconnected from it all. while i did struggle to connect with the book in this section, i did enjoy lacey’s further musings on faith and fiction in this part.

overall, i did enjoy that this was an experiment in form and i did like the interplay between fiction and reality, but i ultimately had issues with connecting and engaging with the story in its entirety.

thank you as always to netgalley and farrar, straus and girroux for the arc !!

This book is a nesting doll of narrative. It is like a piece of paper crumpled over again and then resmoothed. The job of the reader is to make up the bigger picture from the markings left behind.

The opening of the novel has the quiet tension and unease I enjoyed so much in Lacey’s novel Pew. A call in a dirty phonebox followed by blood seeping from underneath a neighbour’s door.

The narrative unravels with a very uneasy & very human drama. It probes relationships, violence & perspective with a light hand.

I enjoyed this novel and got through it relatively quickly. However, I couldn’t help but feel like the fragments could have created a more powerful mosaic for the reader, to forge a punchier novel in the style of Pew.

Would absolutely recommend to people interested in literary works on friendships, relationships and the role of narrative as something that bridges fiction, objective reality and personal perspective.

Fascinating book that originally starts out seemingly as a fiction book focused on a couple's dissolution, but then halfway through switches to nonfiction as the author decides she doesn't want this to be fictional anymore, she wants to talk about what actually happened. The two halves of the book loop into each other and create a fascinating reflection of each other. Definitely worth your time when it comes out this June.

I’ll admit a little bias here, because I might be a Catherine Lacey fangirl. Well, can you blame me, when she keeps churning out hit after hit?

I was super hesitant about a memoir-type story, because I typically don’t care for those, but I would have known to trust Lacey because The Möbius Book was phenomenal. The kind of book you read in one day because you don’t want to put it down, even though you know it’s the sort that you’d like to sit with, slowly, and let sink in. But that’s what rereads are for!

Lacey is so painfully relatable. Even though we have little in common and seemingly very few shared life experiences, I found myself nodding my head constantly throughout her stories, both halves, agreeing with her emphatically because I understand her feelings perfectly.

The format, the way the two halves of the book twisted into each other, was absolutely brilliant. I can’t wait to grab a physical copy to highlight and tab all over the place.

The first book in quite a while that I had to read in a single day because I couldn't pull myself away - a riveting hybrid-form text about the dissolution of a relationship and the clarity only gained in its wake. Love Lacey on a sentence level as well, just masterful work.

I absolutely loved this book. There are two parts to it which I didn’t know going into it and I was a little confused. Part 1 is a fictional short story and Part 2 is a memoir and I especially loved part 2 but feel like I kept thinking back on the opening story as I was reading the second part which was cool.

This was my first intro to Catherine Lacey and I’m so impressed. I was writing down so many beautiful quotes and thoughts and loved the pace of her storytelling, pretty amorphous but as you look back there is an obvious through line. Themes of heartbreak, grief, religious upbringings and lingering spiritual inclinations - all of which felt so relatable to me. That liminal space between letting go of everything you know without knowing what comes next. And leaning on others while you find your shape!

“Haven’t you ever tried to love or take care of someone despite being given ample reason that they cannot or do not want to receive your love or care? A faith it could go differently. An amnesia of how it’s gone.

Haroula thought for a moment, very still, then handed me a a half orb of orange. No, she said. Why would I do that?

Ah. Yes. A good question, I thought, a better question than mine.”

“It seems that optimism is free and pessimism costs you something.”

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book!

Really enjoyed this, but not quite as much as I hoped I would. I was intrigued by the premise – "a hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending" – and based on Lacey's other experiments with form in Biography of X, I was excited to see what she'd bring to the table with this one. To that end, I was somewhat disappointed. I appreciated the interconnectedness of Book A and Book B, and I already feel due for a re-read of the first half to pick up on more of those echoing details. But I didn't find Book B, the memoir/autofiction piece, to be particularly structurally innovative in the ways I expected. I do wonder if I'd feel differently holding a paper copy rather than a digital one, and I'm curious if there's an element of Lacey's supposed experimental form that is better captured in the material layout of a printed book.

To Lacey's credit, The Mobius Book was beautiful and reflective and alluringly gossipy and full of musings on faith that hit really hard, but I just don't think I'd describe the book overall to be quite as genre-bending as intended.

A phenomenal read regardless, and I'm very grateful to NetGalley for the ARC.

My favorite new book so far this year! Lacey is just a genius. Her work is again very complex but compulsively readable. I found something to underline every other page, and I'm not even much of an annotator. Can't wait for this one to come out.

CATHERINE LACEY HAS DONE IT AGAIN.

I was waiting for her to drop a memoir... all of her books have the feeling of one, in some small way, so this feels natural. I appreciate and am inspired so much by her ability to be contemplative and emotional and intelligent in a way that is so engaging and I continue wanting more. I value and love her attentiveness to emotion.

Forever a Catherine Lacey fan.

This is a memoir but I honestly forget when I picked it up. Then I was very confused. Then I remembered it was a memoir. It read like an out of body experience and if you're looking for a classic memoir then this probably isn't for you. BUT if you're me and like this kind of thing then you're in for a treat. It feels like she's secretly (but also very publicly via a published book) calling out her abusive ex without saying his name, though I feel like it'd be pretty easy to identify who he is, I haven't tried tbh. I do think it's interesting that she referred to him as "The Reason" the entire time; aside from keeping him anonymous isn't that giving him a little too much credit - positive or negative. If he was "The Reason" then what would she name herself?

There are two parts to this book and after you read through both of them you can tell why she's gone with the Möbius theme here: where does one end and the next begin? Where does her fiction come from? Does life imitate art or does art imitate life?

I think this one'll stick with me for a bit. Also it's pretty weird to read a page in a book that references a tattoo of cicada on a forearm who you have a tattoo of a cicada on your forearm

"We were looking for endings, but all we could find was more middle".

The Mobius Book is one of the most bizarre things I've ever read. It's completely absorbing and totally defies rating or classification. A hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, it loops and folds back on itself, mirroring the relentless human experience of constantly searching for meaning in a world that refuses to offer any. Lacey captures this existential ache with such poignance, tracing the contours of faith-- its loss, its presence, and its quiet and persistent return -- in a way I've never read before.

There's a lot to love about this book, but my favorite thing is that it is one of the most beautiful descriptions of finding and losing one's faith that I've ever read outside of a religious text. Not just faith in God (but that's there too), but faith in love, faith in certainty, and in the stories we tell ourselves.

I have no idea how to categorize this book, and I think that's probably the point. Just like love and faith, this book refuses to be pinned down. If there is any justice in the literary world, The Mobius Book should launch Catherine Lacey into the absolute stratosphere.

Wowwwwee! Catherine Lacey does it again. This book is divided into two sections, one fictional, following a woman spending a night with her good friend after they have both gone through tumultuous breakups, and the other story following Lacey after an unexpected breakup. The first story feels pretty dark and uncertain while the second part of the book feels a bit more inquisitive and hopeful. I found the second half of the book more intriguing through the beautifully introspective journey of how Lacey was able to get through her break up. We see all the deep connections she has with her many friends. I think this book would be great for anyone going through a breakup.

This is a striking book by Lacey that takes two different narrative approaches to a central story of loss, grief and anger: on one side is a fictional piece involving two female friends who are both experiencing bad break-ups; on the other is a memoir from 'Lacey' (and I put that in brackets because as soon as one starts writing, there is always a distance between author and self, whether acknowledged or not, as experience is transmuted into story) based on her breakup with fellow author [author:Jesse Ball|285976].

The two narratives touch points around thematics but also with motifs, notably a crow-bar left behind in an apartment by a previous owner. These are angry female voices and the 'memoir' section recalls recent similar books by Rachel Cusk ([book:Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation|41086889] and Sarah Manguso ([book:Liars|200546858]) which negotiate their own relations between fiction and auto/biography.

There is something voyeuristic about the second half as we hear of The Reason's (the rather cutesy and capitalised term throughout for the narrator's ex-lover) violence and patriarchal sense of 'knowing' what the narrator thinks and feels better than she does herself, though she owns her own vulnerability and complicity with this dynamic. Toxic relationships seem to have much in common.

Lacey uses an extended conceit of loss of religious faith to figure the loss of a central love relationship, a metaphor which didn't really work for me. But with touches on her disturbed relationship with food (I was particularly incensed at the scene where The Reason points out she's put on three pounds and organises her eating and exercise schedule till this tiny amount of weight is lost) and the diverse, artistic milieu in which she moves and which nurtures her, there a grounding to the emotional heart.

There's a sense of watching how the raw material of the second section is transmuted into fiction in the first, making the two parts interchangeable and co-located, hence the Mobius strip - but their impetus was different for me as a reader. It's unavoidable, that sense of voyeurism in the second; but I was most struck by the imagery of the first, notably that haunting visual of the pool of blood seeping under the door of the neighbouring apartment: emotional life is dangerous, lethal and yes, bloody, this seems to assert.

If you've read Biography of X, you already know that Catherine Lacey loves to experiment with literary form. The Möbius Book is yet another ambitious and inventive work, structured like a Möbius strip without a definitive beginning or end. The book is divided into two distinct yet connected sections: one fictional, the other nonfictional.

The fictional portion is a haunting and compelling short story about two women navigating the aftermath of their respective breakups. Its eerie undertones are made even spookier by Lacey’s revelation at the start of the nonfiction section: “Nearly every time I've written a novel, something happens between its completion and publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn't know I knew while I was writing. That buried knowledge, that unknown known, had been expressed in the fiction, just beyond my awareness.”

The nonfiction section originated after Lacey’s tumultuous six-year relationship ended in an abrupt and impersonal email—sent from another room in their shared home. As her life unravels, she reflects on the collapse of her faith in God during her childhood and its unsettling parallels to her present experience.

I found this book deeply absorbing and am incredibly grateful to NetGalley and FSG for the advance copy. The Möbius Book will be released this June, and I highly recommend it.

Sometimes a book comes along that feels deeper and more true than the words it's written with. I felt that about this book, this barbaric yawp of a book. The rage, the reckless rage, the self-destructive rage, the impotent rage because the man you're enraged with is smugly safe in his perception of the world and it's a perception that has already discounted you, has always discounted you, has already and always thought of you as an extension of his own self. To learn that you were always a mirror and no more. The funhouse, the horror, of seeing that truth, after thinking for years that you were seen. That you were loved. The language and the meanings shattered inside me as I read. I felt it deeply, as something true. A recognition.

The first part is a short story about two friends who discuss the recent end of their relationships in an apartment that might have had a murder take place next door. The story discusses the philosophy of love and faith.

The second half of the book is nonfiction writing that is similarly philosophical in its analysis of Lacey’s breakup with her partner of six years. Lacey reflects on the relationship and its connection to her religious experiences, as well as other events in her life. I really enjoyed Lacey’s reflections and seeing the connections between her nonfiction and the auto-fiction from the beginning of book. I found Lacey’s reflections on her work as a fiction writer the most interesting. Particularly when she discusses her relationship with sex and sex scenes in writing, and the merits of including sex in fiction.

I think this book would be great for anyone who is or has had to process the ending of long relationship, or is evaluating the role that religion has played in their life and their understanding of love. Readers of Lacey’s other works will especially enjoy this book.

As a full disclosure and reflection, I don’t believe I’m the target audience for this novel. However, I do believe there is an audience for this novel that will appreciate the unique style and creativity of this intensely literary, genre-bending story.

For context, the story is divided into two parts: Part A, a fictional tale of two friends rehashing their failed relationships. Part B is a bleaker, auto-fictional narrative of Lacey’s own separation.

Objectively, I appreciated Lacey’s writing and the creativity of the “Mobius Strip” concept woven into the story. The prose in Part A was sharp and atmospheric with cutting dialogue that was easy to engage with. I found Part B a bit less engaging and harder to follow with a less linear narrative. The story in its entirety explores many heavy topics, including faith and spirituality, relationship collapse, an eating disorder, and anger/abuse. Throughout the narrative, each part vaguely alludes to elements of the other, illustrating interconnectedness, and the lack of beginning/end (ie, the Mobius strip).

For me, the concepts were a bit too cerebral and I found myself frequently distracted while reading; however, I believe this was more due to my personal interests rather than the strength of the narrative itself.

Overall, I would recommend the Mobius strip for its atmospheric prose and creativity. If you enjoy unique literature and don’t mind a bleak story without a resolution, your personal preferences may align better than my own.