Lacey, Catherine. The Mobius Book. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2025. F; 8/25.

This book is well beyond ordinary. I enjoyed it and found it serious and agreed with many of the abstract speculations. The mobius metaphor seems to be about the continuity of life and fiction, to the point where we are given two parts to the work and told to choose one or the other to read first, as if it didn’t make any difference. I read them as they came at me: I think it’s the much shorter fiction first and then essentially a memoir which has features of being imaginary as well. The whole thing has a forthright graceful tone that suspended my disbelief. I might read it a second time.

The part I take to be fiction could be a short story, where Marie is visited by her former lover Edie who has just left her more recent male partner. There is an wide-ranging conversation between them and a coarse feminism emerges (“Men were created in order to destroy everything, and women were created so there would be one thing they couldn’t destroy.”). After reading that I was expecting more beratement in Andrea Dworkin fashion but that never materialized. Not liking men here felt more like an impermanent consequence of a bad relationship.

While the two women are talking in Marie’s apartment there is a red substance (probably blood) on the hallway floor coming out of the next door flat. Marie ends up taken to a police station and has an only partially coherent conversation with a cop which for me was the only awkward glitch in the book.

Then we experience the story of an unnamed narrator who if it is memoir would be the author. Again like Edie she has left a husband, referred to as “The Reason”, she being unhappily and partly literally thrown out of the home. We can cobble together the events of her subsequent life but the content of this longer portion of the book is much more reflective and psychological than narrative.

Reviews I’ve read tend to find the ambiguity abroad here possibly some sort of prevarication. But I’m a fan of graceful writing and what the author does in tackling feminism, religion, relationships, and writing I found both satisfying to read and agreeably sensible even where paradoxical.

Edie (and the narrator) had a Christian upbringing and her worldview remains touched by the lovely (though these days considered limiting) humility and belief that that early religious experience gives her later more agnostic life. While at a camp in late adolescence Edie finds a dog dying on the street and “communicates” with it, never actually hearing its grief and wisdom but in her powerful sympathy experiencing a reframing of the emotion of her childhood traditional faith with a different context.

There is in both sections of the book a persisting and worrisome trauma from controlling heterosexual relationships that have ended badly. And it’s credible straightforward struggling with that and its effect on her writing that give Lacey’s inner emotional rationales some of their surprising truth.

You needed to hear something that no one was going to tell you, so you told yourself. I don’t know why you don’t want to see it that way—there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself.

The Reason had the right to explain my feelings to me because he’d spent six years telling me what I felt and who I was, and had quite often been correct. Usually the version of myself he sold me on was more positive than the one I’d previously held. He believed me to be smarter than I thought I was, more capable, more powerful than I had previously thought myself. I began to believe him, and yet that belief brought with it a strict obedience to this person who had, it seemed, created me. Of course he had the right to tell me who I was, and what I should want or do. I had given him permission to do so.

Narrator returns to writing after her breakup and reflects on the emotional commitment of doing writing well:

Much has been written on the subject of crying in Manhattan, as writers tend to cry in public, and writers tend to congregate in New York City, and anyway, you could make the argument that half if not all published writing is a form of crying in public.

But at the same time she is running away a bit from the mistake she believes she made in surrendering her self-respect to the controlling husband, and she takes on a rebound relationship with someone she refers to as The Bad Idea, working her way through to what she hopes will be better writing:

The first reason The Bad Idea was a bad idea was that I knew I couldn’t trust him, and the second reason was that he quite obviously did not respect me, and yet in grief I was writing bad fiction and passing the time with other bad people and doing other bad things, and in comparison to all that The Bad Idea wasn’t so bad, ultimately, as he was intelligent company and he made me laugh and forget my troubles…

Eventually I found a kind of ambiguity that feels like a truthful way of facing conflict by understanding that some things are unreal by appearance only. Both sides of an apparent incompatibility can be very real. And one of the ideas that pervades this book is that writing and receiving good creative work can subsume that kind of apparent contradiction.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

Often I find myself writing about an apparent subject that is concealing an almost opposite object.

Well, often I find myself trying to end a book review or some difficult situation knowing perfectly well that I haven’t done a first-rate job. Haven’t really thought through what would be the best way to wake up to what’s really gone on.

I’m not saying this novel/memoir is quite on the level of some of the best things I’ve ever read. Never mind my temporary lapse here. I hope if you choose to give it a try you feel some of the excitement I really experienced experienced.

9.1/9.3