The Möbius Book – Catherine Lacey

[Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2025]

There are three kinds of people: those who like autofiction, those who don’t, and those who don’t care; Catherine Lacey’s new memoir-novel will appeal far more to the second and third than most autofiction.

The two stories in the The Möbius Book are readable in either order, then again from the beginning. Lacey’s first story—in the electronic copy of the novel, at least—involves a woman named Marie who mulls over mutual betrayals and a messy divorce from her ex-wife, K. Marie and her best friend Edie, who’s also romantically bereft, pace Marie’s apartment in their twin hells and struggle to communicate while blood seeps out the neighbor’s apartment door. Lacey pulls off this looping-of-perspectives with an omniscient third-person moving dreamlike between four dimensions: Marie’s grief and Edie’s, past and present.  

As a growing puddle of blood in the hall prevents the women from leaving, Marie speculates indifferently about murder while Edie recalls a crisis of Catholic faith after romances she had with young men when she was 20. When a neighbor calls the cops, a detective tells the women it was a heart attack-induced head wound that the dead man’s girlfriend “Didn’t try to help. She just watched the fucker die.” 

It’s clichéd to say that clichéd thoughts about big things like love and God often ring truest, but it’s true. And this is Lacey’s strong suit: limpid clichés self-aware enough to usually work— “Marie knows that harming someone is one of the fastest ways to become permanent in them. How terrible.”—but other times fall flat. 

Although Marie complains that Edie speaks about love in terms of “overblown metaphors” and “brooding one-liners,” that doesn’t stop Marie from speaking of love as something to be conquered, as a life placed “in another’s hands, and you dare them to ruin it,” as a fire that women set, and as a Super Mario game:

Yes, she’d said to Edie all those years ago now, I understand. There’s no other way. But Marie was thinking only of a classic Nintendo-style Edie jumping from crumbling rock to crumbling rock, climbing a 2D mountain to fight the final monster of the game. Except she has no idea, Marie thought, she has no idea what sort of level she’s reached. And there it was, that honeyed disdain that can develop between two people who know each other intimately yet still fall short of telling the most intimate truths.

It’s too sincere not to be painful, but here’s the catch: Lacey shows quite well that in early womanhood (in Edie’s case) and first love (in Marie’s), there’s no getting around that pain. This cringey clarity is the book’s self-vindication. The Möbius Book does exactly what it wants to do—the brooding via overblown metaphor, the brooding on that brooding, the romances unraveling, the meta-meditations raveling the book as it’s being written—in a fun, commanding way. Lacey writes how Meg White drums: layered simplicity, phrase by primal phrase. She bares the desperate need in even mundane human words and situations:

Both Marie and Edie’s compulsion toward the past was chronic, and this compulsion toward the past was also a compulsion toward the familiar, and their compulsion toward the familiar had an ungodly velocity and was openly hostile toward their various other compulsions, desires, even basic needs. Their compulsion toward the familiar was most powerful in the fact that neither of them realized they had it. This compulsion was, above all, extremely ordinary.

Then, speaking of compulsion, the book starts again: title page, acknowledgement, copyright, All Rights Reserved and all. This second story has a depressed novelist, presumably Lacey, who name-drops presumably real friends and experiences while cataloguing her memories after a mid-pandemic breakup with a man she’d left her marriage to live with. She names him only “The Reason.” His absence leaves her as without appetite as when she was a Catholic teenager, when her doubts as to how anyone could fully know another person led her to abandon faith in God and starve herself.

Between people, something unreal—a memory of something that didn’t happen, a delusion that things are fine—is quite real if shared between those people, because it changes them in some way. But Lacey has no faith that this applies to faith as well. God may be there, but it can’t be that God is there just because she believes in Him, any more than it would be true of Santa; yet even faithlessness changes her. When, as a teenager, she loses belief in heaven and, consequently, in her body as a temple, she stops protecting it “from poisons like lust and cigarettes at the Waffle House.” She stops eating altogether:

I had believed a body was nothing but an altar to the Lord, not my own, not anyone’s own, just something I was borrowing as the physical site of my devotion … For ye are bought at a price, Paul told us, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait.

In describing her “denying of the flesh perhaps in order not to lose Him” at an age “a little younger than the corpse of Joan of Arc,” Lacey’s novelist’s anguish over God comes off as a proxy for narcissistic asceticism. Deliberate self-starvation is narcissistic by definition. In passages like this, the teenage self-denial gets so imperious as to make Lacey’s character a funny target for the viral X post mocking the look-at-me performatism of this self-flagellating prose, however much self-wasting does come of real pain: “Ohhhhh my god u only had a iced coffee to eat today? should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party?should we invite bella hadid.” 

Autofiction itself is narcissistic by definition, because self-centered, even if the facts aren’t true to the writer’s real life at all (and then maybe even more so, in caring enough about one’s life to alter it in words). Lacey’s narrator even admits, if awkwardly, potential charges of delusion: 

I knew all those adults likely saw another delusional anorexic — silly thing, little girlish terror — but I didn’t (I couldn’t) mention my religious confusion or grief. To say you didn’t believe in God felt like taboo of the highest order.

The only “taboo of the highest order,” in the sense that it’s the only universal one, is incest. As the book goes on, its words doubt themselves, birthing something very like themselves, one order removed: words about words. Lacey’s narrator tries to work out her religious doubt by revisiting books that she had read in her past life with The Reason, and she and her friends flail in failing relationships with only ever too-new and too-old ways of reaching each other, hasty texts and out-of-commission payphones. 

Charging a woman who writes about her life as “confessional” can be a cheap way to devalue her work, but the fact is that all Lacey’s characters do is confess. Every single word of this book is a confession, and in this is its value. Confession is the most precious mode of communication because it’s how one gets redemption, whether from a god or lover. 

Yes, yes, autofiction has been done before, and in the last twenty years it’s catapulted a cadre of intense, ingenious writers like Tao Lin, Sheila Heti, Sam Lipsyte, and Patricia Lockwood into small- then large-press fame. Lacey doesn’t share much with them. Her elegiac, measuredly obsessive melancholy is much closer to an older generation of foreign autofiction counterparts like the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård, the British Rachel Cusk, the Japanese Yūko Tsushima, and the Swiss-Italian Fleur Jaeggy.

Lacey herself is Tupelo, Mississippi-born, and educated first in New Orleans, then New York, where she lives now. Each new book she’s written is less about geographic dislocation than a head-fugue moving between present and past. The place grounding a memory gives way to the telling and retelling, the reaching back and fleeing from it.

The heroine of Lacey’s 2014 debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, flees solid gray Manhattan to hitchhike numbly through New Zealand; The Answers (2017) propels an ailing woman through socialite and lowlife corners of New York; the later Biography of X (2023) finds its writer-narrator, CM, grieving the death of her mysterious wife, X, by writing and rewriting the biography of this woman who’d lived her premarital life wandering first through Europe, then the “Southern Territory,” a fascist theocracy seceded from the U.S. after World War II. But apart from tracing these landmarks of a love she’d never fully known, CM’s own whereabouts are hazy and, to her, meaningless. Perhaps this pretension to placelessness, this cerebral-peripatetic moping through the world detached from happier others, is the most New York-rooted landmark Lacey’s women could have.

Even more, then, the only landmarks of The Möbius Book are the details of how its characters fail to reach each other. In the first story, a bloody hallway prevents Marie and Edie from crossing a nameless city to reach ex-wives through old payphones and fleeting texts; in the second, the heroine is ostensibly in New York because the Lacey the writer is, but she moves from a vague cafe where she grieves The Reason, to a vague restaurant where she grieves, to a vague apartment where she grieves and grieves. Because he’s no longer there, there’s no “there” there. There is existential dislocation just in regarding the love of one’s life, a guiding certainty, as past.

Because of this, Lacey’s closest peer in both style and substance is the French writer Annie Ernaux, a frank, feral exhauster of love-crises and lover of fragmented chronology. And The Möbius Book does read with the philosophical, sometimes overdone clarity of a clean translation from the French: “Fucking without context or remorse—is this maturity or its identical twin, compartmentalization?” 

Autofiction without context or remorse—Lacey is this, but Ernaux is not.

Ernaux is so rooted in both context and remorse. She can’t remember her father, her mother, a man, without remembering class and place, dim cheap little rooms and the mutual embarrassment of social climbing—Lacey’s rejection of home and circumstance seems a high privilege. Lacey’s women don’t lose but flee their bearings for a world of nameless heartbreak cafés; there are certainly more readers who could see themselves in these chic private crises than in Ernaux’s naked unwashed shame, and Ernaux would be the last to say that living past-free (if one only could) would be a bad thing.

Ernaux’s project is to write how class and place not only limit what one can want but limit how one can escape it through dialect, manners, taste in men; this focus is most overt in her early books about family and most brutal in her later books about romance.

“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about,” she writes in Shame (La Honte, 1997). The novella trawls her first experience of shame: at age twelve in a Normandy village, she witnessed her father try to kill her mother with a scythe. The shame was not for the violence, as it would’ve been for Lacey and probably anyone who’s never had to use a scythe before, but for who did it. Ernaux’s bourgeois neighbors would’ve papered this over as a  love-spat or a private slip. For Ernaux, the event colored how she sat at the table, how her father feared seeming vulgar to customers at the small café-grocery he ran, how her mother washed him at night.

With love as with the poor, helplessness is hand-in-hand with force, attainment with degradation. To rise into plenty money, having only ever dreamed of it before, is to be unmoored from one’s origins, even as they linger in the unease of coarse words at a stiff-backed dinner party. Likewise, to need and hold a man who sends hot prickles through the body is to pawn one’s sense of self and pleasure at his mercy—an eros foreclosure.

Ernaux’s most well-known example is Simple Passion (Passion Simple, 1991), about her affair with a married minor Russian diplomat; though he’s beneath her socially, she’s the one humiliating herself, willfully suspending the monied distance she’s built between her Parisian suburbs and her parents’ Normandy: “All through the autumn, I waited for a man to call me and for everything else to lose its meaning.”

As in The Möbius Book, Ernaux’s diaries from this affair, published as Getting Lost (Se Perdre, 2001), have many pages about crying in public. The difference is that Ernaux doesn’t find it degrading to admit (maybe it’s a fish in water situation) that she knows well what she’s doing by making a spectacle of her suffering, and she knows well no one else has any reason to care.

When, in The Possession (La Possession, 2002), her dapper bureaucratic Slav replaces her with a woman she believes but has no way to know is richer, younger, and more beautiful, her jealousy is not the clinical grief of Lacey’s women but paranoid proletarian FOMO: “Jealousy was always ready to spring up inside me. The feeling that other people were always having more pleasure, more wealth, and that I was destined to be left out.”

For Ernaux, to grieve is to be soiled by places one can’t leave. For Lacey, to grieve is to soil oneself in places that may as well not exist. She writes as if love is something that happens in the mind alone, with no social stakes. Other than the bleeding dead guy and loves already gone, no one in The Möbius Book is ever anything to each other but a listening ear, and so the lovesick talk stylishly past one another, lazily overcerebral as bad caricatures in a Woody Allen movie —up until the very last page, where canned vegetable matter seems to push Lacey’s mouthpiece over the line from romantic nihilism into Buddhist nirvana:

“Do you think I can use this? she asked me, holding a jar of artichokes.

Anything removed can be replaced, I said. I meant the jar of artichokes. I meant everything.”

Ernaux’s own fictionalized hybrid memoir The Years (Les Années, 2008), in contrast, writes of love itself as a mass capitalist delusion sold to women in post-1945 and especially post-1968 France through pop songs, movies, ads, and every book like Lacey’s promising that “Love would save us from our mothers’ lives.” Not so, ma. To love is to what reveal what one wants, thus what one doesn’t have, thus where one comes from.

Ernaux shows how history marks her; her most private desires flatten into a shared world-fate. The Years thus ends with a collective new unknown: “Something is trembling, and I am trembling with it.” Au contraire, Lacey shows how she (tries to) mark herself apart from the world; her desires flatten into heartbreak data points—memories of weepy cafés and calls.

Lauren Elkin wrote in the Paris Review that in Ernaux, “Present and past and future are suspended into one temporality: the expectant tense. (Tense as the vocal cords straining to sound.) To live sexual obsession is to, in Ernaux’s words, ‘experience pleasure like a future pain.’” She is trembling with it.

Lacey traces tightly that expectant tension. In suspending one’s love and faith in doubt, the very act of writing—of struggling against the silence at the heart of doubt, tense as the vocal cords straining to sound—preserves this doubt in the words denying it, in a Möbius loop. Ernaux’s memories bring her closer to the world, while Lacey’s wall her off from it.

When people try to reach each other, or something higher than the trying, there may be grief, but there is no silence. When the struggle to regain love collapses entirely, the only words left are of the mind’s endless turning. What this book does best is trace the unending human loop between “yes” and “no,” between love and struggling with the words for it, then struggling with love and finding the words for how people change in its wake. This book finds the words like no other, but only because these words are uniquely endless.

A common criticism of autofiction is that, as words become more hyperspecific, they also become more interchangeable. When Lacey’s narrator cries at a café in Park Slope with a man named Eric, she could just as well have cried in a midtown restaurant with a man named Jin (in fact, she does both). If a book gets past this, it’s “the novel ways in which they’re put together,” as Christian Lorentzen has written of the genre, that’s interesting or not. 

It’s the virtue of autofiction that faith, love, language, and the use or uselessness of words about these have a new value in the mouth of Lacey’s characters than if they were in Lacey’s mouth herself, as in a straight memoir. Fiction’s distance from memoir, from talking as herself rather than talking about herself talking as herself, is what lets her reach the other—The Reason—because she’s no longer getting in the way of the details: grief with Eric, grief with Jin, whether imagined or not.

Lacey’s details are interchangeable as boutique Legos. She takes this endless fungibility to its logical conclusion and replicates the details in her own repeating memory, and while the result is a brilliantly structured book, this also has the effect of ensuring that nothing new ever happens in it. Any sequel to The Years would involve spanking-new dreary Gallic reflections on heartbreak and shame, no longer pining in the Molotov cocktail smoke of de Gaulle, Debord, and free love but in the neoliberal blue light of Macron, Le Pen, and polyamory; were Lacey to release a sequel to her infinite grief, on the other hand, even the most diehard auto-literati would yawn fast, because the most novel thing about her suffering is that it continues to happen at all.

Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer born in Istanbul. Her work appears in SF Chronicle, SFGATE, Evergreen Review, Necessary Fiction, minor literature[s], Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley and tweets at @writingenjoyer.