The Möbius Book

by Catherine Lacey

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A lyrical blend of non-fiction and make-believe, this book begins with a fictional tale of reflection on relationships and ends with Lacey’s own memoir about the aftermath of her recent separation from her partner. Separate but intertwined, the two stories dance with grief, anger and the friendships that remain.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the 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 strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374615406
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

04/14/2025

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. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Lacey isn’t scorching earth—she’s sifting it, flinging fistfuls of dirt and thought at us . . . mundane language pops out with new meaning in the fog of post-relationship grief . . . Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

"Visceral, slippery . . . a brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human." —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

"Lacey is always doing something mysterious with form . . . Her latest novel is split down the middle, making it impossible to decide which half to begin with. Blending truth and fiction, the reader is in good hands no matter Lacey’s subject." —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"Memoir collides with invention in a brilliant interrogation of art, faith and relationships . . . The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention." —Sarah Moss, The Guardian

"Catherine Lacey continues to probe and puncture the membrane between what is real and what is imagined . . . curious and unique." —Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"As enticing and frustrating as its eponymous strip . . . exhilarating in its meticulous construction and literary flamboyance." —Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe

"Every book Lacey writes is uniquely strange, but all of them investigate the slipperiness of storytelling . . . a project that makes you think deeply about how we construct stories to make sense of our lives. The goal is always to search rather than to settle." —Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times (UK)

"Catherine Lacey has been climbing up the literary ladder ever since her magnificent debut novel . . . this new one runs the emotional gamut." ―The Telegraph (London)

"The Möbius Book has no beginning or end but stresses the cycles that punctuate our lives, musing on memory and fiction and the centrality that faith—whatever form that may take—can have. With a heavy emotional thrust and a singular style, this book might resist easy definitions or categories but asks gnawing universal questions on intimacy, security and belief systems that are sure to enthrall many." —Nathan Smith, Observer (London)

"Is it a memoir or a novel or a little of both? Better to categorize Lacey’s latest as its own genre, a category-defining, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more . . .Unlike life, there is no beginning or end, just a story that follows its own strange, wild, and mesmerizing pattern. A sui generis work, like no other." —Booklist (starred review)

"A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss . . . There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer . . . A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[The Mobius Book] expands the craft explored in [Biography of X] but offers a nakedness of spirit that few artists have explored as deftly as she does.” —Library Journal (starred review)

"Novelist Lacey (Biography of X) reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender . . . 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." ―Publishers Weekly

"A hybrid work of fiction and nonfiction, a genre-bending work that traces her relationship with her ex partner and with her former religious faith. Lacey’s work always surprises me and offers something totally new . . . sure to be striking and singular." ―LitHub

"Part novel, part memoir, what might have become a mere separation narrative in another’s hands instead interrogates through its own form whether anything begins or ends in the first place." —John H. Maher, The Millions

"As a massive fan of Lacey’s ambitious alternate-history novel Biography of X, I couldn’t be more thrilled that she’s following it up with something similarly audacious: a half-fictional, half-memoiristic meditation on her own breakup. Leave it to Lacey to put a tantalizing asterisk on her first foray into autobiography. —Conner Reed, Publishers Weekly

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth." ―Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

"A page-turner in both directions, The Möbius Book explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy: What remains unknown (indeed, often unknowable) at the core of the people we know best? And how do we survive this unknowing? This wry, surprising, nimble book—allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight—achieves what only great art can manage: to be both impossible to imagine, and utterly necessary. I was absolutely spellbound." ―Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2025

Lacey's previous book, Biography of X, was a work of fiction masquerading as a biography, and in her first memoir, fiction and biography intertwine once again. It offers readers two entry points: one side of the book is fictitious, the other is memoir. Both talk about love, faith, and loss. Lacey the memoirist writes of failing marriages, the community of artists and writers that supported her, and her relationship with faith as a child, a young writer, and a writer moving through this world. Lacey the novelist writes of marriage, others' motherhood, and a dead dog that addresses god and the afterlife. This hybrid work of nonfiction and fiction shows how a writer's life influences the fiction they write and how the fiction an author writes impacts their life as well. The two narratives draw readers to the middle of the book where they are left with the friends and creative works that inspired and supported Lacey through a breakup and depression in the middle of the COVID pandemic. VERDICT This memoir expands the craft explored in Lacey's last book but offers a nakedness of spirit that few artists have explored as deftly as she does.—John Rodzvilla

Library Journal