Depending on which end you start from, you might begin Catherine Lacey’s new novel by reading about Marie, who has found herself living in a dingy fifth-floor apartment on the wrong side of town. It is Christmas, and Marie is alone. She goes out to a nearby payphone – the apartment’s proximity to this anachronism is one of the reasons she chose it – from which she almost calls her close friend K, but then decides not to. When she returns to her building, she notices what looks like blood seeping from beneath the door of the neighbouring flat. She quickly goes inside her own apartment without investigating further. She “doesn’t want to begin the night with the possibility of a murder next door”.
When her friend Edie arrives with her overnight bag, fresh from the dissolution of another unsuitable relationship, Marie does not mention the blood. She wants to know if Edie has been in touch with K. The three of them have been friends since forever, but K has committed an unforgivable breach of confidence that has wrecked Marie’s life and the two are no longer speaking.
As Marie and Edie dig deeper into what has brought them to this particular point in time and place, Marie tells Edie a story about the tragic drowning of a young couple on a beach in Mexico. Edie in turn monologues at length about her long-ago summer dalliance with two men, one an atheist, the other a theology student, which came to an abrupt end when each discovered the existence of the other.
If you turn the book upside down and flip it over – let’s call it the Möbius manoeuvre – you will find yourself at the beginning of an entirely different narrative, though there are aspects of it that might seem eerily familiar. The narrator here is Lacey herself – or as close a doppelgänger as the conventions of autofiction permit – and she is recalling the traumatic end of her relationship with the person she believed would be her partner for life.
Once again, it is close to Christmas, and Lacey has been forced to sleep in the spare room. Her boyfriend – whom she refers to throughout simply as “The Reason” – has ended their relationship via an email he has sent from the neighbouring room. There is no need to discuss the matter, he insists, as he has known for a year that Lacey has stopped loving him. The fact that he happens to have met someone else is beside the point.
Following her divorce and just before the publication of her groundbreaking novel Outline (2014), Rachel Cusk spoke of her break-up with traditional narrative fiction, commenting that “once you have suffered sufficiently, making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous”. Lacey’s position seems less absolutist. The Möbius Book does not reject the idea of fiction so much as demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction are in constant dialogue, how each is never entirely what it says it is. Just as distorted echoes of the memoir can be found in the fictional half – the seeping blood from next door; the accidental drowning of the young couple – so the scenes that are ostensibly true must be fiction to an extent, the curated memories of a subjective narrator.
In one of the most arresting sequences in the autofictional section, the narrator visits a psychic in Mexico, Michal, who offers to rid her of “entities” that are hindering her recovery. Lacey is not normally a believer in such esoteric practices, but she is determined to step out of her comfort zone, to apprehend the world from an alternative vantage point. “I found this explanation … absolutely bizarre and so outside my understanding of reality that I had no idea how to reply .… Yet whatever did or did not happen in that room I trusted, at least, that Michal believed it, saw it, that this is the world she lives in.”
On one level at least, the exorcism can be seen as a representation of the creative disjuncture that Catherine Lacey is exploring. “What I think I’m doing when I write a novel and what I later realise I’ve done is so out of sync that I’ve felt repeatedly shocked and sometimes embarrassed at how I’ve tricked myself once again”, she insists. Her previous novels have similarly been acts of disruption – the interrogation of quotidian reality through the introduction of the dystopian or alien. The Möbius Book acts as a fracturing and reshaping of those previous realities – readers will note the significant deployment of a hammer and a crowbar in both sections. It is equally a moving documentary of personal loss, a meditation on the fragility of identity and a critique of the struggle women still face in being heard.
Nina Allan is a writer and critic. Her latest novel is A Granite Silence, 2025
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