Our Take
Catherine Lacey has built a career on formal daring, and The Möbius Book might be her most audacious structural experiment yet: two narratives, one nonfiction-adjacent and one fictional, bound together and readable from either cover. The novel invites comparisons to Jenny Offill's fragmented, aphoristic style in Dept. of Speculation and to Maggie Nelson's genre-blurring memoir work in Bluets, both of which similarly refuse to let readers settle comfortably into one mode of storytelling. Lacey's prose is spare and precise, full of the kind of sentences that land like small emotional detonations, and her recurring interest in the instability of identity and narrative truth (familiar from Biography of X) reaches a new pitch here. The dual structure isn't a gimmick so much as an argument: that heartbreak and invention are never as separate as we'd like to believe, and that the stories we tell about our own lives are always, in some sense, fiction. This is a book for readers who loved the fragmented intimacy of Dept. of Speculation or the essayistic slipperiness of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and who don't mind a novel that asks them to do some structural puzzle-solving alongside the emotional work. It's short, strange, and likely to stick with you.
