Catherine Lacey’s latest publication is her most personal to date. Part fiction, part non-fiction, The Möbius Book follows the experience, innermost reflections and philosophical questioning of a woman who has just experienced a cruel and traumatic relationship break-up.
Lacey and her publishers present two versions of this experience.
A Möbius strip is a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. This book plays with that concept: two versions of the same story presented head-to-tail and upside down – you read one short book and then flip the book upside down and turn it back-to-front to read the other.
The writer seems to be suggesting that her actual biographical break-up told in the longer non-fiction book and her fictionalised trauma in the creative version, are basically one and the same story. Where does real life stop and art begin? Ultimately, the writer seems to imply, it’s all a loop, all an attempt to process life and suffering.
The fiction opens with a truncated phone call, a one-sided, broken communication. Edie is coming over and it’s urgent, she tells her ex-sister-in-law. Marie had betrayed Edie’s sister for an intense psychoerotic and sexual adventure with another woman. Her infidelity discovered, she has been ejected from the family home. Six months later, she is holed up in a grim suburban apartment. There is blood seeping out the door of the apartment next door, but Marie fails to report it to the authorities. This apparent lack of a moral compass is simply left for the reader to make of what they will.
Edie, too, is going through an intense and unexpected break-up. She reflects on her religious Methodist background, her putative college relationships and on the time she spoke to a dying dog in Greece who offered her the almost gnomic spiritual guidance: “Men were created to destroy everything, and women were created so that there would be only one thing they couldn’t destroy”.
Essentially, the writer suggests, both women must get on with their lives as best they can.
The non-fiction half of The Möbius Book opens with a description of the final days of the author’s cohabitation with her partner, who is referred to as “The Reason”. “The Reason”, a coercive man she met at a conference, persuaded her to leave her husband. Six years later he broke up with her by emailing from the room next door.
Constant self-questioning and re-examining of past behaviours by the narrative voice could quickly become tedious. A wide cast of friends and friends of friends bring distraction, shelter, advice and physical comfort. New insights from these characters keep the existential questioning fresh and provide some relief. The dazed action moves from many locales in the US including the midwest, New York, San Francisco, as well as memories of time spent elsewhere.
Matters of faith are repeatedly returned to by the writer from a position of almost-disbelief. Given this often signalled suspicion of the immaterial, it comes as a surprise to the reader (but also to the narrator) when she agrees to undergo a form of exorcism in Oaxaca where her healer, Michal, together with Jesus and Lao Tzu, conducts a spiritual surgery on her. This New Age wackiness is disconcerting. The narrator acknowledges this, suggesting to her healer that rather than devils it might be anger that is being exorcised from her body – intergenerational trauma is intimated.
She also notes that many rational people are now seeking answers in the non-rational supernatural realm. She seems to suggest that when a person is rudderless they will try anything.
The narrator describes her own transformative exorcism as “a fiction or a theatre”. Fiction, she says, 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 by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did ...” There is an attractive clarity in this reflection, and in many other considerations on the nature of writing included in the book.
The Möbius Book is a thought-provoking philosophical exercise, which explores abstract questions of aesthetics as they relate to the personal and creative life. Ultimately, the writer’s brutal honesty, playful language and the unexpected twists and turns she describes in her journey to make sense of herself and her art during a pivotal period of trauma, make this a book to be read with care.
Sinéad Mac Aodha is director of Literature Ireland
