Catherine Lacey’s Disappointing Fusion of Fiction and Memoir

Much of the issue here is that Lacey sketches her characters too vaguely for either of them to say something precise. At times, it’s hard to tell Edie’s and Marie’s dialogue apart, or even to remember which is which. Lacey’s prose in the novel half of The Möbius Book is vague as well. It has one great line—Marie, a former smoker, used to catch herself “inhaling from a cigarette she had no memory of lighting, like there was a ghost inside of her that smoked without her awareness”—but nowhere else does the language so vividly capture experience. In fact, it can seem as if Lacey wants to avoid doing so. Edie’s ex uses stock phrases as a tool of manipulation, a manifestation of cliché’s enduring capacity to seduce, but otherwise, he derives power, we’re told, from his “ongoing attempt to never resemble, however briefly, anyone else.” Lacey rejects this effort far more successfully than she manages to reject the tropes she tries to undermine.

The Möbius Book’s memoir half goes some way toward explaining why Edie’s bad former partner resembles Lacey’s bad former partner, whom she calls The Reason, though a quick google tells you he’s the novelist Jesse Ball. Memoirs and autobiographical novels about authors breaking up with other authors are common enough to be a cliché of their own, one Lacey may be aspiring to avoid through The Möbius Book’s genre split. She does not, however, attempt to call attention to or undermine the tropes of contemporary memoir. Indeed, she deploys one of the most conventional. She flicks between tales from her breakup and reflections on her fervent adolescent religiosity and its abrupt end, using one story to illuminate the other. This technique is called braiding, and, since the celebrated memoirist Vivian Gornick used it in Fierce Attachments, her 1987 account of her relationship with her mother, it has gradually become such a popular mode as to be yet another cliché.

At their best, braided memoirs allow an individual story to exceed the bounds of its author’s life, often by setting it in a familial or historical context that not only explains the writer’s tale but is enriched by the personal illustration. Very few writers get there, though. The form has a significant pitfall, which The Möbius Book’s other weaknesses reflect: It’s extremely challenging to give a subject the kind of sustained consideration that reveals surprises and takes the reader into new territory when the topic in question only gets half the writer’s attention. In many braided memoirs, this means that the more personal story becomes emotionally dominant, relegating the book’s more expansive concerns to the background. To a degree, the same is true in the memoir half of The Möbius Book, which considers Christianity as a wobbly analogue to romance. Another problem, though, is that in the novel half of the text, Lacey hardly writes about religion at all, which is to say it gets only a quarter of her attention in the book as a whole. To come to an interesting conclusion about a such a large—and extensively written-about—topic with so little time would have been a true feat, but Lacey doesn’t attain it. In her book’s memoir section, the word faith crops up frequently during passages dealing with love—as in: “I had loved The Reason with a faith I knew to be profound”—but the connection doesn’t go much beyond that.

Lacey’s stories of her time with The Reason are the book’s strongest, since they are viscerally upsetting. They are also the only ones in the book that aren’t vague. He is emotionally abusive, a gaslighter who threatens her with violence and, when she objects, accuses her of “trying to paint him as a villain, as a kind of man he obviously was not.” After a passage on the eating disorder that followed her loss of religion, Lacey describes an episode in which she gained a few pounds and The Reason bullied her into dieting, “suggest[ing] a new schedule for when and what I should eat” and then telling her it was “female and embarrassing” for her to get upset. She obeyed him, and looking back, sees having done so as the moment “I must have first and most deeply conceded to the idea that The Reason had the power to tell me, at all times, in all ways, who I was.”