When I left my husband, I took a bottle of shampoo with me. And my laptop, but not my passport, or more than one change of clothes. All I thought was, out. But – proof that I never planned to leave – I had just bought a new bottle of shampoo a day or two beforehand, and I wasn’t going to give that, too, to my ex-husband. Apparently, there was a limit to what I was willing to give up.
Catherine Lacey has a similar experience with a gallon of hand soap stored under her kitchen sink: a sign of plans for the future, something to replenish refillable glass bottles with many times over, something she will no longer do. Her new book, The Möbius Book, describes the end of a relationship. It is the novelist’s first work of nonfiction. Or at least, just over half of it is. When a reader picks up The Möbius Book, there are no directions, except that the book has two covers. Both carry the book’s title and Lacey’s name; neither says ‘a novel’ or ‘a memoir’ because it is both. The reader has to flip the book over in order to read the twin end and the two meet in a spread that carries the acknowledgements, printed twice in both directions. I unknowingly started with the memoir, then continued to the fiction, but as the title suggests, there is no orientation, the two bleed into one another.
The domestic is the first victim when a romantic relationship ends. The memoir begins when Lacey’s partner breaks up with her over email one day when they’re both at home. Lacey moves from their bedroom to the guestroom as they navigate an aftermath. ‘I had to shed all the hope I’d stored in these rooms’, she writes. A plotline ensues: They need to sell their house, she needs to have someone else as her emergency contact information, she needs to figure out what happened, and what will happen now.
The story The Möbius Book is about three friends. Edie and K have known each other since childhood and meet Marie aged 17, when she completes their friendship triangle. Marie is described early on in the book as someone who ‘knew she wanted too much from romantic love’. Following this foreboding introduction, she marries K’s sister and they have twin children before Marie cheats on her wife and brings about the dissolution of the marriage, and with it, the friendship group. The story takes place over Christmas, as Edie, making sure Marie is not left alone over the holiday, visits her in her depressing flat.
Both fiction and memoir are explorations of things going wrong. Of the sense that romantic love may be insufficient. Of the question: What else is there?
On the first page of the memoir: ‘a man downstairs was The Reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor’. This man will, from now on in the book, only be referred to as The Reason. Unnamed, he remains omnipresent, his name ‘burrowed into everything, like glitter in shag carpet’. On the first page of the story, Edie calls Marie, says she’s headed over, and we are introduced to Marie’s alarming new building, ‘a place between places’ in a bleak and liminal neighbourhood.
The end of Lacey’s relationship prompts a reflection on her life. Though it ends in a new relationship (and one of my absolute favourite moments of dialogue I’ve read in years, where she tells her new partner, ‘I can’t find a way to comprehend how to explain how good that feels, and he said, don’t.’ End of paragraph), the narrative arc is one of contemplation, not redemption. When one part of life ends all the other ones lead to multiple conclusions about it, from conversations with friends to a deep and profound examination of her religious upbringing: Love takes faith, and Lacey was a devoted, pious child. Marie, full of regrets, tells a police detective ‘there were times I held my wife and thought it was prehistoric, that feeling’ only to realise her interlocutor has no idea what she means by that; of course, she doesn’t either: something prehistoric is also something that is lost, now over.
To return to the question at hand: What else is there at the end of romantic love? Perhaps the answer is, who stays in one’s life. In the memoir, Lacey writes her friends into the world beautifully. There is Francis, who struggles to play the piano and so calls her in her heartache days to play to her, creating a digital audience of one to his incapability and her sorrow. Also, the friend who, when realising Lacey is writing a memoir, asks only that she write her ‘four inches taller’, even though Lacey describes her as plenty tall. And yet in the novel part, the three friends and two more characters – the wife/sister and the person Marie cheats with, both only described with regret from Marie’s perspective – are far from fully sketched out. We don’t know why K stops talking to Marie for what seems like your run-of-the-mill domestic failure, why she is more faithful to her sister than her friend. K is an absence, harsh in her lack of contact with Marie. Edie is a woman who walks in and out of stories like a glimmering appearance bound to disappear (that’s how her romantic relationships are described, also kind of how she treats Marie now that the friendship is a one-on-one, ungrounded in the triangle). Marie: she embodies the fear of the end of a relationship. Her sad flat ends up pushing the plot towards its only logical conclusion: death. Of the neighbour, but still. There is a puddle of blood under the door of the neighbouring flat – and though Marie tries to ignore it, she is forced to acknowledge it.
As a novelist, Lacey is one of the most experimental, fascinating, boundary-pushing of her generation. Biography of X (2023, her fourth novel), is a fictional 2005 biography of musician and artist X, who was born in Mississippi (a crucial aside: also Lacey’s home state) during The Great Disunion, in which the Southern states seceded from the USA in 1945 to form a religious state. Lacey’s thoughts on religion in this book would be fascinating to any reader of Biography of X. Before it, Pew (2020) takes place over seven days leading to a religious festival, includes a mysterious silent arrival to a town and feels like a horror film, or a fable. How to draw on an incredibly creative practice that centres world-building to then reflect on a reality that may feel just as strange as a USA that has split. In Lacey’s first book, Nobody is Ever Missing (2014), the female character left everything – a husband, too – behind to hitchhike in New Zealand but ends up feverishly remembering every detail of her life.
As a memoirist, Lacey also remembers every detail. She is an incredibly anecdotal writer. At a moment of breaking, every detail, bit of a story or memory begins to seem (or read or feel) like a metaphor about what is happening to you. And so, Lacey recounts the story of a surfer she once met who was in the water off the coast of Samoa once when the tsunami sirens sounded. He and the people around him had to decide whether to paddle out to sea or go inland and run as fast as they can. He went beyond the wave’s break and never saw the others, who decided to rush to shore, again. In New Orleans Lacey and a friend see a peacock in someone’s front yard. When a woman comes out to the front porch they ask, is that your peacock? ‘Who? Big Bird? No, he is his own person’. Apparently the peacock just appeared one day and the woman kept her distance, though she did charmingly name him. (There’s another fiercely independent animal in the book, a kitten Lacey names Banana Bread and fed for weeks while staying in ‘some grubby beach town’. She wondered what would happen to the cat when she moved on, but of course, the cat was gone before Lacey ever left. Read into it what you wish: the way we tell an anecdote imbues it with innuendo, or meaning.)
‘I wondered if I stopped writing stories because living felt so fictional that writing fiction had become unnecessary—keeping track of a day was enough’ Lacey writes in the memoir section, and a few pages later recites how one of her friends said humans are ‘metaphoric animals’. Really, The Möbius Book is about writing. And the dual-attempt, in memoir and fiction hits the same dead-end: the way the whole world is tilted by the end of romantic love.
Referenced artists
Leslie Jamison
Post-Wounded: On Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams
About that shampoo bottle: I don’t think that much about my ex-husband anymore. I’ve had other heartaches since. But his singular status as my ex-husband adds narrative weight to the story and the detail of the shampoo bottle brings something so big – a different life – into an item so small and cheap, he probably hadn’t noticed I took with me. It’s my side of the story. Reading The Möbius Book I thought about several recent books by women detailing the dissolution of long-term relationships and marriages: Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (where the end of a relationship is also the beginning of motherhood); Sarah Manguso’s Liars (which makes an appearance in Lacey’s book too: the two women come together to throw bricks against Manguso’s garden wall, a habit written into Manguso’s novel, another proof that fiction and life are a Möbius strip, always both sides); Haley Mlotek’s divorce memoir No Fault. I could make a longer list if I wanted, in this exploding category of women reflecting on the end of romantic love. How a story can be told – that is, lived – so many times by so many different people and still have to be told, again and again, because it happens again and again. Hence Marie is not a cautionary tale: she is tragedy, that is to say, always already there. The Möbius strip, the two ends: fiction and reality, writing and experiences, reading and other people’s experiences. Everything you hear and say and read and feel becomes data in the new life, the aftermath.
Late on in the memoir, Lacey writes: ‘I hate writing fiction with the equal and opposite force of how much I love it. What a stupid, wonderful way to waste my life.’ And in a tilted world, there it is: memoir and fiction, a two-sided book that needs to be flipped, a story told about life, about experience, from both perspectives – life and fiction – which provide two ways to insist on trying again and again to find the words. And if it’s bound to fail, I can go back to the moment when Lacey writes about failing to find the right words, and how her new partner said, don’t.
