The No-Sided Confessor: On Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book”

---

The astronomer Carl Sagan once asked the recreational mathematician Martin Gardner if he believed in God only so he would be happy. “My faith,” Gardner obliged, “rests entirely on desire.” In a 2014 New York Times review of his autobiography, Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, the paper notes this answer had twisted Gardner into “a human Möbius strip combining the faith and skepticism of his parents,” one a devout Methodist and the other “a Scripture-doubting science buff.” Gardner, who penned the autobiography in 2010, aged 95—he’d die the same year—told Sagan his faith earned him “a lasting escape” from the realization “that you and everyone else are soon to vanish utterly from the universe.” Which was just Gardner looping back around, darkly—his first widely-read short story, “The No-Sided Professor,” published in Esquire in 1987, featured an improvement on the one-sided Möbius strip: a paper strip with no sides at all. Twist a rectangular strip of paper and connect the short edges and you’ve turned a two-sided sliver into a one-sided Möbius strip, a paradox you can touch; in Gardner’s story, once you make the right fold, the paper simply vanishes. The titular professor eventually folds himself in the same way, then he vanishes too—only to reappear, naked, teleported into a strip club. Get it?

Catherine Lacey’s latest work—whose title, The Möbius Book, invokes the looping of Gardner’s beloved object—is in fact two books in one. One is a novella in which two friends, Marie and Edie, spend a gritty Christmas night dissecting nascent desires and fizzled-out faiths, narrating recent breakups, throwing back mezcal, and pondering an expanding puddle of red (blood? paint?) outside the apartment door; the other is a memoir that braids the dissolution of Lacey’s own marriage (to a man known only as “The Reason” in the text) with meditations on art, faith, healing, friendship, everything. The book is printed as a tête-bêche: one selects which half to begin with, reads to completion, rotates the book 180 degrees, begins anew. 

And of course it matters where one begins. Surely, starting with the fiction is proper, the most faithful—Lacey is a novelist and short story writer, after all; it says “Fiction/Memoir” above the bar code, doesn’t it, not “Memoir/Fiction”; the e-book, if you’re wondering, leads with the novella. But then there are one’s desires, faithless and looping: how satisfying might it be, in this rainy age of autofiction, to trudge trenchcoated and deerstalkered into the storm of memoir, brandish the detective’s magnifying glass, and solve it: this is the real-life morsel from which the fiction is built. Obviously, then, the author hasn’t vanished at all; she’s been here all along, a paradox you can touch. 

How exasperating we readers can be! We of little faith in the alembic of artmaking; how thin the desire to understand the way reality, too, requires naturalizing fictions of our own design. In invention and in real life, the magic of the self is always being poured and fitted to a vessel of form, then cut with mezcal and paint and blood; hocus-pocus is always diluted. That fiction and nonfiction are separate but inevitably entwined is a primary lesson of Lacey’s more recent experiments. In Pew, townsfolk graft their desires onto a figure of ambiguous or unidentifiable race, gender, and provenance, constructing themselves as they project an identity onto the shambolic narrator. In Biography of X, a widow tries to discover the “true” origins of her wife, the mysterious artist X, whose childhood in a drab and violent theocracy (the “Southern Territory,” a secessionist American South) is partly the reason for her excessive reinvention, this Marina Abramović-esque performer whose X is half algebraic and half Christlike, continuously reborn as anyone, but forever branded by her upbringing. 

The Möbius Book’s memoir half contains language, characters, images, and ideas that reappear, hocus-pocused, in the fiction half. We’re going to beat this thing for good, says Edie, ventriloquizing her ex’s clenched-fist philosophy on love, just as Lacey ventriloquizes The Reason with the same line, both slogans underlining the aggression hissing underneath the men. The Reason’s insistence that he knows Lacey better than she knows herself (“it must have been pleasurably familiar to have my unspoken thoughts intuited then privately extruded through the many reasons of The Reason. It must have reminded me of God”) is a wan omniscience passed to K, Edie and Marie’s best friend, who sets Marie up with her ex-wife with similar claims to certainty (I know everything about Marie, about both of you really, everything, and she’s perfect for you, you’re perfect for each other). The memoir side is clear on both the seductions of identifying “real-life” origin points in a writer’s fictions, and the impossibility of accounting for the transformations present in the act of writing. The Reason’s violent tendencies—smacking himself in the face during arguments, his history of physical altercations with other men—and Lacey’s need for “walking on eggshells around him” eventually “showed up in my fiction.” Nesting doll–like, one of Lacey’s stories has a narrator who has a student who writes a poem (if you’re raised with an angry man in your house / there will always be an angry man in your house …) that makes a lasting escape to social media—a place where context is shredded into one-sided strips—where it not only goes viral, but ends up attributed to Lacey herself. In the memoir half, she and The Reason snicker, but the laughter is a nervous one. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief. Ha ha ha.” It is and is not a joke; fortunately and unfortunately, both of them get it.

•

One of the pleasures of Lacey’s writing is not just her formal ambition—this in a fiction landscape with precious little formal experimentation—but, for me, the way each book is itself promiscuous with form, magicking together multiple conventions, generating new generic possibilities via mashup. Biography of X, for instance, is part reverie of historical revisionism, part love story, part art criticism. Similarly, each of The Möbius Book’s halves parrot other genres—the dialogue-dominated novella often reads like a play, the memoir like an artsy picaresque—but the book as a whole put me in mind of what, privately, I’ve been calling pandemic novels. That is, not merely novels that treat isolation and crisis and the sense of infinite time as subject, but ones whose form approaches the queasy and imperfect task of planting two flags, one (tattered, limp) reading BEFORE and the other (laminated, tryhard) shouting AFTER. Katie Kitamura’s lovely Audition does this, asking us what really has changed, if anything substantive, in the novel’s two halves (both narrated by an actor who continuously, compulsively reinterprets what people say and both of which, like Lacey’s novella, take place largely in a confined, domestic space). Or there’s Sheila Heti’s wonderful Alphabetical Diaries, in which sentences from over a decade of private scribbling have been alphabetized—as if, desperate for order and form, vanishing and reappearing in the forever-dusk of lockdown, we might need recourse to—and faith in—some higher, mathematical system of arrangement, to show us heretics the connection between dear and death.

Like these novels, Lacey’s book (interior, before-and-after) has something to say about autofiction in an age of loneliness (even more dependent on personal branding, parasocially thirsty to the point of vampirism). A friend of Lacey’s goofy musing in the memoir, occurring to her while the two behold Matisse’s The Red Room—Was Matisse the original influencer?—helps us interpret the blood pooling outside Marie’s apartment door in the novella. Edie wonders if it’s paint. Marie is paralyzed by it, and when the cops arrive and discover a dead body in the adjacent apartment, the grizzled detective informs Edie that the dead man’s girlfriend Didn’t call anyone. Didn’t try to help. She just watched the fucker die. Here’s our artist-cum-influencer, on Christmas no less, having died for the sins of our numbing instinct to surveil, to bleed our creators dry and reduce them. “Is anyone as obsessed with the Catherine Lacey memoir about Jesse Ball as I am?” reads a Reddit post about The Möbius Book, using The Reason’s real name but only half the book’s genre. “I’ve been curious about their relationship for YEARS … He’s so intentional about his public image and her book blatantly exposes his flaws as a boyfriend and a human being. I feel like no one cares about this but me.” Except everyone cares about it, everyone spent years watching Zoom interviews with authors hosted not in hallowed institutions on plush wingbacks—tasteful arrangements of water glasses, the X’s of elegantly crossed legs—but in the author’s actual home, in the attic that’ll serve as a writing studio for now, the Y lean of a back on an ergonomic chair, today’s coffee mug nestled concentric on the stain from yesterday’s. Our ability to google a character’s real name, or the way that, say, Knausgaard’s autopoetry has indeed made something happen in his life—all of this convinces us there is more that’s worth knowing about an author.

It is a strength and a weakness of The Möbius Book that Lacey offers connections between all these bad forms of knowing, every futile side of wished-for omniscience. The outsized certainty of a believer, a lover, and a fan in turn flattens us, fashioning us into plastic playthings. At the outset of her breakup with Ball, Lacey writes in the memoir: 

“I woke in the guest room, the attic, a guest in my own home … staring up at the white clapboard ceiling and walls, I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself.”

How to write oneself out of the doll’s house; how to avoid a negative loop? Like Gardner’s No-Sided Professor, one strategy might be to fold oneself inward and vanish, only to reappear naked, reborn. Where Gardner had faith because he had desire, we might let new but similar desires bloom, having faith only in the act of remaking ourselves. “All my thoughts and feelings about the world in general and myself in particular,” Freud once announced, “have been found unworthy of further existence. They will now have to be thought all over again.” 

•

This rebirth, like Edie’s or Lacey’s sexual awakenings, or the rebirth of the nonfiction into the fiction, is not at all about becoming a child again. Ball is often a man-child in the memoir—aggressive, hyperfocused on novelty (he declines to say or write sentences that could at all resemble anyone else’s) but totally incompetent (he “refused to use a laptop, so I did all his paperwork … my willful participation in the long lineage of women licking stamps for their geniuses”). “The child sees everything as a novelty,” wrote Baudelaire. And genius “is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped … with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience.” But a man-child lacks that equipment, and like the salivating fan, he fixates indiscriminately, just as Marie’s twins

“surveilled Marie from their carseats and high chairs, how they seemed to forget nothing and catalogued everything … Marie had often thought of and longed for the softer ways her friends had watched her, how different it was from the nonstop existential intensity of those two little sets of eyes.”

Lacey’s childhood religiosity likewise promised “Order out of chaos. Divinity in happenstance. Meaning, meaning, meaning, everywhere I turned as a child … telling me that I was saved and powerful and protected eternally, so long as I kept believing.” 

It’s this refusal of masculinized novelty that explains Lacey’s tinny embrace of cliché, the way an old drummer eventually forgoes his busy fills for the feel of four-on-the-floor. For all the thoughtful provocation, it can make for unpleasant reading, the prose equivalent of turning over a finely-wrought ceramic urn only to see LIVE LAUGH LOVE screaming on its side. The pileup of diaristic groaners (“a trust betrayed is always a shock; that is the hazard of trust”; “Hope is visible in the objects in our homes”; “Anything removed can be replaced, I said. I meant the jar of artichokes. I meant everything.”) is matched by equally dotty wordplay in the novella (Edie has or imagines a conversation with a dying, Christish dog, God backwards; in case we haven’t gotten the joke, the day Edie finds the dog, she is caroming between two boys: Chris, Thomas; one is almost tempted to read Marie and Edie—Gardner would want us to—as manglings of Marry and Die, etc.). Many of the anecdotes in the memoir are told with a kind of slack, wizened remove (“The beautiful woman smiled as she told us the story of her grandmother, who had also been beautiful”), fabulist vacuums in which detail is less important than the moral teaching or the feeling evoked. 

The abstract tales, the useful if unpretty repetitions of what’s been said a million times before, the swapping of childhood novelty for adult unknowing and discipline: even when I didn’t enjoy The Möbius Book, I got pleasure in thinking of it as a kind of sermon. It’s another of Lacey’s undiscovered formal moves—language that sometimes feels hackneyed, but whose ideas, however hastily collaged, nevertheless worm their way into your head. Language that implies a syntax across parts of books, across the oldest fictions and nonfictions. Language that asks—doesn’t demand—that you come back for what’s next, show up uncertain as ever every Sunday, and not vanish.