Catherine Lacey Had a Really Bad Breakup. But That Was Just the Beginning

A Möbius strip is a looped, one-sided surface without boundaries, which a 2021 Scientific American article describes as “an artist’s reverie and a mathematician’s feat.” It’s a non-orientable surface; within it, clockwise and counterclockwise are indistinguishable, and any object taking a journey on the surface of the strip will, if it goes far enough, end up back where it started.

The Möbius Book (FSG), Catherine Lacey’s visceral, slippery new work, has identical, flipped covers and two discrete but linked parts, so that readers will have different experiences depending on which portion they read first. Open it on one side, and you begin a novella in which two friends, Marie and Edie, spend Christmas in Marie’s apartment—both in the wake of breakups, Marie with a wife she has betrayed, Edie with an abusive man—while, in the apartment next door, a pool of what appears to be blood seeps from under the door. Flip the book over and you start a memoir of the nomadic months Lacey spent staying with various friends following her real-life breakup from her unnamed former partner, a well known writer who, Lacey writes, ended their relationship via an email he sent while they were both in the house they shared. (A representative of her former partner didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The book’s halves meet in the middle with two identical acknowledgments, works cited, and mastheads listing the FSG staff that worked on the book.

The Möbius Book

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Following her breakup, Lacey went a year not writing any fiction at all. “That was the first time in my adulthood that that happened,” she tells me. Instead, she was working on the earliest kernels of what would become the memoir portion of The Möbius Book, which began as entries in the “mess” of a journal she keeps compulsively. Initially, she thought it might take the shape of an essay; later, once she connected her current experience to her adolescent loss of faith, having been a devout child raised in the Methodist Church—a topic she’d been attempting to put to words since she was in her early 20s—she realized the project might need a little more room to breathe.

The first draft, she says, was “longer, it was a bit angrier, it was a bit more in the heat of that first moment.” After an inconclusive meeting with her editors in the fall of 2022, she put it aside. When she returned to it about a year later, she thought she might scrap the memoir completely and rewrite it as a novel, and at a residency in Switzerland, she wrote the entire novella in three weeks, the characters arriving as “a crucible for two years of thinking about relationships, religion, all this stuff.” The fiction, she says, rather than replacing the memoir, shed “the right kind of light and complication” onto it. The result is a brilliant exploration of faith (religious and otherwise), love of all kinds, sensuality and sexuality, eating disorders, experiencing the unknown, and the endless fluidity of being a human.

Lacey in conversation is open, generous. When I reach her via Zoom she’s at her home in Mexico City, which she shares with her husband, the novelist Daniel Saldaña París, who makes a late-stage appearance in the memoir portion of Möbius. For the last few years she’s been learning Spanish, an experience that has returned her to a “childlike” state of heightened misunderstanding. “I’m very much in the middle where you hear stuff and you’re like, Yes, that’s what I mean. But you can’t get it to come out of your mouth.” The process, she says, is “changing the way I’m listening to people, and changing the way I’m thinking about how we communicate ourselves.” Fruitful territory for a writer who’s been exploring identity and connection since her very first novel.

Vanity Fair: There are overlaps that ripple across the memoir and the novella, some that are more hazy and thematic, and some that are very concrete. For instance, someone calls Marie “easy to love,” which is something one of your friends says to you in the memoir portion. Did those bubble up subconsciously, or did you go back and put them in afterwards to thread the halves together?

Catherine Lacey: I really don’t know. To some degree, there is a blackout process anytime I write something. It’s like waking up from a dream. I did go back and edit it. I don’t really know what I knew when I knew it, but at some point I knew there had to be some relationship between the two books. There was a possibility, when I was beginning it, that I was going to throw out the memoir completely and just tackle the same subject matter in fiction.

When I finished the novella and I read the whole thing I was at a residency, so part of the reason I could write it in three weeks was that I didn’t have to cook or clean or talk to anyone or anything. I went kind of insane. I did this process where I recorded myself reading it, and then I would go on a walk through these woods and listen to myself reading it and edit it as I was walking. I could never get away from it, do you know what I mean? At some point in that process, it became clear that, no, this book is a part of the other book and they should be printed back to back. And that happened there. In the hole.

In the woods.

Yeah, in a hole in the woods.

Where all the best ideas come from. Religion, and more nebulous spirituality, are major threads in both parts of the book. This seems to be the most direct address of your own religious upbringing and loss of faith.

The first book I ever tried to write, I was trying to tackle the strangeness of feeling—like, I had these formative first years of my life. I felt very gnostically religious as a kid. Once I was a teenager, I was so annoyed by it. It was this ugly thing from the past. But when I was a young woman writing in and living in New York and realizing nobody else grew up this way, even the people that went to church, they didn’t necessarily have their own relationship with Jesus as a child. I have lots of friends in the South that still go to church and are progressive and strange about it and don’t really believe in these things or that, and that it doesn’t bother them. They’re not upset by, do you really believe in the Nicene Creed or what? And that part is secondary to the point of not even their business. There’s something really beautiful about that, but it was just not the way that I engaged with it, even as a kid, I guess I was just a nerd, I was a book nerd and the Bible was there.

If this was the first book I’d ever published, I think I would be throwing up all the time. But because I have slowly revealed things, and when I published Pew, or some of the things that are in The Answers, I would have conversations with other people in my family about religion, so I’m a little bit more prepared. I’m always mildly humiliated by publishing a book. I think it’s a ridiculous thing to do—and I am really happy to do it. But I definitely feel some experience of humiliation and shame almost all the time. So this is just a little bit more than normal.

In the memoir portion, you wrote that at the same time that you weren’t addressing religion in your writing, you were also not really addressing sex in your writing. Was it the sense of other people’s biases that was keeping you from that kind of writing before?

I would say for the religious stuff, it’s just the sheer inability to find the language to describe the experience. It’s been very difficult to write about. I have gotten to the point where I can write without thinking about what people are going to think about it later. Most of the time, at least, I do have walls up and practices that help me be able to write whatever I need to write.

With sex it’s a little bit different because I have been able to write about sex, or turn experiences that I’ve had into text in notebooks or whatever. I’ve seen myself do that translation, but I always ended up cutting it out of things. There was a whole lesbian subplot of my first novel that I completely cut because I felt too exposed by it. I guess I needed to, also, because it can only hold so much. So sometimes you’re cutting things not just out of shame or nervousness, but because there’s not actually space. But maybe you’re also a little bit nervous about—oh, too bad, I guess I don’t have to deal with talking to my mom about this! I’m 40 now, and I love being 40. I would love if I could just stay at 40—.

Why?

I am not really dealing with the actual problems of aging yet, but I don’t have some of the baggage of youth. I guess everybody dreads it in some way, but it’s been awesome. I am less nervous about people sexualizing me, partially because they’re not going to in the same way, because I’m not very young.

The temperature of the climate around what readers are comfortable with, and what writers are comfortable with, has also changed in the last few years. Because of writers like Melissa Febos and Miranda July. Sheila Heti, Chris Kraus, Raven Leilani, Ariana Harwicz, [and] R.O. Kwon are some other contemporary voices. Of course, women have always been writing about desire and sexuality, and there are hundreds more I could add to the list that I admire on a purely technical level, but I think when a woman’s work enters the mainstream and is unapologetic and untidy about desire and sexuality, that’s when more women feel empowered to write vividly about it too, and—importantly—when editors and publishers allow it out into the world.

I’m writing this novella that’s being serialized in Gagosian [Quarterly] magazine. There’s a lot of sex, and I don’t feel nervous about that. There’s sex in Möbius, less than there was at one point. The not writing about sex and not writing about religion, the way in which I do think they’re connected is that, potentially, both can be transcendental experiences and are therefore very, for me, internal, bodily, somatic. In some ways that goes against this idea of an intellectual novelist living a life of the mind. I do live a life of the mind, to some degree, that does prevent me from being in my body, but that’s being broken down more as I get older, too.

In a Substack post you wrote that you were previously nervous about publishing something so personal in nature, but that you have memoirists in your life who helped you. Who were they, and what advice did they give you?

I called Isaac Fitzgerald, who’s the cheerleader of everyone and such a professional pep talker for, literally, a pep talk. There’s something about talking to somebody that’s been through the experience of publishing a book that’s really personal, and hearing that you end up being fine. Leslie Jamison, I love all her work, but Splinters was a book that I read as I was finished with the nonfiction, but working on the fiction. I admired her so much.

All these things happen to everybody. In some ways, there’s no reason to be nervous about publishing anything that’s personal, or has some piece of you in it, because there’s nothing I’ve experienced that billions of other people haven’t also experienced. That’s why I read nonfiction, that’s why I read memoirs, to recognize some piece of my experience rearranged and experienced differently and turned into language, as a way of giving me some structure to the mess of living.

That post was a response to a review, the premise of which was that this book is autofiction, which it isn’t. In response, you wrote, “the memoir side is about things that really happened, and I wrote about them in this form for many reasons.” What are some of those reasons?

To some degree, when I write fiction, I am taking something that really happened to me and exploding it, taking it apart, making it not the way that it really happened, trying to get under some experience or feeling that I had.

But the experiences I write about in the book, of—I want to choose my words really carefully—a very complicated relationship, that I had consented to treatment that I wouldn’t want a friend to consent to, and the getting out of it making me realize all these things about my religious life and the loss of that life. I wrote it first in nonfiction because I needed to understand what had happened, and then I decided to publish it because I believe that it’s a very common experience. People, in one form or another, we all go through periods where we lose some type of faith. Maybe it’s not always religious faith. When I read a novel that’s about something that I’ve gone through, it’s very different than when I read a memoir. There’s a different reading experience when you know that this happened to another person on the planet.

Leslie’s memoir, to understand that she confronted divorcing someone when she had a young child, it hits me in a different way. If she had written a novel about a similar experience, it could have been very thrilling and upsetting and terrifying and beautiful and all these other things. But we would both have the protection of knowing, well, this isn’t exactly how it happened. That’s part of the joy of writing fiction, that you can take a very real experience that you’ve had and warp it.

You didn’t name your former partner. In the memoir portion you refer to him as The Reason. What was behind that choice?

That first chapter of the memoir side of the book was almost exactly what I wrote down in a notebook. I think this is a very common thing for a woman of any age, or in any moment of your life, to find yourself in a relationship where you’re putting the other person up on a pedestal, and revering them to a degree that they become unreal. And I think that there’s a type of man that often finds himself in that position in a relationship, and there might be things that he’s doing that are also feeding into that. But it’s an active thing that both people within a relationship are doing when one person is basically God and the other person is reacting.

I’m not saying that that was exactly what I was in. At the end of a relationship like that, especially if it ends in the way that mine did, it’s almost—like, I’m friends with my exes. I like keeping up with them. I don’t like the end of a relationship to be the end of anything. Even people I’ve dated very briefly, I tend to stay friends with them. This was not the case in this moment, because that relationship was very different. Even writing his name in my notebook felt like too much. That’s the name that I gave him in my notebook so that I could write about him without throwing up.

I had to realize it wasn’t just him doing that. I had been actively creating this image of this person, deifying them, and that is unsustainable. When a relationship ends and these two human beings come apart and come back down to earth, if you’ve been in a really unbalanced relationship, it’s debilitating—at least for the one person, maybe not so for the other.

How did you figure out what details you were going to include about the relationship and breakup once you started thinking about this as something that was going to be published? Particularly because the relationship itself was something you both spoke publicly about when you were in it. Of course it was a private thing, but it wasn’t only a private thing.

The first draft of the book had more of the relationship in it, but it just became less important as the scope of the book got bigger. The book began because that relationship ended, but it’s not about that relationship. If it was, it would be a lot more repetitive and exhausting and upsetting. And also it would be much more warped because it would just be my perspective on this relationship. Even though I think my perspective of the relationship is a valid one, there’s also another one that I don’t have any access to. If you want to read the book and get juicy details about how horrible something was, you probably won’t find them. There are a few things in there, but I made sure that everything that I included could be backed up with my notebooks, or emails, or something. My goal was never to make him look bad or make me look good. If you write a memoir, you inherently look kind of bad. Or, you look human.

I was struck by the fact that both concrete instances of violence that Edie suffers at the hands of her former partner have to do with books. He punches a wall and a bookend falls and gives her a bloody nose, and he also throws a book at her.

I didn’t notice that until just now. I really didn’t. There’s so much that subconsciously comes out. I live a life with lots of books around, so I guess that’s maybe why.

When I was reading this book it made me think of a line from The Answers (2017): “I thought being in love meant getting to be two people. How could you do something I wouldn’t do? This is impossible and insane. I can’t be only one person. I need to be you, too. Let me be you.”

Those lines, I think I remember correctly that I wrote them when I was revising The Answers. I started writing The Answers when I was in a serious relationship, during which I broke up from that person, got back together with that person, got engaged to marry that person, married that person, and promptly divorced that person. That was what I was doing while I was writing The Answers, which is very funny to me now. Horrifying at the time, humiliating, very upsetting, but really funny to me now.

I was really working out what it meant to be in a relationship, but it did upset me that there is this impulse that takes over sometimes. I’m in a very different place about relationships now. That’s a topic that can keep on developing and changing, your relationship to relationships, and what you need and what you think they’re for and blah, blah, blah. I had noticed this experience of being with—always a man, because the women that I dated never did this to me—being with a man, doing something that he doesn’t like, and him being like, don’t fucking do that. I shouldn’t say that women don’t do this to each other, they do. It’s just not my experience. Being seen as an extension of, or a representative of, this other person. I was in my twenties, early thirties and I was like, is this just what you have to do? You have to become this extension of the other person? Now I feel like, no, you don’t. But at the time, it really felt like it was a part of the bargain. It’s a part of some bargains, and some relationships. It’s not factually a part of being in a loving relationship with another person.

In the memoir portion, you wrote that you were done with writing novels because each time you would get to the end of the process and understand something that you hadn’t realized you were writing about. It sounds like that was happening with The Answers. What was it about Biography of X (2022) that made you feel like you were being “punked,” as you write, in that way?

I started writing Biography of X early in the relationship with the person in The Möbius Book, and I really thought I was going there with the fiction. I really thought it was very, very different than my relationship, very different than my experience. I thought it was much more research based. In some ways it is, of course, but the emotional engine of it is this woman that is madly in love with someone that will never see her as her equal. She’s aware of that and is like, Okay! It’s almost like marriage as fandom. The things that happened in The Möbius Book happened as I was finishing the book and having to do copy edits, and I was really, stomach-turning upset because I thought that I had escaped that kind of fate.

In my first novel, there’s an adopted sister that commits suicide, and those sections were very automatic for me when I wrote them. They felt like I hit some nerve when I wrote those parts. I never had an adopted sister, and at the time I had never lost a sibling to suicide. But in between finishing the book and before it came out, my stepsister, she died. She basically drank herself to death, which is a kind of suicide. It felt like I had seen it or felt it before it came out. That was the first profound, weird experience. You spend years with a novel and there’s all kinds of subconscious stuff that goes into it. It’s not just building a chair, or something. It has to have some spooky element that you don’t understand. I will keep writing fiction even though it does punk me every time.

It seems like writing the fiction part of this book was a different experience. Were you aware of the usually murky, secret part from the beginning?

It’s almost like I was trying to preempt the prank that I was always pulling on myself, but who knows? It’s always something I would never have guessed. It’s always different than what I would’ve expected.

Do you think you’ll start writing about where you’re living now?

The experience of an extended period of learning another language and being surrounded by people saying things that you don’t understand, and being unable to express yourself, that’s not going away anytime soon. I’m not working on a big Mexico novel or something right now. I am very aware of what it means to be an American living here, and it’s a complicated thing. I don’t see myself writing about Mexico as a country in any meaningful way. I simply don’t know enough to even begin to even think about something like that. But the experience of being outside of the States and in love with somebody whose mother language is different than my own, those are interesting topics to me.

A lot of literature can be described as an exploration of self, but each of your books really engages with questions of identity. In Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014) the protagonist shrugs off her identity as a sister and wife; Pew (2020) centers on somebody who’s ambiguous in gender and race. Do you think your own sense of identity has become more or less fixed?

Oh, way less fixed. Thank God. It’s so fun. It feels so good to feel like, I don’t know who I am. I do feel like I have some kind of compass, but the compass is not my identity. The compass is just helping me navigate a world in which I’m being offered all these different identities all the time.

I’ve realized that something I find disturbing in other people is when this person is very attached to a very specific identity, a very specific vision of themselves, and they’re trying to always project that same image. And I mean, somebody could say that about me, also. Perhaps I seem that way in certain contexts. But I think my experience of my identity, internally, is very wobbly. To me, it’s a complete positive. That was one thing that came up in all the Biography of X coverage, where it was like, Can you ever know your spouse? First of all, no. Second of all, that’s not the point. Third of all, you don’t even know yourself. There is no self!

It’s more enjoyable the more you embrace the fluidity of the strangeness of it. Micro changes in your hormonal composition drastically change your behavior. You think about all these things and it’s just like, why would you think that there’s a consistent self? It’s liberating for there not to be one. You actually have permission to do the things that you think you’re not supposed to do. Isn’t that great?

This interview has been edited and condensed.