Review by Booklist Review
Is it a memoir or a novel or a little of both? Better to categorize Lacey's (Biography of X, 2023) latest as its own genre, a category-defying, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more. Her narrative structure is unconventional, too, as the book can be read front-to-back or back-to-front, with no chapters, just one intertwining story with paragraph breaks, told in Lacey's singular, staccato prose. Two sections of roughly the same length are told from differing perspectives, corresponding to the book's title. The first section begins like a mystery, with what seems like blood, blood, and more blood, before turning into something else, something more. Marie is good at friendships ("easy in it") but not so much with romantic love; she wanted too much from it, she admits, "held it to impossible standards, wanted it to totally redeem her." The Möbius Book is full of questions that cannot be fully answered. What is real? What is fake? What is love? Why does suffering exist? Unlike life, there is no beginning or end, just a story that follows its own strange, wild, and mesmerizing pattern. A sui generis work, like no other.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Lacey (Biography of X) reflects on love, faith, and loss in this ambitious genre-bender. Reeling after a breakup, Lacey set out to process it with a "Möbius strip of narrative": the book's first half is fiction, and the second--printed backwards and upside-down, requiring readers to physically turn the book over--is memoir. In the first, a woman named Edie visits her friend Marie near Christmas. Marie has just noticed a pool of blood seeping from under the door of the neighboring apartment, but the friends merely drink tequila and reflect on their mutual friendship with K, a religious conversation Edie had with a dying dog, and the recent end of Edie's abusive relationship. Eventually, a cop comes to investigate the blood. The second half sees Lacey pick apart her own breakup: in the wake of an email in which Lacey's partner told her he met someone else, she recalls her strict religious upbringing, the function of fiction in her life, and her experiences with spiritual healers. Lacey's writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite ("A trust betrayed is always a shock. That is the hazard of trust"). Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author's fans will be glad they took the plunge. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Lacey's previous book, Biography of X, was a work of fiction masquerading as a biography, and in her first memoir, fiction and biography intertwine once again. It offers readers two entry points: one side of the book is fictitious, the other is memoir. Both talk about love, faith, and loss. Lacey the memoirist writes of failing marriages, the community of artists and writers that supported her, and her relationship with faith as a child, a young writer, and a writer moving through this world. Lacey the novelist writes of marriage, others' motherhood, and a dead dog that addresses god and the afterlife. This hybrid work of nonfiction and fiction shows how a writer's life influences the fiction they write and how the fiction an author writes impacts their life as well. The two narratives draw readers to the middle of the book where they are left with the friends and creative works that inspired and supported Lacey through a breakup and depression in the middle of the COVID pandemic. VERDICT This memoir expands the craft explored in Lacey's last book but offers a nakedness of spirit that few artists have explored as deftly as she does.--John Rodzvilla
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss. A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor's door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey's latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. "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," Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The "toy version of herself" might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. "Ha ha, we said,yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief," Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer. A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
