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A Möbius strip, a looped surface with a single continuous side, is often formed by cutting a long, thin piece of paper and joining its ends with a half twist. The strip has no beginning and no end. You cannot distinguish its clockwise turns from its counterclockwise turns. It is impossible to separate inside from outside. Its disorienting geometry has made it an attractive figure for experimental artists and writers; it features in sculptures by José de Rivera and Max Bill and in poems by Charles Olson and Howard Nemerov. My favorite Möbius strip appears in the frame story of John Barth’s 1968 short-story collection, “Lost in the Funhouse.” Readers are instructed to cut out a rectangle whose top and bottom halves read “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE” and “WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN,” respectively. If you join the ends to each other, they will form an infinitely regressive tale: “Once upon a time, there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time . . .”
Catherine Lacey’s sixth book, “The Möbius Book,” is divided in half. One half is a work of fiction, a novella about two friends, Edie and Marie, who meet in Marie’s apartment to discuss their recent breakups: Edie has left a controlling man, and Marie’s wife has filed for divorce. Written in a close third person that shifts between the women, it charts the history of their devoted, if mutually frustrating, friendship. The other half, which is nonfiction, memorializes the aftermath of Lacey’s breakup with a man known as “The Reason,” who leaves her for another woman. This half is a modern quest narrative; its narrator wanders from one city to another, uncertain of what she wants and what kind of a home she will make for herself. “The Möbius Book” is non-orientable. It has no front or back. You can start it from either side; you need only turn the book over and rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. But the half that you begin with will inexorably shape your sense of the metamorphosis that its narrator and her themes—betrayal and friendship, sex and spirituality—undergo as you read.
Lacey and I first met two years ago, when we discussed her novel “Biography of X,” at Greenlight Bookstore, in Brooklyn. (Like several of my colleagues, I appear as a minor character in the book.) We’ve stayed in touch intermittently, mostly to exchange reading recommendations. In May, she spoke with me over Zoom from Mexico City, where she lives with her partner, the novelist Daniel Saldaña-Paris. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
As I read “The Möbius Book,” I was admiring how it brings together all of your preoccupations: the loss of faith, the loss of love, the erasure of the body, the limits of autobiography.
It does feel like a turning point for me, like I finished something. It may be a while before I do another book. It feels like a clearing-of-the-desk moment.
What do you feel like you’ve finished?
“Finished” is the wrong word now that I hear it, but losing my faith was the first thing I tried to write about in a serious way. In graduate school, I thought that was my subject. It was my learning space. But I was too close to it. It had been less than a decade since I had gone through the crisis that I was trying to write about, and I didn’t realize I would have to better understand the experience of losing faith to describe it in a way that felt clear. I do think writing about faith resists clarity. I had to accept that there was always going to be something murky about it.
I also think getting older is fucking awesome for writers, because your concerns shift and deepen. I think feeling finished has something to do with turning forty.
As I get older, I find I no longer experience life changes as visible crises, but as stretches of concentrated, if painful, lucidity. There’s a language of crisis running through “The Möbius Book”—it’s about divorce and breakups—but it feels entirely in control in its structure and style.
I finished the nonfiction half when I was still in it. I had written it in a state of deep agitation and fear and chaos. My life was completely a mess. I wanted to have the heat of rage and confusion. But the original draft that I wrote was almost completely in that place. It was unfinished. I was slow to realize it, but it didn’t have another voice critiquing what I was going through. That was the role of the fictional half: to present alternative perspectives on a moment of transition and crisis and confusion. I wanted to have some alternate perspective outside of myself as a character in the book.
The fiction is mostly a dialogue between Edie and Marie. It takes place entirely in Marie’s apartment over the course of one night. It reads like a play.
I love limits. I feel like I have to set up the limit at the beginning of something in order to be free to write within it. This was how I wrote the fiction. I knew it was going to be two women having a conversation in an apartment. They had to stay in the apartment. So that it wasn’t totally claustrophobic, I had to figure out how to get them out of the apartment without having them leave it.
So, the first draft was the nonfiction, then you revised it and wrote the fiction? Or did you write the fiction, then revise the nonfiction?
There was a bit of going back and forth, but the fiction was written in a very concentrated three-week period at a residency in Switzerland. I think it helped inform how to revise the nonfiction. I wasn’t able to fully give myself over to that revision until I had a better idea of what the goal of the book was like. Originally, I thought I was writing an essay, or I was writing in my diary for nobody to read.
One thing that getting older makes you more open to is accepting that you have no idea what you’re doing. If you’re doing creative work, it could go in many different directions. I think the biggest mistake that you can make is being married to a specific outcome. At a certain point, I was married to the book as a straightforward work of nonfiction. When I showed it to my editors, they felt like it was missing me somehow. I had written something that was very personal, but my perspective as a writer wasn’t in it.
It’s interesting to hear you describe the mistake of being “married to an outcome,” because everything you say about writing could double as a description of being married, period.
Yes, accepting the multiplicity of forms that your relationship with another human being can take. That’s the hardest part of it for almost everybody.
Or how, in marriage, forms of self-erasure can be misrecognized or misexpressed as love.
I think this goes back to the family unit in general. I grew up on a different planet compared to most people, in Mississippi in the eighties and nineties. That world was so much more conservative and had such a narrower idea of what men and women could be and, and what a family looks like and, and what kind of cruelty is permitted within a family. There are a lot of behaviors that I learned to interpret as love. I think the control of men was interpreted as a form of love. I hadn’t realized how much that was the thing that I was married to—that I was actively seeking out these forms of structure and authority from a man, when it was the one thing that made me the most unhappy. I’m not completely liberated of these ideas. But I do feel like I finally described what I had been pushing up against for a long time.
You are one of two people I know who has described Jesus as their first boyfriend. The other is the queer theorist Michael Warner, in an essay, “Tongues Unbound,” about growing up Pentecostal.
I was so jealous of the Pentecostals. Oh, my God, speaking in tongues is so sexy. We were part of a Methodist Church. There was some archaic stuff going on, but it wasn’t speaking in tongues. I wanted so badly to be taken in that way.
Is the love of Jesus a substitute for or a complement to the worldly desire for male authority?
It’s both. He’s an eternal, unattainable entity that has all the moral high ground and creates all structures. Your role is to be entirely focussed on him. Everything he says is true. But it was also human-on-human love. Jesus was the Son of God, and He was conceived by a virgin, but at his core he was human. He was demonstrating to us the human capacity for purity and selflessness.
My first actual boyfriend was a punk and an atheist. We didn’t talk about religion that much. Part of my attraction to him was that I was worried for his soul, although I never brought that up, because it wasn’t cool. Even though I didn’t want to go to church anymore, and I was confused about my faith, I thought I could demonstrate to him some kind of care that would save him. It was partially through that relationship that I fell away from the church completely.
Did you fall toward something else?
No, I didn’t have another world view to attach to. I was a young woman, and I wasn’t in an environment where it was O.K. to talk about not believing in God. I felt like the immediate reaction I would have been met with was “Let’s bring you back.” But I was having a complete existential breakdown.
In my first years in college, I made the friends that I’m still very close to. I learned something about platonic love that remains consistent in my life. I could cry thinking about it—I feel the beautiful thing about platonic love is that it doesn’t require anything from you. It meets you where you are. My friendships make me feel connected to the sacred most consistently.
For me, platonic love is completely devoid of the will to possess, which is what distinguishes it from romantic love.
I have had friendships that start with possession, but then things can break down irretrievably. The only friend breakup I’ve ever had was with the only person that I still dream about. That tells me a lot. I don’t think about any ex-lovers, ex-boyfriends, ex-whatevers. I’m not moved to know about them. But I think of my one ex-friend as my incomplete love. That tells me something about my hierarchy of relationships. For me, friendship is up here. And my partner is pretty close, but they’re in a different category. Everybody else is below that.
It’s hard to write about friendship that isn’t animated by envy or desire. The nonfiction half of the book, in which you are walking around different cities, wires a circuitry of friendship. People flash into focus for a paragraph, then recede, then return. There’s a faith that’s gained simply through moving among one’s friends. By the time we get to the end of the book, and there’s a new romantic love, it feels like a natural extension of friendship.
I think that was one thing I realized while writing the book: I had drastically distinct criteria for what I wanted from a partner than from my friends. I understand that they’re different roles, but I thought the criteria should be closer together. I was hesitant about the fact that the book has a happy ending. I was hesitant to end a book about losing faith, falling out of love, and being betrayed by a partner with the idea that you could just fall in love with somebody else. But I wanted to remain engaged with the possibility of doing similar things differently.
One thing that happens to people when they get divorced is that they vow never to get married again, as if any possible marriage would be identical to the marriage that ended. It’s as if the humiliation of the divorce was such that you’re willing to sacrifice the possibility of going through that ritual again and finding something new in it. I can understand it—but divorce completely closing you off to the possibility of marriage? It’s neither here nor there if you’re legally married, but how can you give up the opportunity to engage deeply with one other person?
You observe in “The Möbius Book” that you haven’t written about sex in your previous novels. Why not?
I don’t know. I still feel like I didn’t write that much about sex in this book. Even dipping into it a little bit was hard. I took out a lot. I don’t know if I am really ready to publish my thoughts about sex or have people respond to them.
Here you describe “grief sex” in the aftermath of your sister’s death. It reminded me of something a friend wrote to me a few years ago: “It’s unfair that desire is alchemically indifferentiable from grief.”
There is something about the alchemy between different states and different emotions, especially as it’s released through the surrender of having sex. That surrender is a way to access the grief or anxiety that we store in our bodies. That’s why one should be hesitant about who you do or don’t have sex with. You want to be clear about who you’re offering that emotional information to. It doesn’t have to be somebody that you’re in a committed relationship with, but everyone has to be aware of the emotional responsibility of intimacy.
When I asked you about falling away from religion, I wondered if you were going to say that you fell toward sex as a shared practice of transcendence.
No, I still believed in waiting until marriage. I believed that sexual intimacy would be some kind of transporting state that I wasn’t prepared to enter without some sort of organizing moral principle. I just didn’t want to be in my body. So, I wasn’t.
My experience of losing religion partially had to do with a growing awareness of not being straight, but also not having language for it because of the context I grew up in. There weren’t examples of a gay life, and there definitely weren’t examples of bisexual women. How can you have an orientation toward a sexuality that you don’t know exists? There’s this woman who fell in love with and married the Berlin Wall. I don’t know what the term is for having romantic or sexual feelings for objects—for falling into monogamous love with an object as large as the Berlin Wall. I felt that strange about my sexuality.
I feel that way about the sea.
You would marry the sea.
Or a Möbius strip, which is a minor miracle of geometry. On its Wikipedia page, you’re shown an animation of it in which a crab scuttles across its surface. The crab starts on the outside, does one tour and ends up upside down on the inside. He does another and ends up back where he started, but dizzy. Even if he technically ends up back where he started, he’s differently oriented. I felt like that crab moving across the two halves of this book—from fiction to nonfiction, from the end of one love to the start of another one.
He’s dizzied; we’re dizzy. I like your interpretation of finding your way from the fiction to the nonfiction as like the crab’s journey around the Möbius strip. Part of the reason the book is structured that way is because I didn’t want there to be just one way to read it. I didn’t want people to have vastly different experiences of it based on which way they read it first. I wanted both parts to be pushing against each other without either one being first or second. There’s no sequence. One person’s experience of the book may have a narrative, but the thing itself doesn’t have a narrative order.
As you were talking about bisexuality’s lack of orientation, it made me think about the un-orientated nature of the Möbius strip. I had an epiphany: The Möbius strip is bisexual. Is this insane?
I hadn’t thought of that, but I will take it. That’s amazing. It has a form that’s not recognized as single-sided, but it actually is a single plane. Yet it looks confusing as a single plane. This is blowing my mind.
The first piece of writing I ever translated into English from Spanish is from an anonymous source that argued that bisexuality is not being a mix of straight and gay. This was something I didn’t even realize that I still believed—that there’s two sides of yourself, and you’re constantly in a state of tension between them. I don’t feel like I’m in a state of tension, but I feel like my experience has always been informed by that orientation.
A lot of writers claim to be interested in the multiplicity of the self, but when you read their work, you encounter a totally uniform personality. Each of your books enacts multiplicity through a different aesthetic strategy: in “Pew,” the evacuation of the narrator’s interiority in favor of the stories other characters share with them; in “Biography of X,” the reproduction of archives and photographs; in “The Möbius Book,” the refraction of fiction as nonfiction. These experiments feel joyful, childlike even.
I just remembered that one of the first books I asked my mom to buy for me was a memoir by a man who had multiple-personality disorder, or what was then called multiple-personality disorder. I learned about it from Oprah. I loved reading about this middle-aged man who had a wife and a family and all these distinct personalities and different names. It was called “First Person Plural.”
There’s the seed of your whole artistic project: the first-person plural, many gendered, variously sexed up.
Yes, a fluctuating mix of masculine and feminine that we experience in our bodies and our minds over time. Some people stay very firmly on one side of the scale or another. Sometimes that corresponds with the gender that they exist in. I feel like for bisexual people there’s an infinite mix. Maybe you inhabit the world in a very masculine way, even though you present as very feminine. As these things move, you’re aware of them moving and you want them to be visible to other people. I think to some degree I do.
Part of what being in a romantic relationship means is opening that infinity in yourself to the other person. If you’re, for instance, a cis-gendered man who doesn’t necessarily want to be in a relationship with another man, but wants to be in a relationship with somebody who occupies multiple spaces in order to interact with the feminine side of yourself. I always felt very masculine, but I was never not a woman. When I was dating straight men, this just presented endless problems. I was always coming up against the same fucking issue with these fucking men. Like, what is their problem? Why is this part of me always being refused?
I can relate. Let me know if you figure out the answer.
I feel like there is a muscularity to the way that you engage with the world through your writing. I’ve come to enjoy the astrological way of explaining character because then it gets degendered. I like a planetary language, because then what I’m talking about is energy—Mars energy or Saturn energy. It’s not a feature that only men can have, or that is inherently masculine. There’s a feminine aspect to it.
In “The Möbius Book,” you describe going to a spiritual cleanser, Michal, who removes a demon from your leg. Even though you feel changed, you’re skeptical about the reality of the demon. But then, you compare it to the reality of fiction: “Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened.”
Michal, the woman who performed the cleansing, had her way of seeing it. She saw what was in me as a ghost, as a demon. She believed this demon didn’t even know me, didn’t even care about me—that it was just trying to get into my body, that there were demons all over the place. But to me, it seemed more autobiographical. I thought this was my demon, my ghost. I didn’t believe in its arbitrariness. I think I played an active role in whatever emotion in my body was unlocked through this process.
Your ghosts are part of the self, but capable of being expelled from it.
I like Derek Parfit’s way of viewing the self. He’s not interested in what the self is or if you can ever know yourself. For him, the self simply doesn’t exist. I also like the idea—I think it’s a line from Deleuze that Chris Kraus quotes in “I Love Dick”—that life is not personal. I’ve never been able to find the original. There’s nothing that can happen to you that everyone else hasn’t gone through in one shape or another. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve published something that’s personal and received an e-mail from somebody who tells me that they went through the exact same thing. I’m, like, “Of course you did!” I’m not writing about it because I’m the only person that went through it. When I get nervous about the fact that I’ve written this personal book, I remember that this is not an act of revealing something very personal. We’re all in the same fucked-up little boats.
How far can you push this logic when you’re writing about an easily identifiable ex-lover, ex-husband, ex-whatever? What obligation do you have to someone who might feel like this book is extremely personal?
I’ve never written anything that didn’t have other people in it. No one has written a piece of fiction or a piece of nonfiction that doesn’t have other people’s perspectives or experiences of other people in it. The scenes in the nonfiction are things I remember to the best of my memory. Everyone who was in the nonfiction read the nonfiction after I was done with it, with the exception of a few people who I don’t give a shit about, frankly. But when I was writing about somebody who I wasn’t going to share the book with, I made sure that what I wrote was backed up with diary entries, e-mails, texts, or anything else I could use to prove that something really had happened. I was very sparing, I think, about what I decided to include. There are many scenes that I decided to omit because I do feel an obligation to people whom I’m no longer in touch with. I feel an obligation to write truthfully.
I suspect you were admirably restrained.
You should read the earlier version. It’s not restrained. There’s a lot in there that could have been very humiliating—for myself, too. But I’m fine with coming off as a compromised character. I don’t think anybody that writes a memoir should seem virtuous or correct. I should be a suspicious narrator. I’m a human being.
This would be boring for me if you weren’t.
Amen. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
