THE MÖBIUS BOOK

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.