Catherine Lacey’s Infinite Regress

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?