Catherine Lacey’s incendiary breakup book

In the novella, two women meet over a drink. Marie is barred from seeing her young children after she was caught cheating on her wife; Edie is newly separated from a controlling male lover. While many topics are aired – not least the pool of blood seeping alarmingly from under a neighbour’s door – the dialogue turns above all on Edie’s ex-partner. Edie downplays his aggression (“He feels so much”) but Marie is doubtful: “Someone or something else was always responsible... his migraines, his heart condition, his grief – though usually it had been Edie, Edie who had been responsible for making him angry, for provoking it.”

Lacey must know it won’t escape attention that the man outlined here shares details with her own ex-partner, the author Jesse Ball, who won the Gordon Burn prize in 2018 for his novel Census. And while The Möbius Book’s longer nonfiction segment also airs a variety of subjects – from Lacey’s insomnia as a God-fearing child in Mississippi to her post-breakup experiment with bondage – the main focus is a frank exploration of her years with Ball, referred to only as The Reason (the reason Lacey left Chicago). The Reason and Edie’s ex-lover don’t absolutely align – The Reason isn’t shown lying about a relationship with a former student, among other differences – but his aura is nearly as sinister: he tells Lacey early in their relationship to lose weight, suggests she’s “most likely just a lesbian” when they stop having so much sex, and breaks his own hand by punching a wall in rage because she checks her phone while they’re watching a film.

These recollections don’t claim victimhood so much as conduct an unsparing inquiry into Lacey’s attraction to the submission The Reason demands, even while she makes clear that she has moved on, describing sex with the man who is now her husband, the writer Daniel Saldaña Paris. As Lacey discusses her breakup with author friends including “Geoff” (Dyer) and “Max” (Porter), who asks her if The Reason may have been right that she no longer loved him, the interest may be keenest among readers who recognise the literary cameos that float through the pages. But once you have read both parts – whichever way around – the structure generates broader intrigue: if the thematic overlap suggests the extent to which a novelist feeds on personal experience, does it also perhaps hint that fiction is free to cut closer to the bone?

As always with Lacey, the writing can sound solemn: Edie chose the “bleak and liminal neighbourhood” where she lives in order to be near a payphone, craving “proximity to something so irrevocably stuck in the past”. Vivid particulars – the sight of the gallon of hand soap that Lacey bought prior to The Reason’s blindsiding email – give way to grandstanding riffs: “Hope is visible in the objects in our homes... The kitchen pantry reassures us of our future nourishment.”

Yet the material is incendiary enough to survive its mannered telling – maybe it says more about me than about the book, but the truth is that I found myself consuming both parts as avidly as I would the ugliest gossip. Ultimately, the cathartic indictment of The Möbius Book is what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous: a project born of damage, capable of damaging in turn the one person you suspect will read it most closely.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta (£16.99). Order your copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Getty; Willy Somma