Start At The End

On Catherine Lacey's "The Möbius Book"

If you have something of a blank check after writing a bestseller, you might as well take advantage of it, and Catherine Lacey sure did; her follow-up to 2023’s Biography of X, 2025’s Möbius Book, is a truly reversible book, even down to the ISBN barcodes on each side and the repeated title pages, blurbs, and copyright pages; one side is a novella, the other a memoir-ish type thing, and in the middle of the book, the text flips upside down, and the reader has to duly flip the book around and over and start from the other side. (It’s a tête bêche, a fun phrase to learn; you would look kind of funny doing this in public, but unlike some other textually experimental books — Susan Howe’s poetry, House of Leaves, or my beloved Hopscotch — this turn only happens once, so any performative readers will have to plan ahead.) All this was probably a big pain for the publisher, which is the exact kind of thing more authors should be able to do: insist on doing things that give accountants and executives headaches. The book existing in its physical form (and repeated for the paperback!) is an achievement in itself, a pain in many people’s ass made real. For all that insistence on the form, though, it’s strange to then actually read the book and find that all this paratextual work went into something that’s just totally and overwhelmingly… fine.