After celebrating the publication of four novels and one collection of short stories over the past ten years, Nonfiction alum and Adjunct Assistant Professor Catherine Lacey ’10 is publishing her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book—a catalogue of the wreckage that ensued after a broken relationship, the broken trust of a shared mortgage, and her ensuing battle with depression. Juxtaposed with the beauty of the friendships that surrounded the wreckage, and the redemptive power of platonic love, Lacey traces the impact of her broken relationship to her teenage experience of losing faith in God—her appetite wrecked, her body emaciated.
Currently teaching a masterclass in nonfiction roughly fifteen years after being in the same program as a student, Lacey discusses this debut work of nonfiction saying, “I’ve spent about a decade focused mainly on writing fiction, but essays were really my gateway into writing.” As a result, memory and fiction—sometimes, in a sense, the same thing—enmesh.
Professor Leslie Jamison said the book “explores some of the most propulsive questions at the core of human intimacy…[it's a] wry, surprising, nimble book—allergic to genre labels, and positively vibrating with insight.” Critic Hua Hsu calls The Möbius Book a “singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for faith that might break us free.”
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
