Autofiction’s Primal Scene | Los Angeles Review of Books

Jon Repetti returns to the scene of writing in Catherine Lacey’s new novel “The Möbius Book.”

AFTER THE PUBLICATION of her first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), Catherine Lacey became the object of what passes for a media frenzy in the world of literary fiction. Reviewers and interviewers returned consistently to the same question: to what extent is the novel—about a woman named Elyria who hitchhikes across New Zealand during a depressive episode—autobiographical? In an essay for BuzzFeed Books published in the middle of this experience, Lacey wrote that she was frustrated but not surprised by the question, given the long-standing tendency of readers and journalists to assume that novels, especially first novels by young women, are memoirs in disguise.

The author and protagonist of Nobody Is Ever Missing are roughly the same age, they’ve both been to New Zealand, and they share a desire to temporarily vanish. The biographical similarities more or less end there, though Lacey insists that these surface connections are beside the point:

What I should tell anyone who might ask again is that no fiction writer can honestly tell you what parts of her characters are mutations or facsimiles or pure inventions of the self. There’s no master Venn diagram, no clean delineation between invention and reality. Everyone writes fiction.

Invention and reality cannot be divided on a Venn diagram, she argues, but are better imagined as, in essence, a Möbius strip, a single continuous surface that only appears to be two-sided.

I want to suggest that Lacey’s recent works—especially Pew (2020), Biography of X (2023), and now The Möbius Book (2025)—can be approached as a series of increasingly complex reflections on the consequences of the final sentence of that early essay: “Everyone writes fiction.” And she really does mean “everyone,” not just writers. In Pew, a strange, silent figure without a discernible gender or race appears in a small town and, over the course of a week, becomes the screen upon which all the town’s inhabitants project their desires, fantasies, and fears. In Biography of X, an elusive artist experiences something similar at a global scale over the greater part of the 20th century. This artist is not mute, but she resists (always imperfectly) the desire of others to impose their fictions on her by inventing and reinventing her own counterfictions, accumulating a lifetime of masks through which her biographer sifts.

In The Möbius Book, Lacey casts herself as the object of projection and analyzes her shifting responses to the fictions others make for her. When a partner buys her an expensive Japanese teacup, she reports feeling something like impostor syndrome and decides to devote herself “toward truly becoming the person for whom this teacup had been intended, someone who used it with frequency and pleasure, […] and I hoped to become this deserving person very soon, at some reachable point in the foreseeable future.” When the couple separates, she asks him to shatter the teacup with a hammer. Eventually, he obliges. In a much later fragment, she thinks of Marina Abramović and Ulay walking from opposite sides of the Great Wall of China to say goodbye, at once aestheticizing and ritualizing their breakup. The ceremony of smashing the teacup becomes retroactively legible as a private version of that performance, a borrowed story.

“Everyone writes fiction,” but it is precisely because everyone writes it, and because everyone is writing it all the time, about everyone else, that nobody can write fiction just as they please. Whether one accepts being cast as a character in another’s story or aggressively repudiates that story, one’s ability to write their own story is always at some level determined by that other, and by countless (other) others. This applies both to the fictions we tell about our own lives as we’re living them and to those things called novels that a certain group of people called “fiction writers” produce.

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The Möbius Book insists that invention and reality can never be reduced to one another but must be thought together, dialectically, as distinct but inseparable. Not an autofiction, but a hybrid work of fiction and memoir, the text is printed as a tête-bêche: finish one side, then flip the book over and begin to read the other side. The fiction side is a novella in which two women named Edie and Marie discuss their respective breakups and struggles with religious faith, or lack thereof, in a shabby apartment at the edge of an unnamed city while a Lynchian bloodstain silently spreads in the hallway and a man lies dead in the room next door. The memoir side concerns Lacey’s tumultuous six-year relationship and breakup with the writer Jesse Ball, who is referred to only as “The Reason.” She traces the contours of her life in the aftermath of that separation through fragments and vignettes: the return of her anorexia, her travels in Mexico, her sex life, her dabbling in New Age healing practices, and her conversations with friends.

The two-sided structure of the book immediately invites the sort of Venn diagramming of “reality” and “invention” that the author rejects in her 2014 essay but with a (half-)twist. Scenes, images, and phrases from the memoir appear in the fiction, though they are always displaced or mutated (to use Lacey’s word) when they cross the boundary. The author’s memory of watching four nudists swim at a rocky beach with a powerful undertow becomes Edie’s recollection of a couple swimming at a similar beach, a memory in which the man is dragged out to sea and drowns. Lacey’s tentative sexual experimentation with friends becomes Edie’s dive into hedonism with strangers. Lacey’s initial skepticism toward and ultimate appreciation of (though never quite belief in) energy healing is divided between Edie’s enthusiasm for and Marie’s rejection of various forms of mysticism. Scenes from Lacey’s relationship with Ball, likewise, appear in distorted form throughout both women’s stories.

A reader with some background in psychoanalysis or structuralism might be tempted to go a step further than the Venn diagram–drawing journalist, instead approaching the fiction as an act of symbolic resolution or compensation for the events of the memoir. The publicity copy and back matter invite this sort of approach as well, presenting the memoir as an objective “cataloging” of the “wreckage” of the author’s life and the fiction as the subsequent “investigation” and transformation of these traumas into a work of art that not only expresses but also illuminates—even redeems—the experience.

Lacey, I suspect, might respond that our hypothetical Freudo-structuralist is just a more sophisticated version of the journalist, insofar as both assume that the web of relations between reality and invention—between any given life and any given work of fiction—can be ultimately and decisively mapped. The Möbius Book resists that sort of mapping. The reader cannot help but note the passage of certain scenes and images from one side of the book to the other yet can never give a precise account of why these specific scraps of experience have been chosen, or why they have been transformed in this particular way. Attempting to trace precisely the logic of their fictionalization is an impossible project, analogous to sliding one’s finger along the surface of a Möbius strip and trying to locate the exact point at which one finds oneself suddenly, mysteriously, on the “other side.”

The persistent scholar could, of course, counter that Lacey has simply left things out, withheld details consciously or unconsciously, and that, if we had access to all the facts of the life and all the drafts of the fiction, we could trace her overdetermined psychic workings more thoroughly. Perhaps. But such an effort would require the equivalent of a Borgesian map as large as the territory it charts. At this point, the critic is permitted to overstep a bit and suggest that the creation of a work that prompts the reader to attempt such a mapping while effectively demonstrating its impossibility is the “implicit argument” at the heart of the text, even if the author would likely avoid that language herself.

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This structuralist mapping exercise is not merely a parochial and outmoded method of academic interpretation, surviving only among those who imbibed too much (Fredric) Jameson in graduate school, nor is the Venn diagram approach merely the province of would-be tabloid journalists. Both represent extreme tendencies within a broader mode of reading that is widespread, if not quite dominant, today in the circulation of memoir and autofiction, a mode that conceives the text in terms of the production of catharsis, as a means of what Lacey calls “treatment” for what ails the writer, psychically or existentially.

If the writing of fiction is a treatment, what else could that treatment be but a cathartic, a purgative? The things purged in Lacey’s writing are not only strong emotions but also—and more often—ideas, images, phrases associated with those emotions that previously had a merely private and inchoate existence. Their significance remains uninterrogated until they appear on the page, written by her own hand but coming as if from elsewhere. The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning—when we catch the author surprising herself, when she describes how the act of putting a particular idea, phrase, or feeling in the head, mouth, or body of a character allows her to suddenly recognize that that very thing has always been present in herself, concealed or disavowed. The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading (like a Möbius strip, you have to go all the way around twice to complete the circuit), when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight.

This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.