Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all well
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, best selling author and
PhD in literature. Today we are diving into the Mobius
(00:24):
book by Catherine Lacy. I was pretty sure when I
very first read about this book and read about the
formal elements, the fact that it really is a memoir
together with a novella. I assumed that that PhD in
literature was really going to.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Be put to the test.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
And I had such an interesting experience of the books.
I'm very pleased to dive into it with you all today.
A couple of super quick housekeeping notes. One is that
if you are listening on a podcast and you feel
like watching these lectures on YouTube, that is a possibility.
The lecture today does not lend itself to a lot
of photographs, but there are definitely books where the YouTube
lecture ends up containing all of visual elements that I
(01:01):
feather in throughout. It is so fun for me, and
I think viewers really appreciate it. If you are watching
on YouTube and you feel like taking the show on
the road, you can always listen to it as a podcast.
It's the exact same lecture as a podcast anywhere you
listen to your podcasts. I also haven't mentioned for quite
some time what the foxed page means. The foxed page
(01:22):
comes from the idea of foxing. So foxing is just
the aging, the little age spots that we would find
on the pages and on the covers of very old,
very beloved books. So today I'm really excited to talk
about Catherine Lacey's The Mobius Book. This is a book
that is formally inventive, and when I say formally there
I simply mean in terms of its form. And I
(01:44):
will admit that that formal invention was really the main
reason why I picked up the book. I think that
my experience of The Mobius Book was both helped and
hurt by the fact that I had just finished reading
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. That is a book that
is also very formally inventive. Very famously, Billy Pilgrim is
unstuck in time. The book is very fragmentary. It plays
(02:07):
really pretty fast, and loose with the idea of the
narrator as also being an actual person, our actual author,
the actual Kurt Vonnegut. And so in many ways I
was really primed to dive into a book like the
Mobius Book, where Catherine Lacy is doing the same thing.
So you can't talk about this book without talking about
the cover and about how the book is actually set up.
(02:28):
So when the thing I first noticed when I saw
it in the bookstore is that's it's covered kind of
like a library book. It's like those ones you would
get from like Interlibrary Loan. There was something very kind
of weirdly academic about the way the book actually felt
in my hand. But the thing I noticed right away
is we had the big bar code down at the bottom.
(02:50):
Those of you on YouTube can see me holding it
up here. The book itself is kind of a pretty
blue color, but then it has this big bar code
situation in white, and aesthetically, I did not really love that.
After I read the book and I was preparing the lecture,
I took a closer look at all of the elements,
as I am wont to do, and I do think
(03:10):
it's important that right above the little barcode again. I'll
show it to you if you're on the YouTube. It
says fiction slash memoir. So part of my process when
I am approaching a book is to not do a
whole bunch of reading about it beforehand. This book, the
Mobius Book, was on a bunch of different lists things
you might want to read this summer. So I picked
(03:30):
up the Mobias Book, and I certainly understood that you
could start at either side. And I love this kind
of book. I love the notion of playing with the
physical object of a book and playing with our expectations.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I was excited.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I picked it up, and I realized that randomly I
was either going to start reading one or the other
of these pieces of literature.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I dove in.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
It turned out that I was reading the memoir. But
because I had not looked very carefully at the boilerplate information,
all of that stuff about the publication and the rights,
the one that has like the little thing that says,
you know, this is a work of nonfiction, blah blah blah,
I didn't read all of that stuff. I went ahead
and I dove into this, and it was so interesting
because I was reading it as if it were fiction. Essentially,
(04:13):
as if it were maybe some sort of auto fiction.
In fact, as I was making my little notes as
I always do, I had a whole section of auto fiction.
Part of that was because she was using a lot
of names of actual writers and talking about things that
were happening in the real world in a way that
felt to me like auto fiction. And I'm kind of
interested in this phenomenon. I mean, all of you Fox
Page listeners who have been listening for a while know
(04:36):
that my advice is just if you want to be
a better reader, just pay closer attention. And I could
certainly argue to myself that I should have read all
of that frontist matter, But I also think it was
such an interesting experiment. So I went into this thinking
it was going to be two pieces of fiction, and
at some point I realized that what I was reading
was in fact a memoir. And part of the interesting
(04:58):
thing about this book, about the reading experience of this
book is that you never know as a reader if
you are going to you know you're going to start
at one or the other. I suppose you could be
very conscious about it and look and see which one
is the fiction and which one is the nonfiction, but
you obviously are hopefully you're going into it with enough
intrigue and enough mystery that you don't really know which
would be better. And obviously all of that's kind of
(05:20):
an academic and not very interesting question, because there is
no way to know which is better. I did come
away wishing that I had read the fiction first, and
I'll try to articulate why as we are moving through,
but I think the basic idea was that I found
the fiction part more compelling, and I would have liked
to have had that story in mind, the story of
(05:40):
Edie and Marie and Kay, and I would.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Have liked to have sort of backfilled.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I feel like I would have held on a bit
more to a lot of the information that we had
gotten in the memoir, and frankly, I would have been
like weirdly more interested in the memoir because I would
be sort of backfilling all of these things in a story.
The novella that I felt was pretty compell and I
think just the way that I'm describing this, the idea
of wanting to kind of backfill information into the fiction
(06:07):
piece indicates a little bit of my reaction to the book.
My reaction, and it's very strange because this doesn't happen
to me very often.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I felt like the whole thing was sort of slippery.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I couldn't quite figure out what I wanted to discuss
with you. All the little notes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
That I always take in the back of the book, I.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Take a little note of something that is interesting to me,
and then I'll put page numbers that indicate the pages
where I could go back and look at this aspect.
They were kind of all over the place, and in fact,
I didn't have as many as I usually do, which
I think is notable because this is the kind of
book actually where it seems like I would actually have
a lot of that because of all of the idea
of the fiction and the nonfiction working together, the formally
(06:46):
inventive part of it, the idea of all the parallels
you might find, it seemed like it would have been rich.
And yet I enjoyed the reading of it, but I
came away feeling a little bit like I hadn't quite
apprehended the whole thing. What was really interesting is I
then went on to listen to a bunch of interviews
with Catherine Lacey, and I'm going to share some of
that information with you today. But I found that really interesting,
(07:09):
and of course part of me, in my formally inventive brain,
I was sort of in that space. It was so
interesting to her to listen to her discuss all of
these different elements with various interviewers. Obviously there's some things
that kept repeating themselves, which is interesting unto itself. But
I had this sense that I was adding a whole
other layer on top of the memoir that sort of
(07:30):
sits on top of the fiction, or you know, maybe
the fiction is sitting on top of the memoir, and
I felt like I was once again backfilling. I didn't
actually know the name of her boyfriend. This is very
much a roma atle like a novel where there are
actual people in it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I'm doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Super obnoxious thing where I can't remember the word in English.
I think there's a word in English, but I can
only remember the word in French.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
There's also a word tet's besch.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
There's a word for this kind of book in French,
but I can't really think of it in English, which
now I'm just like off the deep end with the
French posturing. But I didn't know most of these authors.
Some of them I did, and I didn't know the
name of the guy. Apparently it's very you know, it's
a quick google away to find out who the author is.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I actually did.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Go once I found his name is Jesse something or other.
I read an interview that he did with someone and
he sounded like such an ass which was actually very
validating in many ways. So today is going to be
a little different in the sense that we're not going
to look quite so closely at the prose. Instead, we're
going to look at the formal elements, the inventive nature
of the book, because I think in many ways that
(08:34):
is where the experience of reading it is most satisfying.
So I always like to take a look at the
title here. The title is obviously very important, and because
it's sort of so easily not easily, but because it's
so because it's so obviously speaks to the formal invention.
At first, I hadn't gone very deep with it.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
In my mind.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It was sort of just melded with the infinity symbol,
like I just had this sense that Amobia's strip is
a thing that just keeps going. And you do have
that sense it's certainly something that keeps feeding on itself,
and some of the jacket copy. There's the stuff about
how it has so many beginnings and so many endings
and there is really no beginning and no ending, and
I actually don't really agree with any of that. I mean,
(09:15):
I think there are two beginnings, and I think there
are two endings, and in many ways these are two
discrete pieces of writing that definitely have echoes with each other.
But I didn't have a sense that it was sort
of circular. For those of you who are looking for
an actually circular novel, and maybe we should take a
look at this, there is a book by Julio Gortasar
called Rayuela. It was written in the sixties or seventies,
(09:38):
can't quite remember now Hopscotch is the translation into English.
That is a book where there have all these different chunks,
all these different sections, and you can read it in
any order. That to me feels much more like something
that has no beginning and no end and is incredibly circular.
It is such an amazing book. And maybe it's literally
heavyweights like that who have done formal experimentation that I
(09:59):
think is slightly more daring that made this not quite
as satisfying as it might have been. But in terms
of the title, it is, you know, the Mobias strip
does in fact look like the Infinity sign. Every time
I'm thinking of it now, I think of meta and
I'm just like so bummed out by the fact that like,
these corporations co opt these things, and you can never
quite think of, you know, the infinity symbol, although they
(10:21):
stretch theirs to look I think a little bit like
an M but these things never seem quite the same.
But the thing that I realized when I sat down
to dig a little deeper mentally into this book in
preparation for talking with you all, is the fact that
when you look at a Mobia's strip, you're seeing two
sides of something. This Themobia strip is very mathematical, and
(10:41):
I know this because I looked it up on Wikipedia,
which I think is interesting, but not that interesting. Like
I really could not delve at all into the mathematics
of it. And I thought for a little bit about
whether the mathematics had much to do with these two
pieces of writing, and I don't really think it does.
But the Mobias strip has a twist in it, and
part of what I think we are meant to see
(11:02):
when we are looking at the Mobia strip, And when
we are thinking about it in terms of this book,
is that you're seeing two sides of something. So it's
not simply that there's no beginning and no end. It's
that we're talking about two sides of the same thing.
And that to me was much more significant and much
more interesting than this idea of it being sort of circular.
And if we really do conceive of this as sort
(11:24):
of two sides of the same story, I think the
fiction becomes much richer, and in fact, so does the memoir.
And then, of course, if we take this idea of
having a piece of writing that has two different sides,
we can also think about that idea, the idea of
things having two sides in each of the books themselves.
In a book that is really concerned with relationships, you know,
(11:46):
you have obviously the idea that there are two sides
to every story. I mean, it's such a cliche that
it actually is cliche. But here we're really playing in
a very inventive way with this idea of every story
having two sides. So in one of the interns, they
asked her very explicitly about the sort of relationship between
these two things, and it was so interesting to me.
(12:06):
So she suffers this breakup, and after the breakup she
can't write fiction, and she can't read fiction for this
very long amount of time I mean long, being like
nine months or a year or something like that. And
during that time she's writing a lot like nonfiction stuff
but fragmentary, and all of that eventually becomes the memoir.
I did this weird thing, and there was a lot
of talk about breakup, obviously, and there was a lot
(12:28):
of talk about breakdown. And I started thinking about these
phrases in English that all have to do with prepositions
of location, things like up and down, and I got
really interested in all of the different nuances, and I
think it's very interesting that breakup and breakdown are in
fact so close together. So in the memoir, what she
is really focusing on is in fact this breakup. But
(12:49):
what's more important in many ways is this idea of loss.
She talks a lot in the interviews about the idea
of losing things, of losing faith, of losing the relationship,
of losing her house. And I already had thought actually
a lot about religion and clearly about her loss of faith,
but it was really nice to have her speak about
the fact that for her loss of faith and losses
in general, and grief over losses really is kind of
(13:11):
the controlling idea of the memoir. I think because he's
such an asshole, and because there are a couple of
scenes that he's just like such a dick, the part
where he's like saying that she should lose weight, the
part where he throws the book. Just the fact that
he breaks up with her with an email. I mean,
all of it is so egregious and so gnarly that
it kind of really captivated me. That together with the
(13:32):
religious parts, and actually I was pretty caught up in
her narration of what it was to deprive herself and
the way that this kind of anarexia that she was
experiencing came in fact from the Bible, that it had
a lot to do with the Bible. I was interested
in that for whatever reason. I do not love reading
about people's depictions of eating disorders. I mean that sounds
(13:54):
kind of obvious. As someone who had little disordered eating
at the end of high school, but who was very
very happy to have left that behind, there's something about
it that seems I mean, I hate to say this,
it's gosh this is like a terrible thing to say,
but it feels kind of adolescent in this weird way,
and just isn't quite as interesting to me as other
elements of the book. I was interested, though, in the
fact that she said in an interview that it was
(14:17):
around the time that she lost faith when she was
about twenty, that this urge to be depriving herself abated,
and she was able to have a more normal relationship
with food and with her body. And in some ways
I was like, Wow, lucky for her, and great that
there was an endpoint. But also it is so crazy
to me that like a fairly literal reading of the
(14:37):
Bible would convince a young woman that she is supposed
to deprive herself. So much so, I want to take
a look at a quick little passage on page twenty one,
because it speaks to this idea of circularity. It speaks
to the idea that the book itself has these two
halves and you can sort of read it from either direction.
There's a certain looping kind of thing to it, but
there also is that within the text. I'm laughing because
(14:59):
I just picked up the book and I picked up
the wrong side, and I looked at page twenty one,
and I was like, wait, where is my thing I'm
supposed to read? And then I realized, in fact, that
I was looking in the novella, and I meant to
be looking in the memoir. So she writes this in
the memoir. When I wrote to Mangusa to tell her
of my trouble, she told me her spouse of fourteen
years had recently left her for another woman after a
long affair. Everyone's breaking up these days, everyone kept saying.
(15:23):
And though the ambient heartbreak had been no comfort, it
was unpleasantly pleasant to learn of an ending more extreme
than mine. It's a cyclical pain, and a shared one.
So I love so much about this. I love the wow,
couldn't get my glasses off there. I love the idea
of it being circular, and I love this idea of
a community experiencing this kind of cyclical thing. A couple
(15:46):
of very interesting things here is that the circularity of it,
the cyclical nature of the heartache which is speaking. I
think in many ways it's kind of a fractal It's
like a repetition of the larger circularity of the book.
The cyclical nature of the book. We go through everything
twice in some ways in the book. But I like
the way that she is underscoring the fact that it
(16:07):
has to do with the ends of relationships, with this
breaking up of relationships, and it's interesting just to step
back a tiny bit and think about how often the
end of a relationship is definitive. There is not circularity
in terms of the relationship. So she's talking about something
that feels cyclical because it's happening for people, and it
maybe happens to people over and over in their lives,
(16:29):
and in that sense it's a cycle. But each of
the relationships that ends is in fact a discreete entity
that is not circular. One other quick note here she
talks about Manguso. I did not know that's Sarah Manguso,
which I did read the acknowledgments because I always do.
I like to do my literary sleuthing. But I have
not read anything by Sarah Manguso, so that was not
(16:49):
super resonant for me. But she actually quotes this woman, Manguso,
and what she uses there is italics. In one of
the interviews, she said that she doesn't like the idea
of quotation marks. She is someone who did an MFA
in nonfiction writing at Columbia, so she's someone who has
done a lot of thinking about memoir, and.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
She described how she doesn't love the idea of.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Quotation marks because for her, they're really denoting something that
is factual. It's something that you might have in journalism
or some sort of reportage, whereas in nonfiction the idea
of having dialogue written in italics is much more comfortable
for her because in fact doesn't signal kind of truth
in quite the same way. So I mentioned before that
today is going to be a little different in that
(17:31):
we're not going to be doing a lot of close
textual analysis, but I do want to take a look
at some of the prose in part just to discuss
what it is that we're dealing with here. I found
her pros very effective, and it's always better in these
discussions to have something concrete to hold on to. But
I'm also reading these I mean, obviously I'm reading specific parts,
and of course the parts that I'm selecting are very significant.
(17:53):
We're going to look at pages three and four of
the memoir. It's the opening of the memoir because it
concerns a teak. So one of the things that I
think you do by human nature as you are reading
these two things, is you are looking for ties between
the two and the most obvious ties between the memoir
and the novella are physical objects.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I also found at dates.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I found the whole Christmas the setting of the novella
at Christmas time very revelatory because I was like, oh,
I can map that onto the Christmas where our narrator
in the memoir was with friends. And there are a
bunch of different times where you're looking for specific physical objects,
but the tea cup, to me, was the one that
stood out the most, maybe because in fact it is
(18:34):
how we open the memoir. So we're going to take
a look at pages three and four, and honestly, we're
going to have to spend a tiny bit of time
on the first sentence because it's kind of a wacky one.
So here's what we have odd impulse to catalog these days,
not that I can forget them, not that I can
remember them clearly. So I like the fact that right
from the beginning we have this kind of circularity that
(18:56):
she can neither forget nor remember them. We have this
kind of philosophical contradiction. I have to say, some of
the philosophy. Some of the Seneca stuff I think did
resonate with me, but some of the stuff of Simone Vile,
I think that's how you say her last name. It
just felt like a little bit extraneous to me. I
think incorporating philosophy into memoir is great, but it has
(19:18):
to be done very carefully. But my problem with this
very first sentence here, which it's kind of a bummer
if you have a problem with the very first sentence,
is that it can be read to ways. And maybe
she did that intentionally, but I do not really think so.
So we have this odd impulse to catalog these days,
but it can also be read odd impulse to catalog
(19:39):
these days, which is the way that I've read it,
I think, because you don't usually catalog days. So my
brain naturally was like, oh, wait, she's having these days.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
She's having an urge to catalog things I don't really
know what.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And then when she says not that I can forget them,
not that I can remember them, clearly, honestly, I just
felt some frustration. I was like, Okay, well she can't
forget them, which doesn't have a lot to do with me,
and she can't remember them clearly, which doesn't really instill
a lot of confidence in me as a reader of memoir.
But the biggest problem is this idea of the object
(20:13):
in the first sentence, which is obviously meant to say
odd impulse to catalog these days, that is what she's cataloging. Usually,
I find her prose pretty precise and clearer and easy
to understand, And I mean, maybe she is meaning to
sort of begin with this kind of doubt and this
circularity and this double meaning and like the impossibility of
cataloging days. But I did feel like we were beginning
(20:36):
on shaky ground. Then things got much more clear. I
awoke in the guest room the attic, a guest in
my own house, which I found very intriguing. I'm also
very interested in this idea of domesticity, So.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
She plays a lot with the.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Idea of houses and domesticity and the ways that the
public is allowed into her domestic spaces. I mean, she
lives with her partner's mother, so in some ways it
I mean, in many ways that's kind of a normal
domestic setting, but you do have this idea of their
domestic space as having completely ruptured. But also it's interesting
(21:12):
to take a look at how it was formed in
the beginning.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
For those of you who.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Are out there wanting to become a better reader, it's
always really important when you come across a house in
literature to slow down and think about what it is
saying about the people who live there. So obviously, here
in this house, she's totally alienated from the house. She's
upstairs in the attic. She's in the guest room. Which
I was like, motherfucker, why can't that guy, if he's
the one who wants to leave, why isn't he upstairs
(21:37):
in the attic. But for whatever reason, she's up in
the guest room. And I really think, kind of symbolically
but also just like on a very gut level, it
is so brutal that she has made a guest in
her own home. Obviously, your own home is a place
where you should be safe. It is a place where
you should feel comfortable, where you can express yourself, and
none of that is happening for her. Oh you know,
(21:58):
And I'm going to inject here, interject and inject a
very important idea. One thing that was so interesting for
me and a real eye opener, And it's interesting that
I didn't mention it before. Then it might be because
happily I have not had this experience, so I didn't
relate to.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
It quite as closely.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
But this idea of male anger, again happily not something
I have dealt with personally very much, the idea of
male anger as being so present both in her family
of origin and in this partnership with this man that
is this crazy incursion of violence into a domestic space.
And I thought her depiction of this angry man in
(22:38):
the house, there's that unbelievable lion where she says, if
you grew up with him, then you'll probably choose one
for yourself, and if that one leaves, you'll find another.
This idea of replicating these patterns of psychological and emotional
and physical abuse, I find that very interesting, and I
love the idea. Love is a weird word to say here,
but I love the idea of her really bringing us
(23:00):
into the domestic very quickly and then showcasing this man
who is in fact a monster. So we have her
upstairs in her guest room. She is a guest in
her own home. I'd never slept a night in that room,
and staring up at the white clabbered ceiling and walls.
I felt I'd been shrunk down and shoved into a
doll's house, and I knew then again or for the
(23:22):
first time, how grief expands as it constricts, how it
turns a person into a toy version of herself. So
whenever she throws in these things like again or for
the first time, and something expanding as it constricts all
of these things that feel kind of like physics things
to me, I related them all to the idea of
the Mobia strip, which is probably actually like a false
(23:42):
relation that I was creating there, But I do think
it's very interesting because she's trying to describe something elusive,
that she is trying to give us all of these
different ways to think about. It's also, of course, you know,
she's giving us kind of this fat metaphor here about her,
you know, having been shrunk down to doll size and
that she is a toy, which is very telling in
terms of her relationship with this person, But also this
(24:03):
idea that throughout the memoir she is going to be
sort of shrunken down and she's going to revert back
to a time when she maybe was playing with dolls.
I mean she wanted a skateboard, to be clear, which
was awesome. But we have this idea of her regressing
in some ways and becoming this kind of doll like
version of herself. So then we have a man downstairs
was the reason I'd turned from an inhabitant to visit her.
(24:26):
I really liked the way she used the reason throughout
that was excellent. My phone rang. The reason was calling
me from the floor below. He wanted to know if
I would say goodbye to him before I went to
the airport. What have I been doing all week? I asked,
if not saying goodbye to you, I hung up. Okay,
first of all, loved the fact that she hung up,
(24:47):
and I also love the fact that the pacing is interesting.
Clearly she's been up in this space for a week,
but we don't have the minutia all that of all
of that, which I think is very good. She's starting
the memoir at the point when she is leaving the house.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So whenever you have a piece of fiction that.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Is in the first person, or a piece of nonfiction
that is in the first person, you want to ask yourself,
why is this person telling the story and why now clearly,
Catherine Lacy is telling the story because she has a
lot to say about male anger and the loss of faith,
and the Bible and the way that grief and loss
is cyclical, and how much we need to rely on
our friends. All of that is very interesting. But the
(25:23):
reason why it's happening now is because she's just had
this horrendous experience of breaking up with someone she was
with for seven years. I think it was seven years.
You know why I think it was seven years.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
This is terrible.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
I remember that expression, the seven the seven year itch,
which is so I mean, not to get all mobiusy
on you, but like that for some reason in my mind,
is like linked to the seventh inning stretch, which is
just so bizarre. I mean, they obviously have nothing well,
I mean, you know, they speak to the idea of
like getting kind of cramped and then needing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
To stretch yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
But the idea that there's a seven year itch in
any marriage just seems so insane to me, Like it
seems light and kind of like just like absolving anyone
who at seven years decides in fact that they like
kneed out. Of course, in my mind, because it's something
it feels like it came from the nineteen fifties. I
feel like it's like some sort of like weird scapegoat
that men get to say, oh, you know, it was
a seven year itch, and that this would be kind
(26:15):
of like, you know, in the land of men, not
so much in the land of women. But she's had
this excruciating experience, and I really liked the fact that
she was dropping us into the narrative right when she
is leaving the home and now we get to the
part that has to do with the teacup. She just
hung up on him, which was great. Before we bought
that house we lived in Berlin, the Reason bought me
(26:37):
an unreasonably expensive Japanese tea cup. I felt the teacup
was too nice to own, feared I would break it,
and the Reason often brought up the fact that I
did not use the Japanese teacup often enough that I
obviously did not appreciate the teacup's beauty or the Reason's generosity.
But I thought I did appreciate that beauty, that generosity,
(26:57):
and occasionally I told him so, but the Reason insisted
I did not, that I could not possibly feel appreciative.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Based on my behavior. Vis a vis the teacup.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So I began to think he was probably right, and
I put my hopes toward truly becoming the person for
whom this teacup had been intended, someone who used it
with frequency and pleasure, a person who didn't feel guilty
about being given something so costly that she did not
perhaps deserve. And I hoped to become this deserving person
very soon, at some reachable point in the foreseeable future.
(27:30):
So what I love so much here is the vulnerability
that she is showing. I mean, she is really laying
out the fact not only that she is choosing to
be with this guy who's a total asshole, but also
that she is someone who does not think herself worthy
of certain things. And what is so good at the
beginning of a memoir of something that is this vulnerable
and such a strong articulation of that vulnerability is that you,
(27:52):
as the reader, You're like, Okay, this is someone who
knows that, who understands that. The problem in the beginning
is that she doesn't think that she deserves nice things.
It's also, of course problematic that he's telling her things
and she's like, I'm not sure that's right, and then
he is convincing her. There's a lot of stuff in
here about him gaslighting her, a lot of stuff about
him convincing her, and we really see the ways that
(28:14):
she wants to please him, which is so interesting because
it just feels so kind of reprehensible but also understandable
in the context of the memoir. So then we have
these final two paragraphs. One afternoon, during the days I
lived as a guest in my home, I returned from
a walk in the cold to find the reason sitting
(28:35):
silently in the living room. I took the Japanese teacup
from the cupboard, set it on the floor, took a
hammer from the tool closet and set it beside the teacup.
You have to break it, I told him, and after
some hesitation, he did so. As you might imagine, I
have a lot of thoughts about this. One is that
there is this real sort of double sidedness here. I
(28:58):
really wanted her like to this teacup, which sort of
symbolized the fact that he wanted her to be something
that she was not, and that he would maybe give
her things or gifts or parts of himself. But only
you know, very conditionally I wanted her to be the
one to set the thing in front of him and
then just.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Like smash it to pieces.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And it's very telling that at this point in the breakup,
she is in fact making him do this thing. And
in some ways I don't even really know how to
interpret that, except that he is still the one who
is in control at this point. And obviously, I mean,
he wrote this crazy email where he said he was
going off with some other woman and it's only seven
days later, so obviously our narrator is really.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Not functioning very well.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
But I think there are also some interesting nuances about
wanting him to face his anger, wanting him to understand
that he is destroying her, at least to his vision
of her. And in one of the interviews, Lacy said
this really interesting thing about how when we lose a relationship,
we lose our sense of who we might be in
that relationship and who we would be moving forward in
(29:57):
that relationship. And in many ways, this teacup is totally
representative of this idea. You know, she was aspiring to
be someone who thought she deserved these beautiful gifts, and
someone who you know, without a lot of cares, was
using beautiful things, and she envisioned herself being able to
become that person and moving forward as that person, and
that illusion is now shattered. So we have this teacup
(30:20):
at the very beginning of the memoir, which is important
because anything at the beginning of the book is going
to feel kind of momentous. And so then when we
have teacups in the novella, and in fact, when we
have a broken teacup in the novella, it feels very significant.
So that teacup is not a special teacup, which is significant.
It's just some sort of mass produced, you know, like
(30:42):
not very well made, like not very interesting cup, which
in many ways, if we're going to look at that
first teacup as this kind of special, beautiful thing that
she aspires to want to use, and that also maybe represents,
you know, this illusion of what their relationship was all
about and his power over her. Then when we have
this very kind of ordinary, more solid teacup, we have
(31:02):
this sense of her maybe becoming more realistic about who
she is. But this idea that things, I mean, we
are not supposed to be reading these things one to one.
It is not Catherine Lacy who is Edie in the story,
although of course it is, and of course we are
being invited to imagine all of these things. So if
we are thinking of Catherine Leecy as being Edie, we
(31:23):
have this idea of Edie having this kind of ordinary
mug and it is still shattered, but then very significantly,
Edie herself brought some glue over to her friend Marie's house,
and Edie herself is going to glue this thing back together.
So we have this very I mean, in some ways
it should be like too heavy handed, but it doesn't
feel like that, at least it didn't to me. We
(31:45):
have this, you know, kind of extended metaphor of these
teacups in these two different texts, and an extended metaphor
even within the novella where it breaks, but then she
is going to glue it back together. And then very significantly,
when the police come and she's pouring the water into it,
all the water runs through like a sieve.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
So we get the sense in fact that this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Edie who is trying to piece her life back together
and herself back together, it's not quite there.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
It's not quite there.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
She does they'll go and choose another mug. I did
think it was interesting teacup. I mean, not that many
people are using teacups, like I'm imagining like a very
fine like China teacup, and I think the idea of
the Asian teacup being a teacup sounds good. My sense
is that when she is in Marie's apartment and she's
taking down mugs from the cabinet, it's probably more of
(32:32):
a mug and not so much a teacup. Although of course,
thank you, Catherine Leecy for calling them both teacups so
that you can alert your reader to the fact that
there is this parallel. So this idea of me trying
to like piece together, and I think human nature is
to piece together, like look for these parallels between the
memoir and the fiction piece. A lot of what we're
(32:53):
doing there is taking a look at these narratives. So
when I mean that sounds so obvious, but what I
mean there is narrative in the broader sense.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
The idea that each one.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Of these people, Edie is a fictional character who has
a very distinct narrative that Katherine Lacey is is you know,
creating out of whole cloth, as they say. But even
when we have the memoir Catherine Lacey is providing the
reader with an image of the narrator of Catherine Lacy
that also is a narrative. So what I thought was
(33:24):
so interesting is when you take these two things, these
two narratives, one of them fiction and one of them
nonfiction with very identifiable elements that you are inviting us
to conflate Katherine Lacey with Edie, you have what I
think the Mobia strip is meant to be, meaning that
you have two sides of the same thing. So we
have when we're looking at it, we can sort of
(33:46):
see both of them, and I as a reader who
has read both of them, I have both of them
in my head, and they're not quite you know, they're
not the same thing, but they're sort of circular in
the sense that I'm envisioning them together. If there is
an entity, a person Katherine Lacy in the world, and
she writes a narrative, a memoir that is not congruent
with her, it is not actually her, obviously, it is
(34:07):
a depiction of her that she has chosen to put
out into the world, we have that version, and then
we have this kind of fictionalized version that I think
we are invited to see as another. I mean, it's
not supposed to be obviously, it's not supposed to be
like factual, because she's very explicitly putting the two things together.
So in one of the interviews, they were asking her
(34:29):
this very obvious question about like why are these two
things together, and what she said.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I have to say I was.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Intrigued by it, but I'm not sure that I was
fully convinced that these two things really. I mean, I
don't think that either of them stand alone. I don't
think they work alone. But I have a sense of
the novella as being a little bit calculated, which is fine.
So what Lacy said is this that when she experienced
(34:56):
that breakup, she couldn't read any and she couldn't write
any thing for a long period of time. But then
eventually she realized that all of the things she was
writing during that period could be put together into this memoir.
But then when she had the memoir finished, she had
this sense that something was missing from it. And I'm
not sure. I mean, I said I didn't think that
they worked separately. I'm not really sure. I don't know.
(35:20):
I get the sense. I mean, I don't think that's
a memoir that I would be dying to read on
its own, and I don't think it would be getting
all of the celebration that it is if it did
not in fact have this element, the kind of formally
inventive part. But so she had this idea that it
wasn't quite finished, and then she described being in a retreat,
a writer's retreat, and working on this thing, this idea
(35:41):
that she had had for this novella, working on it
ten hours a day, you know, sort of seven days
a week, and that it really came very quickly to her.
To me, it does feel like something that could have
been written in a short span of time, partially because
it's just brief, but also because there's kind of a propulsion,
this idea of it happening all in one evening, the
idea of this very compelling and neat arc about the murder,
(36:04):
all of that does seem like something that might have
happened pretty quickly. But I think what's most interesting about
that is this idea, and she spoke to this in
the interviews that the narrative of Edie in many ways
is kind of poking holes in the idea of the
narrative of Catherine Lacy.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
In the memoir.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
She spoke very clearly about the fact that Marie and Kay,
who are some of Edie's oldest friends, they are challenging
this narrative that Edie has of herself. So if we
are assuming that Edie is being gas lit by some guy,
her friends can see that this narrative that she is
telling herself is false. And so there's this playing with
(36:43):
narrative that is really sophisticated in terms of how it
is embodied in this book. So you have the narrative
of the memoir, but then you also have the narrative
of this novella, and the whole thing is kind of
testing the idea of narrative in general and the extent
to which we need to interrogate the different narratives that
we are developing and telling ourselves and the ones that
(37:03):
we are hearing from our friends. That part of the
book was so interesting to me. So I went on
and on a note from the Los Angeles Review of
Books interview, this was so fascinating to me. This is
kind of one of those extension of the novel kind
of meta experiences. So one of the interviewers from the
Los Angeles Review of Books was asking Catherine Lazy about
(37:25):
the dog, and I had done a lot of thinking
about the dog. So in the novella, she has this
experience with this dying dog, and to me, I mean,
I wasn't like, oh, this is obviously a stand in
for God, but there was some sense of this creature
as being kind of otherworldly and as being kind of
an authoritarian figure, and as sort of speaking through her
in a very godlike kind of way. But I did
(37:47):
have a lot of questions about the dog. So I
was really happy because one of the interviewers was like,
can you talk to us about the dog? And her
response was so interesting. What she said is that during
that residency, during this kind of fevered work, she said
that all sorts of stuff comes up, and she wasn't
really even sure what the dog was. She doesn't know
how to explain it. And I liked that in some ways,
(38:07):
the idea that that is open to interpretation. It seemed
to her very much a part of the narrative that
she was telling and seemed very crucial. And I both
kind of loved the idea that she wasn't sure what
it meant, and I also felt a little bit frustrated.
I was a little like, wait, you still don't know
what it means, like I would love to actually have
your take on what you think it means. And then
this crazy thing happened where the Los Angeles Review bookswoman
(38:29):
said that in her mind, it was a parallel. The
dying Dog was a parallel to the time when in
the memoir Catherine Lacy stops to help the man who
is lying face down on the sidewalk. And it was
so fascinating. I mean, I had not made that parallel,
and the crazy thing is neither had Catherine Lazy, and
I was so it was so refreshing to me because
she was like, oh my god, I have never thought
(38:50):
of that. I mean, I don't think she said, oh
my god like that. But it was so interesting because
I had this sense that we have this memoir and
we have this piece of fiction, and then on top
of that, we have the author of both of those
things who is not entirely understanding them, who is hearing
theories from other people that are creating different narratives about
these two narratives. It was so amazing and kind of
(39:12):
odd and excellent. And I think it's a good place
to end because this Mobia's book really is well, it's
about loss, and it's about violence, and it's about grief,
and it's about COVID. It's about many, many different things.
It's about it's about friendship among women, it's about friendship more.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Broadly, it's about spiritualism.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
But what I will take away most is this idea
that it is very much about narrative. And there's a
lot of talk these days about narrative, and I think
we need to be careful with our narratives.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And I think this entire.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Project is really underscoring the power of the stories that
we tell. So I really enjoyed reading the book. But
I also really really enjoyed this deep dive into the
Mobia's book. I hope that it's you know, maybe it's
just like inspired more questions for you, which is also appropriate,
but hopefully it's answered some question and has maybe given
(40:01):
you even a little more to think about and a
little more to take away from this reading experience. So
thank you so much for tuning in. Happy reading,
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all well
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, best selling author and
PhD in literature. Today we are diving into the Mobius
(00:24):
book by Catherine Lacy. I was pretty sure when I
very first read about this book and read about the
formal elements, the fact that it really is a memoir
together with a novella. I assumed that that PhD in
literature was really going to.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Be put to the test.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
And I had such an interesting experience of the books.
I'm very pleased to dive into it with you all today.
A couple of super quick housekeeping notes. One is that
if you are listening on a podcast and you feel
like watching these lectures on YouTube, that is a possibility.
The lecture today does not lend itself to a lot
of photographs, but there are definitely books where the YouTube
lecture ends up containing all of visual elements that I
(01:01):
feather in throughout. It is so fun for me, and
I think viewers really appreciate it. If you are watching
on YouTube and you feel like taking the show on
the road, you can always listen to it as a podcast.
It's the exact same lecture as a podcast anywhere you
listen to your podcasts. I also haven't mentioned for quite
some time what the foxed page means. The foxed page
(01:22):
comes from the idea of foxing. So foxing is just
the aging, the little age spots that we would find
on the pages and on the covers of very old,
very beloved books. So today I'm really excited to talk
about Catherine Lacey's The Mobius Book. This is a book
that is formally inventive, and when I say formally there
I simply mean in terms of its form. And I
(01:44):
will admit that that formal invention was really the main
reason why I picked up the book. I think that
my experience of The Mobius Book was both helped and
hurt by the fact that I had just finished reading
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. That is a book that
is also very formally inventive. Very famously, Billy Pilgrim is
unstuck in time. The book is very fragmentary. It plays
(02:07):
really pretty fast, and loose with the idea of the
narrator as also being an actual person, our actual author,
the actual Kurt Vonnegut. And so in many ways I
was really primed to dive into a book like the
Mobius Book, where Catherine Lacy is doing the same thing.
So you can't talk about this book without talking about
the cover and about how the book is actually set up.
(02:28):
So when the thing I first noticed when I saw
it in the bookstore is that's it's covered kind of
like a library book. It's like those ones you would
get from like Interlibrary Loan. There was something very kind
of weirdly academic about the way the book actually felt
in my hand. But the thing I noticed right away
is we had the big bar code down at the bottom.
(02:50):
Those of you on YouTube can see me holding it
up here. The book itself is kind of a pretty
blue color, but then it has this big bar code
situation in white, and aesthetically, I did not really love that.
After I read the book and I was preparing the lecture,
I took a closer look at all of the elements,
as I am wont to do, and I do think
(03:10):
it's important that right above the little barcode again. I'll
show it to you if you're on the YouTube. It
says fiction slash memoir. So part of my process when
I am approaching a book is to not do a
whole bunch of reading about it beforehand. This book, the
Mobius Book, was on a bunch of different lists things
you might want to read this summer. So I picked
(03:30):
up the Mobias Book, and I certainly understood that you
could start at either side. And I love this kind
of book. I love the notion of playing with the
physical object of a book and playing with our expectations.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I was excited.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I picked it up, and I realized that randomly I
was either going to start reading one or the other
of these pieces of literature.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I dove in.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
It turned out that I was reading the memoir. But
because I had not looked very carefully at the boilerplate information,
all of that stuff about the publication and the rights,
the one that has like the little thing that says,
you know, this is a work of nonfiction, blah blah blah,
I didn't read all of that stuff. I went ahead
and I dove into this, and it was so interesting
because I was reading it as if it were fiction. Essentially,
(04:13):
as if it were maybe some sort of auto fiction.
In fact, as I was making my little notes as
I always do, I had a whole section of auto fiction.
Part of that was because she was using a lot
of names of actual writers and talking about things that
were happening in the real world in a way that
felt to me like auto fiction. And I'm kind of
interested in this phenomenon. I mean, all of you Fox
Page listeners who have been listening for a while know
(04:36):
that my advice is just if you want to be
a better reader, just pay closer attention. And I could
certainly argue to myself that I should have read all
of that frontist matter, But I also think it was
such an interesting experiment. So I went into this thinking
it was going to be two pieces of fiction, and
at some point I realized that what I was reading
was in fact a memoir. And part of the interesting
(04:58):
thing about this book, about the reading experience of this
book is that you never know as a reader if
you are going to you know you're going to start
at one or the other. I suppose you could be
very conscious about it and look and see which one
is the fiction and which one is the nonfiction, but
you obviously are hopefully you're going into it with enough
intrigue and enough mystery that you don't really know which
would be better. And obviously all of that's kind of
(05:20):
an academic and not very interesting question, because there is
no way to know which is better. I did come
away wishing that I had read the fiction first, and
I'll try to articulate why as we are moving through,
but I think the basic idea was that I found
the fiction part more compelling, and I would have liked
to have had that story in mind, the story of
(05:40):
Edie and Marie and Kay, and I would.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Have liked to have sort of backfilled.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I feel like I would have held on a bit
more to a lot of the information that we had
gotten in the memoir, and frankly, I would have been
like weirdly more interested in the memoir because I would
be sort of backfilling all of these things in a story.
The novella that I felt was pretty compell and I
think just the way that I'm describing this, the idea
of wanting to kind of backfill information into the fiction
(06:07):
piece indicates a little bit of my reaction to the book.
My reaction, and it's very strange because this doesn't happen
to me very often.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I felt like the whole thing was sort of slippery.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I couldn't quite figure out what I wanted to discuss
with you. All the little notes.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
That I always take in the back of the book, I.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Take a little note of something that is interesting to me,
and then I'll put page numbers that indicate the pages
where I could go back and look at this aspect.
They were kind of all over the place, and in fact,
I didn't have as many as I usually do, which
I think is notable because this is the kind of
book actually where it seems like I would actually have
a lot of that because of all of the idea
of the fiction and the nonfiction working together, the formally
(06:46):
inventive part of it, the idea of all the parallels
you might find, it seemed like it would have been rich.
And yet I enjoyed the reading of it, but I
came away feeling a little bit like I hadn't quite
apprehended the whole thing. What was really interesting is I
then went on to listen to a bunch of interviews
with Catherine Lacey, and I'm going to share some of
that information with you today. But I found that really interesting,
(07:09):
and of course part of me, in my formally inventive brain,
I was sort of in that space. It was so
interesting to her to listen to her discuss all of
these different elements with various interviewers. Obviously there's some things
that kept repeating themselves, which is interesting unto itself. But
I had this sense that I was adding a whole
other layer on top of the memoir that sort of
(07:30):
sits on top of the fiction, or you know, maybe
the fiction is sitting on top of the memoir, and
I felt like I was once again backfilling. I didn't
actually know the name of her boyfriend. This is very
much a roma atle like a novel where there are
actual people in it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I'm doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Super obnoxious thing where I can't remember the word in English.
I think there's a word in English, but I can
only remember the word in French.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
There's also a word tet's besch.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
There's a word for this kind of book in French,
but I can't really think of it in English, which
now I'm just like off the deep end with the
French posturing. But I didn't know most of these authors.
Some of them I did, and I didn't know the
name of the guy. Apparently it's very you know, it's
a quick google away to find out who the author is.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I actually did.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Go once I found his name is Jesse something or other.
I read an interview that he did with someone and
he sounded like such an ass which was actually very
validating in many ways. So today is going to be
a little different in the sense that we're not going
to look quite so closely at the prose. Instead, we're
going to look at the formal elements, the inventive nature
of the book, because I think in many ways that
(08:34):
is where the experience of reading it is most satisfying.
So I always like to take a look at the
title here. The title is obviously very important, and because
it's sort of so easily not easily, but because it's
so because it's so obviously speaks to the formal invention.
At first, I hadn't gone very deep with it.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
In my mind.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It was sort of just melded with the infinity symbol,
like I just had this sense that Amobia's strip is
a thing that just keeps going. And you do have
that sense it's certainly something that keeps feeding on itself,
and some of the jacket copy. There's the stuff about
how it has so many beginnings and so many endings
and there is really no beginning and no ending, and
I actually don't really agree with any of that. I mean,
(09:15):
I think there are two beginnings, and I think there
are two endings, and in many ways these are two
discrete pieces of writing that definitely have echoes with each other.
But I didn't have a sense that it was sort
of circular. For those of you who are looking for
an actually circular novel, and maybe we should take a
look at this, there is a book by Julio Gortasar
called Rayuela. It was written in the sixties or seventies,
(09:38):
can't quite remember now Hopscotch is the translation into English.
That is a book where there have all these different chunks,
all these different sections, and you can read it in
any order. That to me feels much more like something
that has no beginning and no end and is incredibly circular.
It is such an amazing book. And maybe it's literally
heavyweights like that who have done formal experimentation that I
(09:59):
think is slightly more daring that made this not quite
as satisfying as it might have been. But in terms
of the title, it is, you know, the Mobias strip
does in fact look like the Infinity sign. Every time
I'm thinking of it now, I think of meta and
I'm just like so bummed out by the fact that like,
these corporations co opt these things, and you can never
quite think of, you know, the infinity symbol, although they
(10:21):
stretch theirs to look I think a little bit like
an M but these things never seem quite the same.
But the thing that I realized when I sat down
to dig a little deeper mentally into this book in
preparation for talking with you all, is the fact that
when you look at a Mobia's strip, you're seeing two
sides of something. This Themobia strip is very mathematical, and
(10:41):
I know this because I looked it up on Wikipedia,
which I think is interesting, but not that interesting. Like
I really could not delve at all into the mathematics
of it. And I thought for a little bit about
whether the mathematics had much to do with these two
pieces of writing, and I don't really think it does.
But the Mobias strip has a twist in it, and
part of what I think we are meant to see
(11:02):
when we are looking at the Mobia strip, And when
we are thinking about it in terms of this book,
is that you're seeing two sides of something. So it's
not simply that there's no beginning and no end. It's
that we're talking about two sides of the same thing.
And that to me was much more significant and much
more interesting than this idea of it being sort of circular.
And if we really do conceive of this as sort
(11:24):
of two sides of the same story, I think the
fiction becomes much richer, and in fact, so does the memoir.
And then, of course, if we take this idea of
having a piece of writing that has two different sides,
we can also think about that idea, the idea of
things having two sides in each of the books themselves.
In a book that is really concerned with relationships, you know,
(11:46):
you have obviously the idea that there are two sides
to every story. I mean, it's such a cliche that
it actually is cliche. But here we're really playing in
a very inventive way with this idea of every story
having two sides. So in one of the interns, they
asked her very explicitly about the sort of relationship between
these two things, and it was so interesting to me.
(12:06):
So she suffers this breakup, and after the breakup she
can't write fiction, and she can't read fiction for this
very long amount of time I mean long, being like
nine months or a year or something like that. And
during that time she's writing a lot like nonfiction stuff
but fragmentary, and all of that eventually becomes the memoir.
I did this weird thing, and there was a lot
of talk about breakup, obviously, and there was a lot
(12:28):
of talk about breakdown. And I started thinking about these
phrases in English that all have to do with prepositions
of location, things like up and down, and I got
really interested in all of the different nuances, and I
think it's very interesting that breakup and breakdown are in
fact so close together. So in the memoir, what she
is really focusing on is in fact this breakup. But
(12:49):
what's more important in many ways is this idea of loss.
She talks a lot in the interviews about the idea
of losing things, of losing faith, of losing the relationship,
of losing her house. And I already had thought actually
a lot about religion and clearly about her loss of faith,
but it was really nice to have her speak about
the fact that for her loss of faith and losses
in general, and grief over losses really is kind of
(13:11):
the controlling idea of the memoir. I think because he's
such an asshole, and because there are a couple of
scenes that he's just like such a dick, the part
where he's like saying that she should lose weight, the
part where he throws the book. Just the fact that
he breaks up with her with an email. I mean,
all of it is so egregious and so gnarly that
it kind of really captivated me. That together with the
(13:32):
religious parts, and actually I was pretty caught up in
her narration of what it was to deprive herself and
the way that this kind of anarexia that she was
experiencing came in fact from the Bible, that it had
a lot to do with the Bible. I was interested
in that for whatever reason. I do not love reading
about people's depictions of eating disorders. I mean that sounds
(13:54):
kind of obvious. As someone who had little disordered eating
at the end of high school, but who was very
very happy to have left that behind, there's something about
it that seems I mean, I hate to say this,
it's gosh this is like a terrible thing to say,
but it feels kind of adolescent in this weird way,
and just isn't quite as interesting to me as other
elements of the book. I was interested, though, in the
fact that she said in an interview that it was
(14:17):
around the time that she lost faith when she was
about twenty, that this urge to be depriving herself abated,
and she was able to have a more normal relationship
with food and with her body. And in some ways
I was like, Wow, lucky for her, and great that
there was an endpoint. But also it is so crazy
to me that like a fairly literal reading of the
(14:37):
Bible would convince a young woman that she is supposed
to deprive herself. So much so, I want to take
a look at a quick little passage on page twenty one,
because it speaks to this idea of circularity. It speaks
to the idea that the book itself has these two
halves and you can sort of read it from either direction.
There's a certain looping kind of thing to it, but
there also is that within the text. I'm laughing because
(14:59):
I just picked up the book and I picked up
the wrong side, and I looked at page twenty one,
and I was like, wait, where is my thing I'm
supposed to read? And then I realized, in fact, that
I was looking in the novella, and I meant to
be looking in the memoir. So she writes this in
the memoir. When I wrote to Mangusa to tell her
of my trouble, she told me her spouse of fourteen
years had recently left her for another woman after a
long affair. Everyone's breaking up these days, everyone kept saying.
(15:23):
And though the ambient heartbreak had been no comfort, it
was unpleasantly pleasant to learn of an ending more extreme
than mine. It's a cyclical pain, and a shared one.
So I love so much about this. I love the wow,
couldn't get my glasses off there. I love the idea
of it being circular, and I love this idea of
a community experiencing this kind of cyclical thing. A couple
(15:46):
of very interesting things here is that the circularity of it,
the cyclical nature of the heartache which is speaking. I
think in many ways it's kind of a fractal It's
like a repetition of the larger circularity of the book.
The cyclical nature of the book. We go through everything
twice in some ways in the book. But I like
the way that she is underscoring the fact that it
(16:07):
has to do with the ends of relationships, with this
breaking up of relationships, and it's interesting just to step
back a tiny bit and think about how often the
end of a relationship is definitive. There is not circularity
in terms of the relationship. So she's talking about something
that feels cyclical because it's happening for people, and it
maybe happens to people over and over in their lives,
(16:29):
and in that sense it's a cycle. But each of
the relationships that ends is in fact a discreete entity
that is not circular. One other quick note here she
talks about Manguso. I did not know that's Sarah Manguso,
which I did read the acknowledgments because I always do.
I like to do my literary sleuthing. But I have
not read anything by Sarah Manguso, so that was not
(16:49):
super resonant for me. But she actually quotes this woman, Manguso,
and what she uses there is italics. In one of
the interviews, she said that she doesn't like the idea
of quotation marks. She is someone who did an MFA
in nonfiction writing at Columbia, so she's someone who has
done a lot of thinking about memoir, and.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
She described how she doesn't love the idea of.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Quotation marks because for her, they're really denoting something that
is factual. It's something that you might have in journalism
or some sort of reportage, whereas in nonfiction the idea
of having dialogue written in italics is much more comfortable
for her because in fact doesn't signal kind of truth
in quite the same way. So I mentioned before that
today is going to be a little different in that
(17:31):
we're not going to be doing a lot of close
textual analysis, but I do want to take a look
at some of the prose in part just to discuss
what it is that we're dealing with here. I found
her pros very effective, and it's always better in these
discussions to have something concrete to hold on to. But
I'm also reading these I mean, obviously I'm reading specific parts,
and of course the parts that I'm selecting are very significant.
(17:53):
We're going to look at pages three and four of
the memoir. It's the opening of the memoir because it
concerns a teak. So one of the things that I
think you do by human nature as you are reading
these two things, is you are looking for ties between
the two and the most obvious ties between the memoir
and the novella are physical objects.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I also found at dates.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I found the whole Christmas the setting of the novella
at Christmas time very revelatory because I was like, oh,
I can map that onto the Christmas where our narrator
in the memoir was with friends. And there are a
bunch of different times where you're looking for specific physical objects,
but the tea cup, to me, was the one that
stood out the most, maybe because in fact it is
(18:34):
how we open the memoir. So we're going to take
a look at pages three and four, and honestly, we're
going to have to spend a tiny bit of time
on the first sentence because it's kind of a wacky one.
So here's what we have odd impulse to catalog these days,
not that I can forget them, not that I can
remember them clearly. So I like the fact that right
from the beginning we have this kind of circularity that
(18:56):
she can neither forget nor remember them. We have this
kind of philosophical contradiction. I have to say, some of
the philosophy. Some of the Seneca stuff I think did
resonate with me, but some of the stuff of Simone Vile,
I think that's how you say her last name. It
just felt like a little bit extraneous to me. I
think incorporating philosophy into memoir is great, but it has
(19:18):
to be done very carefully. But my problem with this
very first sentence here, which it's kind of a bummer
if you have a problem with the very first sentence,
is that it can be read to ways. And maybe
she did that intentionally, but I do not really think so.
So we have this odd impulse to catalog these days,
but it can also be read odd impulse to catalog
(19:39):
these days, which is the way that I've read it,
I think, because you don't usually catalog days. So my
brain naturally was like, oh, wait, she's having these days.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
She's having an urge to catalog things I don't really
know what.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And then when she says not that I can forget them,
not that I can remember them, clearly, honestly, I just
felt some frustration. I was like, Okay, well she can't
forget them, which doesn't have a lot to do with me,
and she can't remember them clearly, which doesn't really instill
a lot of confidence in me as a reader of memoir.
But the biggest problem is this idea of the object
(20:13):
in the first sentence, which is obviously meant to say
odd impulse to catalog these days, that is what she's cataloging. Usually,
I find her prose pretty precise and clearer and easy
to understand, And I mean, maybe she is meaning to
sort of begin with this kind of doubt and this
circularity and this double meaning and like the impossibility of
cataloging days. But I did feel like we were beginning
(20:36):
on shaky ground. Then things got much more clear. I
awoke in the guest room the attic, a guest in
my own house, which I found very intriguing. I'm also
very interested in this idea of domesticity, So.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
She plays a lot with the.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Idea of houses and domesticity and the ways that the
public is allowed into her domestic spaces. I mean, she
lives with her partner's mother, so in some ways it
I mean, in many ways that's kind of a normal
domestic setting, but you do have this idea of their
domestic space as having completely ruptured. But also it's interesting
(21:12):
to take a look at how it was formed in
the beginning.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
For those of you who.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Are out there wanting to become a better reader, it's
always really important when you come across a house in
literature to slow down and think about what it is
saying about the people who live there. So obviously, here
in this house, she's totally alienated from the house. She's
upstairs in the attic. She's in the guest room. Which
I was like, motherfucker, why can't that guy, if he's
the one who wants to leave, why isn't he upstairs
(21:37):
in the attic. But for whatever reason, she's up in
the guest room. And I really think, kind of symbolically
but also just like on a very gut level, it
is so brutal that she has made a guest in
her own home. Obviously, your own home is a place
where you should be safe. It is a place where
you should feel comfortable, where you can express yourself, and
none of that is happening for her. Oh you know,
(21:58):
And I'm going to inject here, interject and inject a
very important idea. One thing that was so interesting for
me and a real eye opener, And it's interesting that
I didn't mention it before. Then it might be because
happily I have not had this experience, so I didn't
relate to.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
It quite as closely.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
But this idea of male anger, again happily not something
I have dealt with personally very much, the idea of
male anger as being so present both in her family
of origin and in this partnership with this man that
is this crazy incursion of violence into a domestic space.
And I thought her depiction of this angry man in
(22:38):
the house, there's that unbelievable lion where she says, if
you grew up with him, then you'll probably choose one
for yourself, and if that one leaves, you'll find another.
This idea of replicating these patterns of psychological and emotional
and physical abuse, I find that very interesting, and I
love the idea. Love is a weird word to say here,
but I love the idea of her really bringing us
(23:00):
into the domestic very quickly and then showcasing this man
who is in fact a monster. So we have her
upstairs in her guest room. She is a guest in
her own home. I'd never slept a night in that room,
and staring up at the white clabbered ceiling and walls.
I felt I'd been shrunk down and shoved into a
doll's house, and I knew then again or for the
(23:22):
first time, how grief expands as it constricts, how it
turns a person into a toy version of herself. So
whenever she throws in these things like again or for
the first time, and something expanding as it constricts all
of these things that feel kind of like physics things
to me, I related them all to the idea of
the Mobia strip, which is probably actually like a false
(23:42):
relation that I was creating there, But I do think
it's very interesting because she's trying to describe something elusive,
that she is trying to give us all of these
different ways to think about. It's also, of course, you know,
she's giving us kind of this fat metaphor here about her,
you know, having been shrunk down to doll size and
that she is a toy, which is very telling in
terms of her relationship with this person, But also this
(24:03):
idea that throughout the memoir she is going to be
sort of shrunken down and she's going to revert back
to a time when she maybe was playing with dolls.
I mean she wanted a skateboard, to be clear, which
was awesome. But we have this idea of her regressing
in some ways and becoming this kind of doll like
version of herself. So then we have a man downstairs
was the reason I'd turned from an inhabitant to visit her.
(24:26):
I really liked the way she used the reason throughout
that was excellent. My phone rang. The reason was calling
me from the floor below. He wanted to know if
I would say goodbye to him before I went to
the airport. What have I been doing all week? I asked,
if not saying goodbye to you, I hung up. Okay,
first of all, loved the fact that she hung up,
(24:47):
and I also love the fact that the pacing is interesting.
Clearly she's been up in this space for a week,
but we don't have the minutia all that of all
of that, which I think is very good. She's starting
the memoir at the point when she is leaving the house.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So whenever you have a piece of fiction that.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Is in the first person, or a piece of nonfiction
that is in the first person, you want to ask yourself,
why is this person telling the story and why now clearly,
Catherine Lacy is telling the story because she has a
lot to say about male anger and the loss of faith,
and the Bible and the way that grief and loss
is cyclical, and how much we need to rely on
our friends. All of that is very interesting. But the
(25:23):
reason why it's happening now is because she's just had
this horrendous experience of breaking up with someone she was
with for seven years. I think it was seven years.
You know why I think it was seven years.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
This is terrible.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
I remember that expression, the seven the seven year itch,
which is so I mean, not to get all mobiusy
on you, but like that for some reason in my mind,
is like linked to the seventh inning stretch, which is
just so bizarre. I mean, they obviously have nothing well,
I mean, you know, they speak to the idea of
like getting kind of cramped and then needing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
To stretch yourself.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
But the idea that there's a seven year itch in
any marriage just seems so insane to me, Like it
seems light and kind of like just like absolving anyone
who at seven years decides in fact that they like
kneed out. Of course, in my mind, because it's something
it feels like it came from the nineteen fifties. I
feel like it's like some sort of like weird scapegoat
that men get to say, oh, you know, it was
a seven year itch, and that this would be kind
(26:15):
of like, you know, in the land of men, not
so much in the land of women. But she's had
this excruciating experience, and I really liked the fact that
she was dropping us into the narrative right when she
is leaving the home and now we get to the
part that has to do with the teacup. She just
hung up on him, which was great. Before we bought
that house we lived in Berlin, the Reason bought me
(26:37):
an unreasonably expensive Japanese tea cup. I felt the teacup
was too nice to own, feared I would break it,
and the Reason often brought up the fact that I
did not use the Japanese teacup often enough that I
obviously did not appreciate the teacup's beauty or the Reason's generosity.
But I thought I did appreciate that beauty, that generosity,
(26:57):
and occasionally I told him so, but the Reason insisted
I did not, that I could not possibly feel appreciative.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Based on my behavior. Vis a vis the teacup.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So I began to think he was probably right, and
I put my hopes toward truly becoming the person for
whom this teacup had been intended, someone who used it
with frequency and pleasure, a person who didn't feel guilty
about being given something so costly that she did not
perhaps deserve. And I hoped to become this deserving person
very soon, at some reachable point in the foreseeable future.
(27:30):
So what I love so much here is the vulnerability
that she is showing. I mean, she is really laying
out the fact not only that she is choosing to
be with this guy who's a total asshole, but also
that she is someone who does not think herself worthy
of certain things. And what is so good at the
beginning of a memoir of something that is this vulnerable
and such a strong articulation of that vulnerability is that you,
(27:52):
as the reader, You're like, Okay, this is someone who
knows that, who understands that. The problem in the beginning
is that she doesn't think that she deserves nice things.
It's also, of course problematic that he's telling her things
and she's like, I'm not sure that's right, and then
he is convincing her. There's a lot of stuff in
here about him gaslighting her, a lot of stuff about
him convincing her, and we really see the ways that
(28:14):
she wants to please him, which is so interesting because
it just feels so kind of reprehensible but also understandable
in the context of the memoir. So then we have
these final two paragraphs. One afternoon, during the days I
lived as a guest in my home, I returned from
a walk in the cold to find the reason sitting
(28:35):
silently in the living room. I took the Japanese teacup
from the cupboard, set it on the floor, took a
hammer from the tool closet and set it beside the teacup.
You have to break it, I told him, and after
some hesitation, he did so. As you might imagine, I
have a lot of thoughts about this. One is that
there is this real sort of double sidedness here. I
(28:58):
really wanted her like to this teacup, which sort of
symbolized the fact that he wanted her to be something
that she was not, and that he would maybe give
her things or gifts or parts of himself. But only
you know, very conditionally I wanted her to be the
one to set the thing in front of him and
then just.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Like smash it to pieces.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And it's very telling that at this point in the breakup,
she is in fact making him do this thing. And
in some ways I don't even really know how to
interpret that, except that he is still the one who
is in control at this point. And obviously, I mean,
he wrote this crazy email where he said he was
going off with some other woman and it's only seven
days later, so obviously our narrator is really.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Not functioning very well.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
But I think there are also some interesting nuances about
wanting him to face his anger, wanting him to understand
that he is destroying her, at least to his vision
of her. And in one of the interviews, Lacy said
this really interesting thing about how when we lose a relationship,
we lose our sense of who we might be in
that relationship and who we would be moving forward in
(29:57):
that relationship. And in many ways, this teacup is totally
representative of this idea. You know, she was aspiring to
be someone who thought she deserved these beautiful gifts, and
someone who you know, without a lot of cares, was
using beautiful things, and she envisioned herself being able to
become that person and moving forward as that person, and
that illusion is now shattered. So we have this teacup
(30:20):
at the very beginning of the memoir, which is important
because anything at the beginning of the book is going
to feel kind of momentous. And so then when we
have teacups in the novella, and in fact, when we
have a broken teacup in the novella, it feels very significant.
So that teacup is not a special teacup, which is significant.
It's just some sort of mass produced, you know, like
(30:42):
not very well made, like not very interesting cup, which
in many ways, if we're going to look at that
first teacup as this kind of special, beautiful thing that
she aspires to want to use, and that also maybe represents,
you know, this illusion of what their relationship was all
about and his power over her. Then when we have
this very kind of ordinary, more solid teacup, we have
(31:02):
this sense of her maybe becoming more realistic about who
she is. But this idea that things, I mean, we
are not supposed to be reading these things one to one.
It is not Catherine Lacy who is Edie in the story,
although of course it is, and of course we are
being invited to imagine all of these things. So if
we are thinking of Catherine Leecy as being Edie, we
(31:23):
have this idea of Edie having this kind of ordinary
mug and it is still shattered, but then very significantly,
Edie herself brought some glue over to her friend Marie's house,
and Edie herself is going to glue this thing back together.
So we have this very I mean, in some ways
it should be like too heavy handed, but it doesn't
feel like that, at least it didn't to me. We
(31:45):
have this, you know, kind of extended metaphor of these
teacups in these two different texts, and an extended metaphor
even within the novella where it breaks, but then she
is going to glue it back together. And then very significantly,
when the police come and she's pouring the water into it,
all the water runs through like a sieve.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
So we get the sense in fact that this.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Edie who is trying to piece her life back together
and herself back together, it's not quite there.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
It's not quite there.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
She does they'll go and choose another mug. I did
think it was interesting teacup. I mean, not that many
people are using teacups, like I'm imagining like a very
fine like China teacup, and I think the idea of
the Asian teacup being a teacup sounds good. My sense
is that when she is in Marie's apartment and she's
taking down mugs from the cabinet, it's probably more of
(32:32):
a mug and not so much a teacup. Although of course,
thank you, Catherine Leecy for calling them both teacups so
that you can alert your reader to the fact that
there is this parallel. So this idea of me trying
to like piece together, and I think human nature is
to piece together, like look for these parallels between the
memoir and the fiction piece. A lot of what we're
(32:53):
doing there is taking a look at these narratives. So
when I mean that sounds so obvious, but what I
mean there is narrative in the broader sense.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
The idea that each one.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Of these people, Edie is a fictional character who has
a very distinct narrative that Katherine Lacey is is you know,
creating out of whole cloth, as they say. But even
when we have the memoir Catherine Lacey is providing the
reader with an image of the narrator of Catherine Lacy
that also is a narrative. So what I thought was
(33:24):
so interesting is when you take these two things, these
two narratives, one of them fiction and one of them
nonfiction with very identifiable elements that you are inviting us
to conflate Katherine Lacey with Edie, you have what I
think the Mobia strip is meant to be, meaning that
you have two sides of the same thing. So we
have when we're looking at it, we can sort of
(33:46):
see both of them, and I as a reader who
has read both of them, I have both of them
in my head, and they're not quite you know, they're
not the same thing, but they're sort of circular in
the sense that I'm envisioning them together. If there is
an entity, a person Katherine Lacy in the world, and
she writes a narrative, a memoir that is not congruent
with her, it is not actually her, obviously, it is
(34:07):
a depiction of her that she has chosen to put
out into the world, we have that version, and then
we have this kind of fictionalized version that I think
we are invited to see as another. I mean, it's
not supposed to be obviously, it's not supposed to be
like factual, because she's very explicitly putting the two things together.
So in one of the interviews, they were asking her
(34:29):
this very obvious question about like why are these two
things together, and what she said.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I have to say I was.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Intrigued by it, but I'm not sure that I was
fully convinced that these two things really. I mean, I
don't think that either of them stand alone. I don't
think they work alone. But I have a sense of
the novella as being a little bit calculated, which is fine.
So what Lacy said is this that when she experienced
(34:56):
that breakup, she couldn't read any and she couldn't write
any thing for a long period of time. But then
eventually she realized that all of the things she was
writing during that period could be put together into this memoir.
But then when she had the memoir finished, she had
this sense that something was missing from it. And I'm
not sure. I mean, I said I didn't think that
they worked separately. I'm not really sure. I don't know.
(35:20):
I get the sense. I mean, I don't think that's
a memoir that I would be dying to read on
its own, and I don't think it would be getting
all of the celebration that it is if it did
not in fact have this element, the kind of formally
inventive part. But so she had this idea that it
wasn't quite finished, and then she described being in a retreat,
a writer's retreat, and working on this thing, this idea
(35:41):
that she had had for this novella, working on it
ten hours a day, you know, sort of seven days
a week, and that it really came very quickly to her.
To me, it does feel like something that could have
been written in a short span of time, partially because
it's just brief, but also because there's kind of a propulsion,
this idea of it happening all in one evening, the
idea of this very compelling and neat arc about the murder,
(36:04):
all of that does seem like something that might have
happened pretty quickly. But I think what's most interesting about
that is this idea, and she spoke to this in
the interviews that the narrative of Edie in many ways
is kind of poking holes in the idea of the
narrative of Catherine Lacy.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
In the memoir.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
She spoke very clearly about the fact that Marie and Kay,
who are some of Edie's oldest friends, they are challenging
this narrative that Edie has of herself. So if we
are assuming that Edie is being gas lit by some guy,
her friends can see that this narrative that she is
telling herself is false. And so there's this playing with
(36:43):
narrative that is really sophisticated in terms of how it
is embodied in this book. So you have the narrative
of the memoir, but then you also have the narrative
of this novella, and the whole thing is kind of
testing the idea of narrative in general and the extent
to which we need to interrogate the different narratives that
we are developing and telling ourselves and the ones that
(37:03):
we are hearing from our friends. That part of the
book was so interesting to me. So I went on
and on a note from the Los Angeles Review of
Books interview, this was so fascinating to me. This is
kind of one of those extension of the novel kind
of meta experiences. So one of the interviewers from the
Los Angeles Review of Books was asking Catherine Lazy about
(37:25):
the dog, and I had done a lot of thinking
about the dog. So in the novella, she has this
experience with this dying dog, and to me, I mean,
I wasn't like, oh, this is obviously a stand in
for God, but there was some sense of this creature
as being kind of otherworldly and as being kind of
an authoritarian figure, and as sort of speaking through her
in a very godlike kind of way. But I did
(37:47):
have a lot of questions about the dog. So I
was really happy because one of the interviewers was like,
can you talk to us about the dog? And her
response was so interesting. What she said is that during
that residency, during this kind of fevered work, she said
that all sorts of stuff comes up, and she wasn't
really even sure what the dog was. She doesn't know
how to explain it. And I liked that in some ways,
(38:07):
the idea that that is open to interpretation. It seemed
to her very much a part of the narrative that
she was telling and seemed very crucial. And I both
kind of loved the idea that she wasn't sure what
it meant, and I also felt a little bit frustrated.
I was a little like, wait, you still don't know
what it means, like I would love to actually have
your take on what you think it means. And then
this crazy thing happened where the Los Angeles Review bookswoman
(38:29):
said that in her mind, it was a parallel. The
dying Dog was a parallel to the time when in
the memoir Catherine Lacy stops to help the man who
is lying face down on the sidewalk. And it was
so fascinating. I mean, I had not made that parallel,
and the crazy thing is neither had Catherine Lazy, and
I was so it was so refreshing to me because
she was like, oh my god, I have never thought
(38:50):
of that. I mean, I don't think she said, oh
my god like that. But it was so interesting because
I had this sense that we have this memoir and
we have this piece of fiction, and then on top
of that, we have the author of both of those
things who is not entirely understanding them, who is hearing
theories from other people that are creating different narratives about
these two narratives. It was so amazing and kind of
(39:12):
odd and excellent. And I think it's a good place
to end because this Mobia's book really is well, it's
about loss, and it's about violence, and it's about grief,
and it's about COVID. It's about many, many different things.
It's about it's about friendship among women, it's about friendship more.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Broadly, it's about spiritualism.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
But what I will take away most is this idea
that it is very much about narrative. And there's a
lot of talk these days about narrative, and I think
we need to be careful with our narratives.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And I think this entire.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Project is really underscoring the power of the stories that
we tell. So I really enjoyed reading the book. But
I also really really enjoyed this deep dive into the
Mobia's book. I hope that it's you know, maybe it's
just like inspired more questions for you, which is also appropriate,
but hopefully it's answered some question and has maybe given
(40:01):
you even a little more to think about and a
little more to take away from this reading experience. So
thank you so much for tuning in. Happy reading,
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