\u201cOyeyemi, unlike her fatalist predecessors, conjures alternate realities. She swaps the dead-eyed liturgy of capitalist drudgery for something stranger\u2014magic. Kinga suffers from a peculiar affliction: there are seven of her. Each takes charge of a day of the week, leaving voice memos and diary entries for the others; their texts and transcripts form the book.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHelen Oyeyemi, the British Nigerian novelist who published her d\u00e9but at twenty, is an original\u2014a writer whose style is equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart. Her books occupy the borderlands of realism and fable, where the plausible brushes up against the impossible, and the laws of narrative logic are bent just enough to let in the surreal. If the self-help cant of the title seems to glitch or stutter, the book\u2019s contents shimmer with the same strangeness.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cOyeyemi\u2019s point, perhaps, is that every perspective is hopelessly partial. In these epistemologically treacherous conditions, the Kingas model how to proceed with curiosity and humility: \u2018Maybe you see gentleness where I see joylessness,\u2019 one Kinga muses, debating their shared therapist. Yet Oyeyemi sometimes seems to go further, endorsing a relativism so deep that even provisional consensus is out of reach.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cYet in A New New Me, the virus has achieved self-awareness. There\u2019s always been a flighty, avoidant streak in Oyeyemi\u2019s fiction, as if she forever wants to be telling a different story than the one she\u2019s begun.This novel is, in a way, about that very impulse: the lure of complexity as a means of escape.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIf Butler\u2019s The New Me lampooned the self-improvement industry, Oyeyemi\u2019s A New New Me pushes the logic of perpetual upgrades to the point that self-help is indistinguishable from self-erasure. It\u2019s bloatware masquerading as betterment. Yet Oyeyemi doesn\u2019t mourn the loss of unity or push for resolution. Is Kinga better off as one or seven? The book is agnostic. Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi\u2019s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Katy Waldman on Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s A New New Me<\/strong><\/a> (The New Yorker<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cIs escaping danger any different from escaping ourselves? And if we manage to do either, do we know where we are going? These are the kinds of questions that animate almost all of Lacey\u2019s fiction, including her newest genre-bending work, The M\u00f6bius Book. Billed as a \u2018memoir-\u00adcum-novel,\u2019 it is Lacey\u2019s first explicitly personal book, though it is a work of universal exposition as much as biographical recollection. Meditating on her life after a divorce, recalling her fraught religious childhood, and sorting through the reasons that she writes fiction in the first place, Lacey offers us an experiment in form but also in ideas. As the first half of The M\u00f6bius Book tells a fictional story about a friendship in which not all secrets are revealed, and the second half serves as a vehicle to reflect on the dissolution of a romantic relationship, Lacey presents us with a work that functions like a maze: Where exactly the exit is, and how we might navigate the abrupt, unexpected turns, will always remain a mystery.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHow else should we interpret a book that moves not chronologically or even logically, but betwixt itself? Part of the magic of The M\u00f6bius Book is that new metaphors and meanings emerge and come into focus as one reads its two different parts. As one reads book two after completing book one, for example, it becomes clear that Lacey shares much with Edie in the earlier tale.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cNone of these supernatural references will surprise her longtime readers: In addition to formal invention, Lacey\u2019s earlier novels abound with allegory, religious trauma, and spirituality. Yet one mystery remains unsolved in The M\u00f6bius Book: Amid its shocking, beguiling tales is that pool of blood. While we do eventually learn its likely cause, the explanation is so strange as to muddle our understanding of interpretation itself. But that, too, seems to be intentional. For if most of Lacey\u2019s fiction is about running away from something or someone, in The M\u00f6bius Bookwe also get a study of how ignoring the past nearly always results in loss: not only of one\u2019s tangible identity, but also of one\u2019s coherence, orientation, and sense of meaning.<\/p>\n In this way, The M\u00f6bius Book is reminiscent of work by writers like Sheila Heti, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson. But in another way, the book is also something novel: While Lacey sets out to write both fiction and memoir tinged with universalisms, she resists combining the two genres explicitly; each has its own separate place in the work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Alana Pockros on Catherine Lacey\u2019s The M\u00f6bius Book<\/strong><\/a> (The Nation<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2026 \u201cIf the consent framework does not provide substantive guidance, what might a more comprehensive sexual ethics look…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":165409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-165408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115070203530482440","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/A-New-New-Me-199x300.jpg\")
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