Book overview
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, TheA.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub
Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and painfully true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. But through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, she charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and a heartbreaking--and heart-mending--exploration of endings and beginnings.
A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The M