Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Book Club

416 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

About the author

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, as well as a story collection, Certain American States.

Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.

Reviews

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Went to look at some of the lower ratings because I had such a good time reading this, and it really is a collection of people snitching on themselves for being no fun and having no taste or patience. The structure, setting, characters, and their relationships and motivations were all interesting to me. A complex thing to pull off, and she did.

[lexi (aka newlynova) · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’ve spent like a week trying to decide how i feel about this book and i still can’t figure it out - this is a story about a woman who tries to uncover the history of her late wife, a famous and eclectic artist, after a biography is published that contains several inaccuracies. it’s also a dystopian look at an alternate version of the US where the south seceded and formed a fascist theocracy following WWII.

the writing is gorgeous - for the first ~100 pages or so i was enraptured and felt this could be a five star read. it’s a fascinating look at identity and art and what it means to make art that interrogates what it means to be a single person with a single story. but while some parts of the alternate history were fascinating - particularly an excursion the main character takes towards the beginning of the book to the newly reunified south - i feel like so much of it just felt… tiring. i think the suspension of disbelief that this au required to work was too much for me, and i felt it really bogged down the story (e.g: using real historical figures sometimes, but not always, like dropping randomly that ronald reagan ran unsuccessfully as… a candidate of the green party ? no further context given of course why would we need it)

so! not what i hoped it would be, unfortunately, but not a bad book, and maybe even great for the right reader if you don’t get as easily bogged down as i did.

[Barry Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

i need to know more about the painters' massacre of 1943.

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

the only thing better than the biography of an eccentric groundbreaking woman artist is one that's made up.

unfortunately that's not what this was about.

i love lucy dacus and i hate to disagree with her, especially since we read this book at the same time which is thrilling, but we couldn't have had more disparate experiences.

this book was strange. it had a lot of interesting things to say, and a lot of interesting ways of saying things, but these two didn't always match up. some of its most compelling points are made in throwaway lines connecting middling paragraphs, and some of its strongest structural choices are wasted on the alternative history subplot it insists on destroying itself within.

in other words, this is likely good, but it's far from uniform.

the most bizarre moments of this book are twofold: its attribution of boring faux-biography to some of the 20th century's coolest nonfictional minds (oh hi, renata adler and chris kraus! you again, kurt cobain and david bowie!) and the fact that this is not so much biography of an artist and ex wife as it is relation of a history in which the southern united states seceded from the north in 1945 for the reason of "religion."

never mind that surely we would not be treated to this history if this were actually a biography of a woman. never mind that this makes no sense. never mind that world war ii still happened in this universe and we would thereby have to ignore the sense of american unity and patriotism that pervaded following this victory. never mind that also in the 1940s, the north was so progressive as to approve of socialism and of same-sex marriage and of a variety of other liberal causes, even though it elected a neofascist shortly after (who ran against ronald reagan, the green party candidate?).

i could never lose myself in these characters or in this story, because my suspension of disbelief was constantly being f*cked with by an alternate history so silly it resurrected my fading memories of apush syllabi.

i don't know. this book is so weird.

i badly wanted it to be my problem rather than the book's, but then there's the writing. i can deal with overwrought language if it’s precise. sentences that contain bits like “she glimpsed in my direction” and “dark black” are just too much for me to look past.

bottom line: the definition of an unpleasant surprise.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in an alternative version of the US, narrator Charlotte Marie (C. M.) Lucca takes us along for the ride as she researches the mysterious past of her late wife, ploymath art sensation X. It all begins when another author dares to publish a celebrated biography of X that enrages her widow, as she feels it doesn't do X justice, so the book we read starts as a revenge project intended to set the record straight - but then, Lucca's extended research becomes a dark journey into the reality of emotional abuse and dependency. Is X, the artist known for her plethora of personas and literary/ film/ music/ visual art projects, a genius that riffs on the postmodern fragmentation of ourselves, always developing and moving forward by transforming into different manifestations, or is she a fame-hungry, manipulative, ruthless narcissist?

Lucca, we learn, left her husband for X and gave up her successful career as a journalist to become a full-time wife, while eccentric X set the rules: She was the adored, wild child artist, and her wife gave up her agency. With Lucca, we dive into X's many secrets, starting with the fact that she was born in the Southern Territory, which in the narrated world are the Southern US states that left the union after WW II and became a dictatorial theocracy before being invaded by the North in 1996, the year X died (the parallels to German history - wall, secret police and all - are pointed out repeatedly in the text). As a young woman, X managed to flee the strictly policed Southern Territory, an almost impossible feat, and after that took on various identities in almost all art spheres to evade her own trauma and the agents trying to kill her.

We learn about X writing songs with David Bowie, discussing books with Kathy Acker (and becoming not one, but several bestselling authors), making it as a folk legend, succeeding in the fields of photography and visual installations, traveling through the US and Europe and impacting (and manipulating) people everywhere, before it becomes public that she is indeed just one person - which cements her fame. We learn about X's marriages and friends, and there are references to real life people, events and art pieces en masse.

And while these shenanigans are glamorous and the art is amplified by the political background, we also get drawn into the debate about the ethical production of art: X's eccentricities can be read as authenticity - or as her being an utterly terrible person, whom Lucca was unfortunate enough to love. X's control over Lucca's life extends beyond the grave, it's a form of dependency and obsession with a cruel person that emotionally abused her (and not only her). The realizations that come as a product of Lucca's research alter her sense of self: "It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her."

Sure, nothing about this novel reads as particularly plausible (who would marry a person they know virtually nothing about and then proceed to just never ask basic question?), but it's not supposed to be realistic - rather, it's a game that plays with fiction and nonfiction as well as with the question what we can know about a person and, as an extension, about ourselves. The text offers tons of mock sources, photographs and other images, and it's cleverly done. What has to be said though is that the book is way, way too long, which sometimes lessens its impact, and the alternative political background takes center stage for a part of the novel, but then almost disappears as a theme. Some other interesting ideas, for instance the dominance of female artists post-WW II, are mentioned, but aren't properly worked through.

Still, I remain intrigued by Catherine Lacey's output, by her ambition to craft daring, innovative stories, by her beautiful prose, and by her complex characters - it's just great fun to read and to discuss.

[thankyouluckystar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one was painful to get through...

I was intrigued by the premise and really enjoyed the first part of the book, especially about the southern territory. After that the story doesn't really go anywhere, it felt like we were repeating the same story over and over again with the interviews.

For being a biography I felt like I learned very little about X, except for the fact that she was a total asshole. I don't mind a problematic character, but I got bored with hearing about how fantastic and intriguing of a character X was when everything I was reading about her was stating the opposite. I also have a pet peeve for when authors create historically significant people and you're unable to be convinced of their significance, especially when they make a character be good at everything. I had a hard time understanding why everyone was so interested in X, which made most of the story a drag. Although her story is probably the most interesting, I found the narrator quite bland too.

This is probably more of my personal opinion, but I found this to be kind of pretentious and self involved. Also waaaay too long, without much progress. Really not my thing.

[Sarah Schulman]

The literary version of Tar.

[Beata · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel that offers a quest of a woman whose late wife, X being just one of her many names, left her with few facts regarding her life. Set in alternative political and geographical circumstances with regard to the USA, which I found truly captivating, and in several places across the globe, the tale progresses slowly and so does the protagonist's comprehension of who her wife really was.
The book seems a little to slow at times, however, I got invested in the story despite feeling no closeness to any characters in particular.
*A big thank-you to Catherine Lacey, RB Media, and Netgalley for a free audibook in exchange for my honest review.*

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catherine Lacey’s multi-layered novel presents a biography by a woman C. M. Lucca writing about her wife, a now-dead, controversial artist widely known as X. Lucca considers it necessary to correct numerous misconceptions published in an earlier biography of X. But Lucca’s attempt to construct a definitive life of X is complicated by X’s past, particularly her phase as a conceptual artist operating under an array of aliases, each accompanied by its own, carefully-staged physical persona. Masks and personas are fundamental to Lacey’s narrative, not purely as themes but concretised by the incorporation of a separate title and copyright page attributing it to C. M. Lucca, although the conceit’s equally undermined by an earlier title page under Lacey’s name.

Lacey seems to be building on a history of playing with identity in various cultural and artistic fields, a history rife with instances of reinvention and mis-direction from authors like George Eliot and Fernando Pessoa to DJs in electronic music to artists like Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun. A history which often openly calls into question notions of a stable or fixed identity. Lacey carries this further by making the character of X a composite of shards of existing figures in the art world. X stages performances that are clearly based on those of artists like Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle. Aspects of the concept driving Lacey’s novel echo Calle’s “L’homme au Carnet” and Lacey invokes Calle’s famous stalking project “Suite Venitienne” but makes Calle its object rather than its subject with X as Calle’s pursuer. Sometimes this mirroring operates as a series of in-jokes but it also points to deeper concerns around authorship, originality and authenticity as well as issues of knowledge and attribution. Concerns that deliberately invoke Borges’s fiction – directly referenced in Lacey’s text – particularly his stories “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” and “Borges and I.”

Notions of authenticity and knowledge are central to Lucca’s perception of her attempts to piece together the fragments of her X’s past, although what Lucca thinks she’s doing and what she actually does are gradually revealed to be at odds. Lucca’s a former investigative journalist who uses her skills to uncover “truths” about X, whose origins have been deliberately obscured. She’s also a classic, unreliable narrator, far too personally invested in her subject, at one point too distracted by jealousy at X’s happiness with a former lover to pay attention to potentially crucial information about X’s activities – although as the story unfolds Lacey casts doubt on any possibility of objectivity when it comes to representing others. Even Lucca’s use of endnotes seems like a ploy to shore up her claims that her account of X is authoritative.

Lucca’s unreliability also extends to self-knowledge. In interviews Lacey’s claimed her novel’s primarily an exploration of grief and love, but Lucca’s experiences are not those found in conventionally tragic tales of lost love. There’s no sense of any real intimacy in Lucca’s description of X or of their time together, their bond seems more dependent on a fateful combination of X’s forceful charisma and Lucca’s wilful self-delusion. A love grounded as much in projection and obsession as it is desire or affection, with X cast as the embodiment of Rebecca Solnit's mythical, female art monster.

Another thread that emerges via Lacey’s portrayal of Lucca’s research is a critique of biography as an interpretive form. Lucca relies on interviews with X’s former lovers, colleagues and acquaintances but these often serve to create an impression of X as an object that can be viewed from a variety of angles. Features of the commercial biography Lucca’s ostensibly attempting to debunk recall Benjamin Moser’s widely-criticised biography of Susan Sontag – here also part of X’s circle. Moreover, X’s connections to the real-life writer Kathy Acker reminded me of Chris Kraus’s book about Acker, and the uneasiness stirred by the revelation that Acker was the former lover of Kraus’s partner.

A key feature is the location of X and Lucca’s story, a version of America separated into North, South and West, with South as a closed-off, fascistic theocracy. It’s an alternative history that’s fairly obviously indebted to Margaret Atwood and Philip Roth. But it’s also quite an intriguing one - I relished specifics like the rewriting of the lives of iconic figures like Emma Goldman’s. Like X, Lacey’s setting plays with reality, for instance the revolutionary factions in the South that conjure countercultural groups like The Weathermen. Yet I wasn’t always convinced by Lacey’s imagined America or clear about its relevance. Lacey has said she simply wanted a backdrop against which X and Lucca as a lesbian couple wouldn’t stand out, living as they did in a North in which homophobia has long since ceased to exist. But the world-building involved seems far too elaborate, and frequently far too distracting, for its stated function.

There were times when this felt slightly dry and stretched out – though it’s not clear if that reflects Lucca’s shortcomings or Lacey’s. I’m also not sure the interplay between Lucca’s reflections, X’s past and the more speculative features is entirely coherent. The ending too was a little predictable. But I still found this a fascinating, provocative piece, an impressive collage and commentary on cultural and artistic movements and their histories.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admire the craft and commitment that's gone into this book but I wish Lacey had made me work harder. The text lays out its premise in the opening pages and doesn't really deviate from this programme:

And might I - despite how much I had deified and worshipped X, and believed her to be pure genius - might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived with her.

The use of that 'deified and worshipped' links the central relationship to the alternative history of the US which is set as background and where America is divided by a wall in 1945 and the Southern Territory becomes a 'fascist theocracy' (an allusion to The Handmaid’s Tale?). The ideological struggle depends, as always, on storytelling and narrativisation, and X's brutality draws a dotted line to the mass incarcerations and executions that take place (this is all off-stage and background only to the main story, and only emerges as the narrator investigates X's unknown life).

In the foreground is a not unfamiliar story of a wild-child genius who expresses herself through a vast array of performative characters, identities and media. She changes her name, travels extensively, is artist, novelist, song-writer (with David Bowie, natch, another shape-shifter) - who gives controversial interviews and can never be pinned down. All this is almost a postmodern manifesto and the text itself draws attention to the way it collapses 'fiction' and 'reality' as real people are slickly interwoven (Lynn Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bowie as noted) and intersect with X.

Lacey supports the book's ideological infrastructure with a vast array of footnotes, sources and references which made me think of Jorge Luis Borges where the more sources and evidence are provided, the further fictional 'reality' recedes for artificiality.

This is all huge fun as the narrative makes parallels between art, politics, activism and exploitation. It's perhaps a bit long for what it has to say but succeeds in bestowing upon itself exactly the kind of slippery identity that it is contemplating.

Thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recorded books, netgalley (thank you for an advance copy)
…..read by Cassandra Campbell
….14 hours and 6 minutes

Have you ever wanted to spit somebody in the face?
And or tell them to fuck off, and never contact you again?
CM did…..
CM wanted to spit into Mr. Smith’s face ….(the guy who wrote a biography about her deceased wife) and tell him to F off. (CM didn’t because she’s a nice proper woman).
But….
I’m getting ahead of myself here….

What I need to say — and others might want to know …. this is a remarkable piece of writing — strange — mysterious engrossing —
sometimes pathetic—other times darn messed-up hilarious.
There is nothing generic about this book.
It may not be for everyone….but I was totally captivated > and Casandra Campbell was perfect to read it.

CM left her husband to marry X.
Never mind
….that CM didn’t know where X was born….
Never mind
….that CM ‘knew’ that X would be the center of her life and the mystery of her life.
Never mind
….that “X Lived in a play without an intermission, and where she casted herself in every role.
Never mind
….that X chose to live a life where nothing was fixed. She might change her name from day to day.
Never mind
….that X thought she was a person who could manipulate others and that CM would allow herself to be manipulated.
Never mind
….that CM had to ‘promise’ she wouldn’t tell anyone - would never report — when X disappeared. Sometimes for weeks. And CM was never to question where she had been when she returned. (Disappearing had been a problem in other relationships for X)….

Interlude >> let me repeat I found this book deliciously messed-up humorous.

Never mind
….CM never intended to write a corrected biography… she says “if that’s what you call it”.
But she does….and this is the book we get.

NEVER MIND
….the strangeness, CM and X’s relationship….
“The Biography of X” is a whimsical, fresh, and thrilling ride for anyone who’s willing to take it.

CM set out to uncover as much information she could learn about X. The detail that bothered CM the most …..was not knowing where she was born.

…excerpt:
“What about those times when you call out to your wife telling them lunch is ready? And they don’t come? So you walk further down the hallway and into the room and call out their name again— only to find them lying on the floor, like a pile of laundry…..
“What I want to say, is, when I went to look for her, and did not find her, when she died, that is, or after, when I looked at the body left behind, I knew exactly what happened”.

Note: Catherine Lacey wrote Pew…..another book that equally intrigued me. I guess I’m an official Lacey fan now!

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last sentence is from Montaigne, though she gives him no credit.

Biography of X is the third novel I have read from the always-interesting Catherine Lacey, author previously of the brilliant debut Nobody is Ever Missing and the fascinating, if flawed Pew. Ultimately I found this less successful - more later - but it is certainly intriguing if not always entirely engrossing.

Biography of X largely consists of a book within a book, a biography of the enigmatic artist X, famed for her multiple identities (performance art in themselves), reinvention of her art into different genres, and unknown origins, written after her death by her bereaved wife, the journalist, C.M. Lucca. (both fictional of course)

Lacey's addition to C.M. Lucca's biography constitutes two 'real-life' lists of sources

- a revised list of photographic sources, some of which are, in Sebaldian fashion, photos Lacey has found, other from Wikipedia Commons, and some made by Lacey or commissioned by her; and

- sources for many of the quotes in the book (some of which have fictional sources in footnotes in Lucca's book, others simply phrases in the text).

The second of these is at the heart of the novel, as X, her own words but also those said by others about her, is a conscious (on Lacey's behalf) assemblage of many other female artists, writers and critics. A scan through the sources gives us, inter alia, Reneta Alder, Lynne Tillman, Clarice Lispector, Jean Stein, Kathy Acker, Susna Sontag, Maya Jaggi, Nathalie Leger, Amanda DeMarco, Jean Rhys, Susan Howe, Chris Kraus, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Connie Converse, Parul Seghal, Fleur Jaeggy, Merve Emre, Barbara Demick, Sophie Calle, Audrey Tatou, Marguerite Younecar, Louise Bourgeois and many many more. The book also features, as characters, male artists such as Tom Waits, David Bowie and Denis Johnson, X's career taking a nose-dive when she quotes political views using Bowie's real-life words (in the novel the more liberal Bowie disowns her views).

And this is an example of the confusion (or innovation) of the approach, some of the artists appear as characters in their own-right in the novel - Connie Conserve with a different life story, plays a major role as a lover of X - some are used to blend into X's own biography and sometimes artist A is quoted as using artist B's words to describe X:

In X’s archive, I could find only one note from Connie, an inscription in a Thomas Bernhard novel: “We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.”

This inscription from Connie Conserve to X is actually from Vivian Gornick.

And as another, early, example we get the following:

I rarely agreed with the way that other people described my wife, except for the quote from Lynne Tillman that was included in one of the obituaries. She’d said X was “voracious for people . . . one of the great devourers of all time. But her method of devouring was to entice. If you had a room full of twenty people and X came in, there was an energy uplift. It got everybody off their boring number. Here was this glamorous freak.”

The quote described as being from the real-life Lynne Tillman about X is actual a quote by Chuck Wein as told to Jean Stein.

Or this:

Nathalie Léger once described X’s names in an essay: “Who knows if it was in order better to conceal her self or to expose her self, if it was in order to escape her self or to understand her self; five names, according to some, though I only know of three. With a name nothing is ever clear, on the contrary, everything becomes more opaque.” Léger was one of the few past acquaintances I contacted who seemed to have a wholly uncomplicated relationship with X. “To me it seemed like a reasonable solution to a person, being a self,” Léger told me over the phone. “You have to get through—how to put it?—shame, essentially, yes that’s it—the shame and boredom of talking about yourself.” She later added, “Shifting between so many names, between selves—it must have relieved some of that shame.”

The first quote (“Who knows...opaque.”) is by Léger, as translated by Natasha Lehrer, as published in her The White Dress about the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca (a book which itself draws on many other female performance artists). The White Dress is published by Les Fugitives in the UK (another of the publisher's novels, Now, Now, Louison) is used indirectly taking an anecdote about Louise Bourgeois and making it an incident in X's life.

The first part of the second quote (“You have...yourself.”) is also by Léger, but from an interview with, and translated by, Amanda DeMarco in Bomb Magazine and talking about herself, with the second part (“Shifting...shame.”) of Lacey's own invention.

Lacey's own appendix is clear as to all the sources - this is not my sleuthing work - and there is a partial reading list of more general sources here - but it's a rather odd approach e.g. it's not clear if the artists involved have been approached. My guess is not - it did seem Lacey was careful to mostly use the deceased as the main characters.

The novel is also set in an alternative America, one that was partioned (North and South Korea is obviously a model, with Barbara Demick's work is drawn on) post WW2 into a religiously-conservative South, a socialist North (activist Emma Goldman becomes the first leader) and a West that rather stays out of the ideological battles. This creates an interesting backdrop, and in particular proves the key to X's life story, and enables Lacey to have some fun (Rachel Cusk's words about female artists in a male-dominated society are used in the novel by a frustrated male artist 'Richard Cusk') but seems something of a sideshow which would perhaps have merited a separate novel in its own right.

And that ultimately gets us to the novel's biggest flaw - it is simply far too long, and the life of a fictional artist (punctuated by the need to check the appendix for who actually said what, or what this photograph really shows) couldn't sustain my interest for its near 400 pages.

So a reluctant 3 stars - but Lacey is an author I'll continue to follow - I'd rather flawed and fascinating than conventional.

Thanks to Granta via Netgalley for the ARC - and it would be nice if the references were changed to UK editions of books where they exist.

[fatma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The title of this book--as titles so often are--is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it."

At a certain point in Biography of X, one of the eponymous X's novels is described as "a novel that emulsified fact and fiction"--the same can be said of Biography of X. It's a slippery novel in the way that it straddles fact and fiction, deeply commits itself to both the "real" and the constructed. That it is billed to us as a biography, and not a novel, immediately speaks to the kind of standards that it is attaching to itself, and that it in turn attempts to live up to. As a work of nonfiction ostensibly written by C. M. Lucca, X's widow, Biography of X commits to the research that such a work entails: at the end of each of its chapters, the reader is presented with a list of sources that include--sometimes fictional, sometimes real, sometimes a bit of both--novels, articles, recordings, interviews, movies, archival materials, all listed along with their authors, dates, publishers, locations. That the novel does this seems to imply a kind of rigorous commitment to the work on the part of C. M. Lucca: this feeling that she is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to the integrity of this biography of her wife that she's trying to write. And yet, in many ways, Lucca is not a very good biographer, or not really a "biographer" at all: she is too close to her subject, her stake in this work too personal. Lucca's biography, then, like Lacey's novel, both is and is not a biography: it is the account of the life of a deceased artist, and it is the account of the grief of the widow that artist left behind; it is rigorous enough to attempt to commit to the standards of its genre, and personal enough to cast doubt on its supposed adherence to those standards. In other words, it "emulsifies fact and fiction," mixes the factual details of X's life, supported by meticulous references, with the narrative that Lucca, as someone who loved X, wants to believe about X, or used to believe about X, or is trying to uncover from X.

"It seemed to be all I had ever wanted to know--how I might have changed her, what effect I'd had upon her. She had always seemed to me too powerful a mind and heart to ever fully breach, least of all by someone as fearful and flimsy as myself."

So far, I've talked about C. M. Lucca, the fictional author in this book, more than I have about Catherine Lacey, the actual author of the book. But Biography of X, the novel, and the biography of X, the biography, are not so easy to separate. Like a mobius strip, they feed into each other, the one looping into the other such that it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Put another way, Biography of X is a deeply metafictional novel in the way that it is constantly metabolizing itself, at once calling attention to and calling into question its own narrative, its author and her subject, its methodology.

One of the things I loved most about this novel is the way that it slowly unravelled--and, by extension, complicated--the relationship between Lucca and X. The novel, we are told, is the story of a widow who, in the wake of her grief, decides to write a biography about her deceased wife, who was quite a famous and prolific artist. It's the kind of premise that almost immediately implies a certain kind of story, one which boils down to: grieving widow finds out who her wife "really was." But the novel is not really interested in anything as facile as that; it's not interested in who X "really was" so much as it is interested in who X is made out to be, especially by Lucca. What it asks is, how do we construct accounts for people--and for ourselves--when they seem to elide being accountable in the first place? (In that respect, this novel really reminded me of Trust by Hernan Diaz and the way it also delves into the many accounts of an almost larger-than-life person.) X is undoubtedly a complex and elusive figure--becoming less rather than more understandable as the novel goes on (and I mean that in the best way)--but for me the more compelling figure in this novel is easily Lucca, X's ostensible biographer. As much as it is presented as a biography of X, I found Biography of X to be such a sensitive and moving portrait of Lucca: of what it is like to be so deeply (and dangerously) caught up in a romantic relationship, to so intimately and vulnerably tie your sense of self to another person. For all its deft thematic explorations, Biography of X is also just about this grief that has overtaken its narrator, this persistent sense of loss that she cannot shake off, and that she is unable to resolve.

(One final note: Catherine Lacey's writing in this novel is just stunning. I have pages and pages of highlights; when it came to looking for some quotes to put in this review, there was an absolute embarrassment of riches for me to choose from.)

Biography of X is such a fascinating, engrossing, impressive novel, complex and challenging and resistant to any kind of simple answers--in other words, just the kind of love that I love, and that I did love, a lot.

Thanks so much to Raincoast Books for sending me a review copy of this beautiful book!

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The cleverness of Biography of X doesn't last long. The novel drags through 300+ pages of autofiction, as the narrator shares bouts of dazed confusion, unpacking their choices in marrying a woman of charade personality. Each chapter shows less innovation than the last. At first, the photos interlaced with fake citations of interviews provide an authentic charm. The fictional biographical world gives fuel to the mind, building the reader's imagination of conspiracy in an alternative American history. It’s not quite the Republic of Gilead, nor is it Millennium nostalgia, with its lack of internet resources, cellphones, or promise of the future. America in Biography of X is an east coast utopian neoliberal dreamscape, where Bernie Sanders becomes president after defeating Jessie Jackson (I’m not kidding, it’s on page 308) and homosexuality was legalized in the 1920s. These creative choices start to rapidly remove the reader from any desire to follow a narrative maze of unoriginal depressive episodes, fake citations with references to fake archives posted at the bottom of each page, and finally concluding in the acceptance of X’s death.

X is a culmination of pop culture's "need to know" moments. From Lou Reed's infamous Australian interview in which he completely dismantled an interviewer's ability to frame rock and roll personality into prepackaged clarity, to Bowie's admission that drugs ruined a good portion of his life, X becomes the divine hero of alternative culture. She is everyone who ever mattered, anyone who accomplished anything worth talking about. How Catherine Lacey got away with cultural marauding and recreating it as fiction that's sweeping positive reviews from every corner of the literary world, should be left answered by those who bothered taking her Columbia writing seminars.

There are laugh-out-loud moments of judgment as a reviewer, like when the narrator casually mentions how Kurt Cobain covered one of X's songs (that's why Kurt becomes popular in the 90s!) or how Kathy Acker contributes to a feminist manifesto designed by X, further propelling her as a legitimate artist. These attempts to reference culture in a twist are served bottom shelve by the time we reach the moment that David Bowie comes to their wedding reception. Of course, the narrator and Bowie don't speak or share anything but speculation - that would transcend the novel from autofiction to fanfiction.

It’s not a gasp of amusement but an eye roll of disgust. Biography of X was written by someone who doesn't know what to do with all the cultural artifacts they've culminated while customizing an ego. Leave Tumbler personalities online. No one successfully pulls off soft grunge, especially in literature. It's not clout-building or groundbreaking (like some of these reviews are saying) to reconstruct cool interviews you've seen online and use them as character design. It's fucking lazy. The result is a main character whose entire personality is just one long YouTube video on the history of alternative music and art, making X feel like a 90s MTV persona thirty years too late.

Although I initially enjoyed being wrapped in her alternative history, the novel doesn't deliver much of anything other than an unreliable narrator whose pitiful attempt at catharsis leaves the reader wondering why they spent all that time following a terrible journalist role playing as a detective. A third of the book is skippable, with no impact on the overall lackluster story of two women whose marriage ends up an art concept. If you see this on shelves, steal it, read a few dozen pages, and return it after 24 hours. I promise you're not missing out.

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biography of X is a fictional memoir detailing the life of the eccentric and elusive artist X, as told by her widow. As the widow interviews many of the people that crossed paths with X during her life of constant identity switches and disguises, she uncovers a trail of secrets, lies, and betrayals, and is left wondering if she, or anyone, really knew X at all.

What impressed me the most about this novel was simply how inventive it is. Though fiction, it reads like non-fiction, and is littered with quotes, photographs, and artefacts backed up with footnotes to books, articles etc – all of which are also fake. Not only that, Lacey also plants this story in an alternative reality of the USA where the country split into 2 territories after WW2: the progressive northern territory and the oppressive south. While this gives the story a dystopian flair, it also gives Lacey the room to stretch her creativity further, weaving a narrative so rigorous that it starts to feel real. I was simply enthralled by it.

4.5

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm afraid to say that I wasn't blown away by this book.

I got the audio version from Netgalley in return for an honest review so I should say that the actual narration is excellent. Cassandra Campbell's voice is clear and very pleasant to listen to so that's one star's worth.

The story, however, whilst interesting and a different wasn't really for me. I loved Pew because of its spareness of language but Biography of X seems to ramble around circuitously for a little too long. Catherine Lacey certainly can write a great character and in X (or whoever she was during her fictional lifetime) was just too unlikeable for me and CM came across as a little one dimensional and dull. I'm guessing that was the point given what the conclusion of the book was but (for me) it just took far too long to get there.

I'll definitely look out for more Catherine Lacey because I find her books interesting. If you like a saga-style book rather than the short, pithy offering we got in Pew then this book may be for you. She's certainly done her research.

[sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Closer to a 1 star, if i'm honest! Before I get into this, please read Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Mathewson’s You Feel It Just Between the Ribs. Then, read the Wiki summary for Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle. Then, rotate a Penguin Classics mass market copy of 1984 by George Orwell in your head in all directions, while saying aloud, “hey, I read this in high school.” Okay, now you contain the knowledge of three compelling, reflective dystopias, and there is absolutely no need to read Biography of X. Congrats! I’ve spared you.

This book is set in an alt-reality United States where after WWII, the South seceded from the rest of the U.S. and became an fascist theocracy. We’ll get into that, don’t worry, but you need to know that this is NOT the main focus of the book. It’s the background dressing for the abusive relationship between X, the titular character, and her recent widow, who narrates the book as a semi-biography, attempting to gain insight into X’s life. My best guess is the dystopia setting was meant to serve as character background for X, explaining her behavior and art and lifestyle. Not really what dystopias are for, but whatever, artistic liberty, etcetera.

Despite it being the background and not the point, the author really, really wants you to know she put a lot of work into creating this dystopia. The first 50%-ish is riddled with long expository paragraphs filled with names and dates and fake citations and such. There was clearly a lot of thought put into the setting, and major plot points rotate around events in this world. So, naturally, my brain thought about it a lot, and I’ve turned up the conclusion that it’s actually pretty bullshit. I’ve added a timeline of events at the very bottom of this review, if you’re curious, but it’s as full of holes as you’d expect. My criticisms below are of the worldbuilding and weird politics of the book, not the main plot, although obviously the two are intertwined. I thought the main plot line was…fine. It was fine. It was whatever. But BOY was the rest of it bad.

Glaring oversight #1

Race is mentioned three times, total, in this 400+ page book. This is the first mention:
“Systematic racism was clearly evidenced in the ST’s judicial system, as Black citizens were imprisoned at rates far above those of the white population. (In this regard, however, the Northern Territory saw similar rates, as does the reunified country today).”

The second mention: “The vast majority of Black Southerners (after some uprisings in the 1950s) came to tacitly accept that the intensely racist structure of their society, the tailwind of slavery, was simply “God’s plan.”

The third mention: A group of artists named BASEL/ART (Black Americans for Southern Equality and Liberation through Art, Resistance and Terror). The only named artist from this group is Arthur Jafa, a real-life artist and in the book, a Southern refugee living in the North. X, who is full of herself, says he’s “out of her league.”

There are less than 100 words referencing Black people in this book about the South. a region built on slavery, nonexistent without the presence of Black people. hello???? What reality are we in?? Crafting a dystopia does not equal altering the past.

Because those 100 words are literally the only things a reader has to go off of, here are the following implications:
- systematic racism is identical in a seceded, theocratic fascist South and a “”sociocapitalist”” North
-Black Southerners accepted racism as God’s plan????
- According to X, the only thing better and more interesting than herself is a Black Southerner who is mentioned once and never again

…. yeah.

The only real-life Black people mentioned in this book, because the book is mostly about X hanging out with a boatload of real-life famous white people, are Jesse Jackson (who is textually called conservative in comparison with Bernie Sanders), Arthur Rafa, and fucking RuPaul. I wish I was making this up. There’s also a Toni Morrison quote, attributed in footnote(!!) from the dedication of Sula???? Embarrassing. Racist. Weird. Put this in comparison to the dozens of white authors, politicians, artists, writers, etc — and just to emphasize, here’s a non-comprehensive list of some of the folks that Lacey cites, replicates or fictionalizes in this book: Susan Sontag, Patty O’ Toole, Susan Howe, Renata Adler, Kathy Acker, Flannery O’Connor, Connie Converse, Bob Dylan, Vivian Gornick, Sheila Heti, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, whose bits are particularly insufferable to read.

As the book dragged on, I kept expecting at the very least a mention of what the fuck happened to Black Americans. There is a blatant gap where race should be, as if it’s irrelevant to the substance and culture of world she’s created. The absence of Black people in this book, in this universe, becomes retroactive. That is a form of violence. And maybe if the political philosophy of this book was more intentional, you could view this as a choice made to provoke thought about that absence — but, it just isn’t. It’s a weak, uncertain replica of many better dystopias, and the outcome is racist and embarrassing.

Fuckup #2

The second-worst thing this book does is absolutely fuck the reputation of Emma Goldman, a real-life Russian Jewish anarchist who was, though the book sure won’t tell you this, very cool and constantly getting arrested for various publications and plots. Also, in real life, she was living in Spain at the time period described in this book (post-1940), so would have been no part of this fuckery. She sounds awesome, you say. Correct — and instead of doing anything interesting with this very interesting person, this book turns her into a socialist governor of Illinois.

You’re FUCKING kidding me.

anyways, so besides an extensive arrest (and prison) record that included inciting draft-dodging, inciting riots, and conspiring to blow up an anti-union factory owner (see: very cool), say she gets successfully voted into office. She would become aN ILLINOIS GOVERNOR????? When in real life, she was hootin it up with a bunch of Spanish anarchists post-Civil War? Fuck off. Fuck OFF. Slander.

To boot, the book makes her the chief of staff of the Roosevelt admin. Lol. The book then makes Goldman an anarchist who becomes a socialist (you know, as one doesn’t), and through this transformation, becomes responsible for all the cool parts of the New Deal. Then she’s assassinated in 1945 (presumably by Southerners? The book doesn't explain). They rename the Socialist party the Goldman party, and that becomes the predominant party in the North. Yeah. Okay. Artistic liberty, and all that.

The worst crime against her, IMO, is that in the book, she becomes a figurehead for the “Socialist Capitalism” movement. Yeah! Literally what the fuck is that! and to take radical anarchist Emma Goldman and make her a capitalist of any sort, even fictionally…jail. Not real jail, she was a big prison abolitionist. But like, metaphorically, jail. It’s not good. It’s cringe.

Hey Can We Be More Creative? #3

If the South has a sort of “sinister, hyper-capitalist theocratic government,” and the North has a “socialist capitalist” framework, with references to a “dirty need for money,” then what’s up in the West? Do they have the secret magical type of capitalism that is good and works (lol)? Or could we get Literally Anything Else, Please? There’s just no creativity. Has the space race still happened? Maybe there’s a moon commune, could we go look at that? Oh, no, the solution is actually mercantilism or something? Why not feudal mercantilism? The possibilities (of being under the thumb of capitalism) are endless! Hoo-ray! Ugh.

Here’s my biggest issue w/the author’s political philosophy, behind the veil: the issue with the theocratic fascist South, according to the text, is how willing Southerners are to go to their deaths like cows, following every rule, self-reporting, blowing themselves up over and over again. The issue is not with the man turning the crank of the machine that crushes them. It’s their fault for stepping inside. And even if the author resoundingly disagrees with this, even if she doesn’t harbor a hatred towards the “weak,” we’ll never know, because nothing better, more interesting, more important was written in the code of this dystopia. There’s nothing there.

I also think it treats oppressed Southerners like idiots, as the main character notes that they have “neutered their own needs and desires at the feet of the divine.” This is from the perspective of a Northerner acting as a biased narrator, but it’s still so…like, baby, they’re doing fascism. Religion as a hammer. Southerners didn’t autonomously neuter their own needs and desires, they were forced into doing so by shadowy figures that we never, ever get a clearer picture of, something done intentionally by the author, but for what reason, fuck if I know.

One last whiff off of this monstrosity of a world she’s created. Here’s the quote: “Goldman frustrated everyone, eventually. She seemed like a radical to conservatives, but the rest of us knew she’d had to make many compromises to get as far as she did.” Many compromises with WHOMMMM??? Hers is the dominant political party. What is she having to compromise about! Compromise is not inherently good! It is NOT what keeps society functioning and it is not a moral imperative! Shut upppp! I got poisoned dot com by this author’s boring terrible world and its boring terrible politics.

Minor sin #4

Why did this book make Connie Converse annoying and pretentious?? even if she was, that’s none of your business. get your hands off of her

ok that’s all book was bad bye

If you liked the pretentious art vibes and sinister lesbians of this book, go listen to the second season of Within the Wires, by the same creators of You Feel It Just Between The Ribs, the superior chaotic lesbian dystopia book. Seasons 1-3 of Within the Wire will cure you from ever needing to read this bad, bad book.

TIMELINE (for nerds interested)

“In the years preceding the Great Disunion, while the US military and the federal government had been engrossed in WWII, the ST’s future leaders had through steady propaganda campaign of radio shows, newspapers, reports, posters, pamphlets, and youth outreach programs, convinced a majority of Southerners that every state in the North was being secretly controlled by the Communist Party; an invasion of the South, they said, was imminent. Those who weren’t convinced of a Communist invasion were unsteadied enough by the widespread misinformation to feel there was no longer any objective truth, a belief that numbed any part of the population that might have objected to the forced theocracy.”

“The state governments of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida, as well as parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana had been cooperating in secret for nearly a decade (assumed 1935) to enact the mass exodus.” The “Christian Coup and its wall had been in the works for years” and “what may have seemed like a coup from the outside was actually a slow mutation of a conservative democratic state into a country overtaken by invasive delirium—the fear of God—and ruled by whoever could most convincingly claim to know His Divine Laws, a ‘478 page document listing 1,364 laws that ST leaders used as a replacement for the individual legal codes of the southern states prior to the Disunion. Another 5,449 laws were added to the document during the ST leaders’ reign.”

In 1945, the “Great Disunion” occurs, the South secedes from the North, and the Wall goes up. A border is established in 1946, and later in 1958, a tripartite treaty is enacted between the Northern, Southern and Western territories, making it a federal(!) crime to run away from the South.

In 1996, 2,488 theocratic leaders kill themselves in a mass suicide, the North invades the South, the wall goes down, and Reunification occurs sometime after.

Questions for the group: Why is there a Western territory at all? Is it because the author read the greater work Man in the High Castle and said hey, that seems cool and interesting, what if My Book Too? What federal government exists, if the country is split into territories, and how can it possibly enforce the treaty? What the fuck is the “Christian Coup”? Who wrote the document “His Divine Laws”? Who were the ST leaders? Which church is “The Church”? Who killed themselves? How were they in positions of power? Why that number? Why in 1996? How did any state governments work together “secretly”? How did the North miss all of that? What the fuck? (You will not be surprised to learn that absolutely none of these questions are ever answered).

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

"When we love people, they seem different from all the people that we don't love, but everyone is the same. Everyone is made of the same stuff and everyone reaches the same conclusion [ie, death]."

Wow, what a fascinating masterpiece beautifully performed in audiobook by Cassandra Campbell. A fictional biography that is just as much about its author (the subject's widow) as it is about X, the magnanimous subject. An incredibly real and thoroughly built alternative US history as setting, a charismatic and volatile artist, a laisse faire bisexual normative world, and queering of format and archives. Intellectually mesmerizing and thought-provoking. Although not as emotionally resonant as I usually like my novels, I can't really fault this book for not being something it's not trying to be. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

If you like this book, I'd recommend The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North. Also about a complicated bisexual woman artist!

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging experiment in building an emotionally rich and ugly biography of an imaginary but great avant-garde artist living in an alternative timeline of late 20th-century America who was also a truly destructive, unreliable, and abusive human being.

Retired investigative journalist C.M. Lucca, our cipher-like narrator, and the second (or maybe third?) wife of X, a mysterious shape-shifting female artist in the downtown Manhattan scene who actively violated norms of gender, sexuality, and bourgeois propriety. The novel consists of Lucca's interviews with the other important figures in X's life-- in a clever Sebaldian touch, Lacey supplies fake photographs of X's many incarnations, and abundant pseudo-historical footnotes to Lucca's archive and fictional news articles and academic essays. Lucca's own backstory and inner life seems extremely thinly-drawn, and perhaps this is Lacey's point about the victims of isolation and abusive control in both intimate relationships and authoritarian politics.

X is a composite (one assumes) of Lacey's multiple artistic heroes: under a lengthy list of noms de plume, X wrote avant-garde fiction like Kathy Acker, created performance art like Marina Abramovic, performed in Times Square live sex shows, ironically appropriated dozens of class and gender identities like Cindy Sherman, sold her installation pieces for millions in SoHo galleries, might have been an undercover FBI agent, and befriended David Bowie and actually wrote and produced "Heroes."

Like Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, X was also a serial user and abuser of her romantic partners, whom she isolated and dominated. And who were forced to accept her lack of stable personality structures, and her randomly dropping in and out of their lives in order to, say, fly off to Rome on a moment's caprice to fully impersonate an Italian feminist activist. Here, Lacey is wrestling with the most extreme edge case of life imitating art through maniacally-devoted method acting.

But what doesn't really work here is the shallowness of the world-building: Lacey's alternative timeline of American history seems to have been devised by someone with minimal knowledge of American history, and can't escape the political perspective of the Trump-era left. In X's 1945, the southern states seceded from the Union, built a literal wall along their northern border, and formed a fascist, Christian white supremacist version of Margaret Atwood's Gilead, a thinly-allegorized evangelical East Germany. Up north, the anarchist Emma Goldman became FDR's chief advisor, building a (to us, premature) Bernie Sanders-esque (he was President in the 1990s) welfare state, with socialized medicine, gender equality, and gay marriage.

Lucca reconstructs her late wife's early life: she was born Carrie Lu Walker in Christian fascist Tennessee. As a teenaged bride and mother, she joined a subversive cell of radicals, survived a failed violent uprising against the regime, and escaped to the Northern Territory, where she reinvented and insinuated herself into the New York art world. The deviations from our own timeline just seemed arbitrary, especially when this alternative New York felt almost exactly like the real one, with only tiny and sporadic differences, like Brian Eno and Rachel Cusk switching genders. But one deviation is clever and decisive: after the assassination of a dozen alpha-male artists like Jackson Pollock in 1943, high art is now exclusively the preserve of women...

Maybe I'm just being a carping historian (that is my day job). But this novel about a brilliant but problematic artist didn't need to be unfolding in an alternative America, since our own is sufficiently alienating and uncanny. And alternative timelines are extremely hard to pull off (see under: Philip Roth's The Plot against America).

[Bojan Gačić]

Istina i činjenice su večito tražena roba. Mnogi su zaneseni u veri da baš njihovo viđenje događaja pije vode i pruža tačan uvid u hronologiju dešavanja. Ovo se jednako odnosi na lični koliko i na tuđi život. Velika satisfakcija od pomisli da znate kako je biti neko drugi, kasnije prerasta u još veće ubeđenje u tačnost vašeg tumačenja tuđeg života. Veliki deo neautorizovanih biografija počiva na ovom principu-kada činjenica nema, praznine se "dotumače".

Kao odgovor na jednu takvu biografiju o svojoj pokojnoj supruzi, slavnoj i misterioznoj umetnici čije ime se sastoji od svega jednog slova- X(iks), glavna protagonistkinja piše korektivnu biografiju i upušta se u definisanje žene koja je ceo život bežala od toga da bude definisana.

Ovaj naslov je mnogo toga, a darovi Ketrin Lejsi kroz ovu knjigu su veliki. Samim tim se može čitati na više načina. Forma biografije je u potpunosti ispoštovana kroz hronologiju događaja, pružanje istorijskog konteksta, transkripte i niz parafraziranih intervjua, zatim fusnota gde se navode izvori kroz nazive dokumenata, imena muzičkih albuma i numera, privatnih prepiski i kolekcija. Čitalac zaista ima utisak da je pred njim istorija stvarne ličnosti. Ali stvarnost je sasvim suprotna, "Biography of X" je fikcija. Svako svedočenje, analitički razgraničeno i isklesano do sitnih detalja,plod je bogate mašte autorke dosledno posvećene izgrađivanju realnosti svog zamišljenog sveta.

Taj zamišljeni svet ovde poprima nove dimenzije. Naime, Ketrin Lejsi je stvorila sloj alternativne istorije. Naslovna "X" potiče iz "Južne teritorije", otcepljenog dela SAD-a koji je postojao kao nezavisna teritorija pod autokratskim režimom od kraja Drugog svetskog rata pa sve do sredine devedesetih godina. Turbulentna egzistencija praćena je nizom diskriminacijskih zakona, afera, korupcijom, nasiljem protiv građana, pobunama i pokušajima bežanja na prosperitetniji i liberalniji sever. Ovakav monumentalni podvig imaginacije i brilijantne kontra-faktografije,koji lagano stoji rame uz rame sa Rotovom "Zaverom protiv Amerike"(nekada je čak i prevazilazi), štivo je iz kojeg bi mnogi moderni autori mogli svašta da nauče.

U svojoj suštini, ovo je priča jedne žene i njene bitke da kroz okean činjenica i laži o tuđem životu konačno sagleda i prihvati istinu o sebi, sopstvenoj traumi i patologiji. Taj put je trnovit, potpuna objektivnost i uspeh su skoro nemogući ali i neprihvatljivi. Nekada je fantazija nužno zlo u odnosu na stvarnost, nekada submisivni traže dominantne a nekada je činjenica zaista čudnija od fikcije.

Sve ovo zvuči poprilično zahtevno. Treba biti iskren, ovako ambiciozna knjiga zaista zahteva posvećenog čitaoca. Ali ključ leži u dostižnosti jer pred vama je planina čiji vrh možete dosegnuti, put je intelektualno stimulativan, na momente naporan, kao i sam život ali vredan truda. Ako se pisanje zaista može posmatrati kao eksperiment, Ketrin Lejsi je ostvarila maestralan rezultat, "Biography of X" je onaj u kojem možda i vi treba da učestvujete.

[Trudie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I believe I enjoyed the idea of a faux biography based in an alternate America more than the experience of reading one. The problem is not the ambitious, experimental nature of this but that it tries to do so much. It's jam-packed with celebrity appearances and quotes, ( Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Jean Rhys etc.) as well as academic-style footnotes and images.

The subject of this biography, X, is multi-talented; a cultural provocateur, author, and music collaborator (inspiring David Bowie - no less). She seems to magnetically attract and discard lovers on a whim. X's true nature and her background are a puzzle, her life story difficult for any would-be biographer to unravel as she adopted multiple personas as part of a decades-long performance art piece. She is also cruel and utterly unlikeable.
This is a hard book to parse, luring you in with a promise of interesting world-building but then fragmenting/devolving into something I found messy, aloof and boring. Perhaps my lack of knowledge/interest in the art world alienated me but it is also true I needed at least one character I could root for. Certainly a book for the readers of slightly strange and quirky fiction.

[michelle (travelingbooknerds) · Rating 5 out of 5]

[26 march 2023] wow. love when 2% into a book you get the 5-star magic and it carries through to one of the best final sentences you’ve ever read in a novel. it felt like everything in the universe was aligned and i was in another plane of existence for the duration of this audiobook—i couldn’t tell where the story ended and i began. truly such an engrossing immersive captivating reading experience i never wanted to end. can’t wait to come back here and elaborate on my best bits tomorrow, but i have early start tomorrow so gn for now 🥱😴

Thank you so much to Netgalley; RB Media, Recorded Books; FSG for the opportunity to experience this stunning advanced reader copy audiobook written by Catherine Lacey and narrated by Cassandra Campbell in exchange for my honest review.

{edit: 31 march 2023} How well do you know the people in your life? How well can you know the people in your life? What do you do when you start to discover that the people you thought you knew, you may not know at all? What can you do when that person is no longer alive? Can art be divorced from the artist? Or are artists and their art inextricably linked for eternity? How about in death? These are some of the questions asked and explored in Catherine Lacey's third literary outing—the resplendent, thrilling, and haunting Biography of X.

Set in a parallel United States where the southern states split from the union after World War II to establish a fascist theocracy called the Southern Territory, we slowly discover how much the fraught tensions between the two territories mirror those between our narrator, CM, and her late wife X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter. In her own words:

"My name is X and my name has always been X, and though X was not the name I was given at birth, I always understood, before I understood anything else, that I was X, that I had no other name, that all other names put upon me were lies. The year and location of my birth no longer pertain—few know that story, some think they know it, and most do not know it and need not know it. From 1971 until 1981—a youthful decade—I suspended the use of myself; that is, I was not here, I was not the actor within my body, but rather an audience for the scenes my body performed, a reader of the fictions my body lived. If this sounds ludicrous, that's because it is ludicrous; it is ludicrous in the exact same way that your life is ludicrous—you who have convinced yourself, just as nearly all people do, of the intractable limits of your life, you who have, in all likelihood, mushed yourself into the miserly allotment of what a life can be, you who have taken yourself captive and called it living. You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen. On some level you must know this already or have suspected it all along—but what, if anything, can be done about it? How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent? You may believe, as it is convenient for you to believe, that there is no escaping that confinement, and you may be right. But for a period of years I, in my necessarily limited way, escaped.”

—Catherine Lacey, Biography of X (pp. 174-5).

As CM sets out on a journey to uncover the true extent of the identity, persona, and career of the wife she "had deified and worshipped[,]" but can't deny was held continually at arms length from; instigated by a desire to correct the publication of an unauthorized biography of X that came out after CM's express refusal to be involved by penning one of her own hand. Soon the cracks of their relationship begin emerge from hidden crevices and plain sight, unveiling the extent to which X had curated not just the many creative works she threw herself into but also her persona, her spoken truths, and the marriage between the two women itself. Lacey interweaves historical fact, prominent cultural icons, and artwork of several mediums from our reality into her fictional one to create a mysterious and mythic meld of reality and unreality.

But not only is Lacey’s Biography of X an examination of the line between reality and unreality in form, it is also so in subject. A mesmerizing dream-state of memory, truth, thought, interpretation, perception, pain, love, and longing. A text that will keep readers processing the events depicted within it for days. I know I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished reading it. Every quiet moment I have quickly brims over into rumination over X and CM, both individually and in relation to each other. Fervent commendations to Lacey for their inspired exploration of control, deceit, revery, fame, iconography, obsession, grief, and worth—of art, of culture, of self, of others.

The writing is absolutely breathtaking. The last three chapters are, in one word, masterful; and some of the most impeccable pieces of writing I have ever read. Whilst revisiting them for the purpose of writing this review, I found myself gasping again at the the shocking moments and shedding tears all over again during the ones that hit me like a ton of bricks.

Yet as much as this novel is about the vast array of relationships and the dynamics within them, it is also deeply concerned with the process of creation itself. The relationship between an artist and their work, the relationship between an audience and creative art and by extension fandom and obsession, the inevitability of critical evaluation and interpretation that may or may not align with the artist's intention and who has control of such narrative in life and in death, and the life of art—lasting, unencumbered by time—beyond the life of its artist—ephemeral, on an unknown time limit. To be honest, it feels surreal writing a review for a book that has a lot to say about creative critique in the arts. X’s Disclosure, specifically, has been running through my mind on loop while I write this.

I'm hesitant to divulge much further about the text as I do strongly believe that going through the discovery experience of X with CM is the best way to experience the story, uncovering X's vast expanse of existence, art, and legacy with CM in real time.

The audiobook narration by Cassandra Campbell is beautifully performed. Well-paced, enigmatic, engrossing, and dream-like, Campbell's subtle inflections and tonal shifts not only oriented me throughout the story but kept me moored in a sea of reality and unreality as the story spun forward like a tendril of smoke unfurling through air. I sank into the story like a spectre in the room with the characters, observing to their every move, subsumed in the mystery and intrigue of X's life story and CM's investigations and discoveries. When a text has references and footnotes included I always find that audiobooks make the reading experience smoother for me because sometimes I get confused when I’m supposed to read them and as a result often get pulled out of the story itself. With the audiobook I was able to stay engaged and focused on the story and able to lose myself inside of it,

{edit: 1 april 2023} I loved the book so much I bought a physical copy and WOW being able to see the referenced photos, artworks, letters, notes, from the story included within the text à la Night Film by Marisha Pessl was thrilling. As soon as I spotted a copy I quietly yelped with glee and a couple that was perusing near the book where a little surprised by me. I quickly apologized, responding, "Oh my gosh I am so sorry I just got so excited they have this!" After I quickly flipped through the book and sufficiently oohed and aahed, I look up to see said surprised femme holding the one other copy of Biography of X that was left. Me, in my mind: "Exactly! Hope you love it, icon!" Then I have a fun long chat with the bookseller who rung me up, which ended in them asking me if they could take a picture of my newly obtained copy so they remember to grab a copy after their shift. #streetteam

Now having seen a physical copy of the text, the reading experience I would personally most recommend is flipping through a physical or digital copy of the text while listening to the audiobook at the same time. Cassandra Campbell's vocal performance brings the X-factor and does so much to bring the text to life, I truly believe that it is not one to miss. However, these stunning curated images and inclusions also infuse a text that feels somehow deeply grounded in reality despite being a fictional work, even more like a real biography of a non-fictional icon.

{edit: 2 april 2023} Did I buy a second copy as a gift for a friend? WHY YES, YES I DID.

I was talking to my mother earlier about my late father, memory, and grief and had a renewed sense of feeling seen and affirmed in my grief journey. I felt an ineffable kinship with CM's desire for understanding of her partner, their life together, her own self, X's death. Wanting answers from a person who can no longer provide you with them. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for my mother and the many hard losses in life she has had to grieve and recover from. How different people process, deal with, heal and move on from pain, grief, heartbreak, devastation, loss, joy, conflict, anger. I also understood this push pull between creative work and being perceived as a result of sharing art—wanting the freedom of anonymity but unable to douse the fire of creation which brims over your being into the material world. It is something I think about a lot but but find complex to articulate. I find myself returning to the text to engage with the section regarding self, identity, and creativity. What are we but not works of art ourselves?

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Lacey writes like no one else. Her talent lies in presenting the seemingly ordinary in such a way that it rings true and could exist in the current atmosphere, particularly scary since there are elements embedded in Biography of X that are actually becoming evident, frightening elements, that we watch, stricken, on the evening news. Out of Florida. I won't say more than that except that those who have read this amazing novel will know what I mean.

[B. H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can only talk about this book in conversation with other works of art, because the way it is conceived demands it. And because my own words fail me. This is a stunning work of fiction, an alternative history of the United States told through the eyes of a bereaved widow trying to understand the woman she has loved and lost. But can we truly know another person? Can we truly ever know ourselves? And what role can and does art play in this attempt at self-knowledge?

This is an intricate text and the way it plays with art's ability to fashion new selves and the question of other people's unknowability reminded me of the questions underlying Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. There are times when X's untamed genius reminded me of Lila if Lila had had ego and desire to be remembered. On the flipside, there is much the narrator's voice, her dedication, her inability to see her wife clearly (or herself) that is reminiscent of Elena. The way X seems to manipulate her wife also has some of that bitter realization (or doubt) that Elena has at the end of the quartet, when the dolls are returned to her.

But at the sentence level and the atmosphere, "Biography of X" is much closer to Atwood. Yes there is the question of the Southern Territories that bear some resemblance to Gilead. But the fraught relationship between the two women at the center of "Biography of X" and its meta narratives are better understood in conversation with "The Blind Assassin."

Lacey welcomes these comparisons because so much of the texts and events included in this invented biography are taken and reshaped from real life events and works of art. X herself appears to be an amalgam of Sontag, Lispector, Aker, and even David Bowie. But she is also her own thing, and so many things at the same time. As with every biography, it ends up telling us more about the writer than its subject, how they (we) grapple with the limits of how close we can get to another person.

Quite serendipitously, I watched Todd Field's Tár around the same time I was finishing "Biography of X." While Lacey's novel contains many pictures of the elusive X, I must admit that I have been imagining her more like Cate Blanchett's Lyda Tár. But that is beside the point. There is this moment in the movie, after we have seen Tár command several audiences almost in thrall of her own self-mythology, where she gets exposed. And not by anything as simple as allegations and accusations, but by her own desires, as she lusts after a new cellist (Olga) and contrives many circumstances to spend time with her and to be liked by her. All of a sudden the mythical Tár appears pathetic, made vulnerable and visible by her own desires. Of course, the paradigm could easily shift: if Olga appears to hold a certain amount of power, it is a conditional one as Tár could very easily ruin her life (as she appears to have done others).

I mention this particular moment, the humiliation inherent to our desires, our ability to be hurt and to hurt in turn—because the question of what a person is and the narratives we make about ourselves are at the core of "Biography of X." We must remember we are seeing one person's interpretation of a fraught relationship, we will never gaze directly at the life of X or her wife, and even if we did, we would get but a snippet. A snippet is not a whole story, it could never be. Then what is a biography for, mere consolation? Lacey seems to suggest that a biography is a way to keep ghosts alive when we are incapable of letting them go.

[Vartika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few pieces of art are as unanimously disturbing as The Pain Room, a 1979 installation by the mid-20th century iconoclast known as X. Even fewer are the artists—at least in the Western world—who can claim to match the controversies she stirred up, or the enigma surrounding her true identity and origins: An altogether unknown X arrived on the New York art scene in 1972 and was honored with a MoMA retrospective just about two decades later, collaborating with the likes of David Bowie, Kathy Acker, and Tom Waits along the way. As part of her dizzying, trailblazing career, she inhabited at least a dozen nom de plumes—amongst them the socialite Dorothy Eagle; the novelists Clyde Hill, Cindy O, and Cassandra Edwards; the music producer Bee Converse; the feminist publisher Martina Riggio; and the artists Věra and Yarrow Hall—but disavowed being perceived or understood as anything but the single letter that she appropriated as her pseudonym. Now, years after her death in 1996, Biography of X gathers insights from her archives and testimonies from close friends to paint a picture of who X really was, finally unraveling the mystery of her real name and birthplace, and attempting to reach into the depths of her complex relationship with people, performance, and contemporary America. And might I add: it is too, like the incredibly elusive artist at its center, a dazzling work of pure fiction.

This counterfactual “biography” is, in fact, the new novel by the acclaimed writer Catherine Lacey, who is known for her works investigating the fungible nature of identity and its attendant anxieties. Her previous book, Pew , followed a character of similarly indeterminate origins who doesn’t fit into any identifiable race or gender, exploring the question of what happens to a person when nobody can agree upon who or what they may be. Biography of X—which the author professes to have written concurrently with Pew—seems to flip this line of inquiry on its head: If a person refuses to have a unified or singular idea of themselves perpetuated, refuses to be seen a certain way, what then happens to the people around them?

Lacey addresses this question brilliantly by presenting her book as...

For the full review, head over to The Rumpus !

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should’ve DNFd it. 400+ pages of a woman trying to make sense of who her wife was. I would’ve been far more interested in the actual alternate reality the book is set in. Instead, this alternate reality is nothing more than a prop. Kind of made me mad about it.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, pay no attention to the number of stars. I felt I had to give the book some rating but in this case it means nothing because I honestly don't know what to make of Biography of X. A “magpie novel,” Dwight Garner called it in his review for the NY Times. Exactly right, but it misses a great deal. I feel an urge to read every other review the book's gotten to find out what I'm missing, what went over my head or sped by me because I was listening to the audio version instead of reading the hardcover. Also I gather there are materials in the physical book -- photos, etc. -- that aren’t accessible in the audio version.

So, a “magpie novel.” Filled with pieces of this and that, events and people real and invented, other things that are not-quite-real but not entirely fabricated either. Jumping from one time to another, one setting to another -- now south, now west. It’s recognizably the United States but it's not the one we inhabit. Or rather, it is the one we inhabit, but its (our) cultural fissures have magnified and taken to their extremes. In this universe the Union violently fractured in 1945, creating separate Northern, Western, and Southern territories. The North became increasingly Progressive. The South, on the other hand, retreated to a Conservativism that is angry, repressive, misogynistic -- essentially, a backward, theocratic country that has the feel of an American version of the Islamic Republic. There was, for a time, a physical wall separating North and South. The wall has come down by the time the Biography is being researched, but the relationship between the two is marked by suspicion, scorn, and periodic acts of violence. It's a country that's now one thing, now another. The reader can make no assumptions about what events might have preceded the rupture of 1945.

And then there’s the eponymous X who is the subject of this “biography,” which is written by her widow. X was (she’s deceased in the book’s Present) an artist who worked in virtually every imaginable medium: fiction, music, film, painting, performance art — especially performance art. She collaborated with, argued with, interacted with, walked the stage with David Bowie (X, it seems, wrote the lyrics for “Heroes”), Susan Sontag, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Connie Converse, Renata Adler, Christopher Walken (who does a turn as Blanche DuBois in a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” — don’t ask: it’s too much to explain here), and others too numerous to mention. Some names I recognized, others I didn’t.

It’s all still percolating in my thoughts, this kaleidoscopic novel. I have impressions, half-formed thoughts. X who assumes different names and identities with dizzying frequency. She’s Zelig, the Talented Mr. Ripley, a shapeshifter present at every art exhibit, on every stage, her name in every magazine of note. I kept waiting for the reveal: Who is the Person at the center of this crowd, the individual who is truly X?

‘Who is truly X.’ These very words evoke the problem: X is a mathematical variable, a numerical value that might be anything, depending on the context. There is no Essential, Ideal X that resides at the center of all imaginable X’s, no (as Hillary Kelly had it in The Atlantic) "unified theory of the self". Her widow, C.M., researching the biography, travels the country trying to uncover her wife’s life, her past, reads every article written about her, every scrap of paper X left behind, interviews everyone who interacted with her… She discovers again and again: X is not who C.M. thought she knew. And for me virtually everything X says, everything she does, seems performative. She aims a gun at her wife. Was the threat real, or was she trying to "say"something with the gesture? She whispers pornography to a dying man in a hospital bed, creates an exhibition called The Pain Room. Are we meant to take any of this seriously? And if we choose to do so, what does that mean about X herself? About the world she inhabits?

For me, X was mostly insufferable. She's a bully, capable of the worst kind of emotional cruelty. Seemingly hollow at the core. But perhaps I dismiss her too readily, given what she went through when she was younger.

And the widow herself, C.M. — a deeply unreliable narrator, it seemed to me. Betrayed by emotion and imperfect knowledge of her subject, her wife. She’s impulsive, maddeningly willing to be bullied, to take whatever shit X gives her. She remarks that she had no friends in college and in fact we don’t encounter anyone in the book who is her friend, only people with connections to X. But C.M.’s a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, braver than we give her credit for, than she credits herself. In fact, I frequently felt that the book was as much her biography as it was X’s.

So is “Biography of X” — note, there’s no “The” — about the impossibility of knowing another person? A long meditation on how the very notion of Self, of Who We Really Are, is a fiction?

Is the book a send-up of smug New York intellectuals and artists? (Another price of listening rather than reading: I couldn't jot things down while driving. Some of the “sources” C.M. cites are funny, parodies of academic articles with multisyllabic, jargon-filled titles.) An evisceration of the darker tendencies of today’s political/cultural Right? Satire? Parody? Send-up?

Or is the book, at its heart, a puzzle? in an interview with The Guardian, Catherine Lacey said, ”I liked the idea of writing a fake biography and the biographies I like best are usually written by someone with some kind of compromised perspective. I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America where this female artist could exist and this couple could exist without having to justify themselves, I just need a totally different America.”

Well, maybe not "totally" different.

FWIW: If anyone's curious, I encourage them to read Hillary Kelly's insightful article about the book and its author. It comes as close to capturing the spirit of "Biography of X" of any review I've read. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

Postscript: Cassandra Campbell’s narration is masterful. As an added plus, her voice sounds to me at times a lot like Terry Gross’s, so listening to "Biography of X" was like having Ms Gross read to me. Not a bad companion for the road.)

Postscript 2: Having now read several articles and reviews of “Biography” I have to say that I wish I had read the book instead of listening to it. In saying this I don’t mean to take away anything I said in praise of Ms Campbell’s performance. Rather, it appears that the printed edition has many, many features the audio version doesn’t and couldn’t: photos, timelines, typographic elements, notes, etc. Reading it would have been a completely different experience.

[mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Format: audiobook ~ Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Content: 3.5 stars ~ Narration: 5 stars
Complete audiobook review

C.M. Lucca is writing a biography of X, a woman without history, her late wife. The more she researches her life, the more she realizes she didn’t know her. What began as an attempt to correct an existing biography by Theodore Smith slowly became an obsession for CM to find out about the history of her wife and who she was.

The novel is heavily quoted from various books, articles, journals, and interview transcripts, therefore, it reads like an actual nonfiction biography. The author also mentions many people, places, and works from the real world. Some of them are well known.

Events are set in some alternative history, where, at some point, the US was divided into Southern and Northern Territory. Southern Territory is under a strict theocracy, and the regime sometimes resembles former communist ones, while the Northern part is more liberal.

Overall, Biography of X is an interesting novel, and it is, without a doubt, a very ambitious piece of work. I can appreciate that. On the other hand, it is pretty long. The writing can get very dry because of all the facts, data, and quotations. Therefore, the reader could lose interest. Even though Biography of X is an impressive work, it can lose its original meaning because of length and style. Also, it is definitely not a lightweight read.

For most literary fiction, I like to read book or ebook, but this novel is one of those when I’m really glad I had an audio format of the book. I’m not sure I would finish it otherwise, or it would take me a lot of time to read it. I think the narrator did a wonderful job here and read the book the best way anyone could.

This was my first Catherine Lacey novel, and I will keep reading her other works.

Thanks to Recorded Books for the ALC and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5
I absolutely loved this fake biography of an imaginary shape-shifting artist called X. The way Lacey plays with fact and fiction, truth, and identity is very well done. Another interesting aspect is the relationship between X and CM, which (in my opinion) isn’t a very healthy one, with X being narcissistic, dominant and manipulative, and CM more or less accepting it . Still, there’s also love. When X dies CM griefs and mourns and after some time starts writing X’s biography, discovering things she perhaps rather would not have known.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time takes those sensations away and without them the story seems simpler and we hold that simplicity up and call it clarity.

The titular X at the core of this legion, if not simply protean. She is Acker, Sontag and Patti Smith on any given page. Citations are used as prosthetics in an alternate world where things cling to the reader in being both similar and psychotic. Chronic City and Dhalgren both attempt something similar, but in my opinion this is better, but yet I linger, perhaps unsatisfied.

I would have loved this if:

A)I had been 30 when I read it.
B) It had been 75 pages leaner.

I found it a Citizen Kane saga for the sake of the spouse left behind, one firmly in the NYC art world of the 1970s and 80s. Flesh out the spasms, give us more about the massacres of artists. Perfectly logical target for theocratic secessionists, right?

I did appreciate the New Mexican reveal. The last meta installation which I can’t describe for spoiling the affair. There was plenty here for me to hate but I felt myself sufficiently buoyed by the spurious citations and source material to care. Yeah I hated Rushdie remixing rock history as well.