Biography of X
Catherine lacey.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published March 21, 2023
About the author
Ratings & Reviews
What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review
Friends & Following
Community reviews.
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 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."
"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."
"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.”
Join the discussion
Can't find what you're looking for.
Advertisement
Supported by
‘Biography of X’ Rewrites a Life Story and an American Century
Catherine Lacey’s new novel follows a polarizing artist through a fractured country.
- Share full article
By Dwight Garner
- Apple Books
- Barnes and Noble
- Books-A-Million
- Bookshop.org
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
BIOGRAPHY OF X, by Catherine Lacey
The narrator of “Biography of X,” the new Catherine Lacey novel, is a journalist named C.M. Lucca who worked for a Village Voice-like newspaper in New York City during the 1980s. C.M. has a cool tone and a lonely intelligence; she’s a solitary spirit. Her voice is clear but worn, like beach glass. There’s some early Renata Adler in it, and some Janet Malcolm.
C.M. was married, when young, to a sculptor named Henry. “Never love an artist,” Patricia Highsmith reports being told. “When it comes time for them to work, they’ll look at you as though they didn’t know you, and kick you out into the cold.” Henry never kicked C.M. into the cold, literally or metaphorically. But when C.M. leaves him and marries X — a polarizing, multi-hyphenate female performance artist — the heartbreak and indignities mount.
C.M.’s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined. “Biography of X” reimagines the American century while tapping into our evergreen fascination with the downtown art world between 1970 and 1995. It’s a hard book to get a handle on.
Let’s begin by calling it a novel about warring biographies. X did not want a biography written after her death, but it was inevitable one would appear. She was almost comically dexterous and plugged in, a Zelig-like combination of Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Edie Sedgwick, Laurie Anderson and Nan Goldin, most of whom appear in this book.
X had a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; she wrote seminal novels under various pseudonyms; one of her scripts was filmed by Wim Wenders; she produced records for Tom Waits and David Bowie (and wrote the lyrics to “Heroes”). She discovered and recorded a singer who resembles Karen Dalton. She corresponded with Denis Johnson and was photographed by Annie Leibovitz; she crashed Andy Warhol’s parties and spurned Warren Beatty’s advances. She was everything everywhere all at once. She would never use a door if a window were available.
By late 1996, X is dead. The biography that emerges a year later, by a man named Theodore Smith, infuriates C.M. It’s lightweight and literal, and it’s a joy to watch C.M. attack it. She calls it “radiant with inanity.” She says it reads as if Smith “has mixed up a palette of pastels and given himself permission to brighten a Rembrandt.” She notes that he gets crucial facts wrong.
This is a magpie novel, one that borrows snatches of text, that tinkers with reputations, that moves historical figures around in time. When C.M. writes that Smith’s biography is “page by page, line by line, without interruption, worthless,” some readers will recognize these words, altered just slightly, from Adler’s 1980 takedown, in The New York Review of Books , of Pauline Kael. I’m on the Kael side of this divide, and this repurposing, linking Kael with a hack biographer, rubbed me the wrong way, but that’s life, and it’s nit-picking, and it’s a whole other freeway.
C.M. sets out, in her grief, to report her own biography, a project she refers to as “a wrong turn taken and followed.” Her reporting takes her out into an America that is recognizable, but barely. Like Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” this is a mighty work of counterfactual history.
There is room here only to sketch the outlines of the world that Lacey convincingly projects onto the page. The country was divided, in the “Great Disunion of 1945,” into Northern and Southern Territories, and a wall was constructed between them. The South has become a tyrannical theocracy: Women wear long dresses, the radio plays only church hymns. Lacey employs photographs to ghostly, Sebaldian effect. One image is a satellite photograph of America at night, in which the Southern Territory is completely dark; it’s like looking at a nighttime image of North and South Korea. Lacey spoons out the horror:
On that autumn day in 1945, the quiet orderliness began. Phone lines were snipped. Radio stations were shut down — some by violence and executions, others by willing consent. Local newspaper production ceased. Electricity and running water were rationed in the small number of homes that had any to begin with. Sunday church attendance became mandatory. Libraries were purged of unlawful texts. Schoolhouses were abandoned — all education took place in churches now. Armed guards stood attention at the few places where it was possible to cross the border; snipers were stationed along the rest of the wall. No one was allowed in or out, and those who dared to defy these orders were shot dead.
Lacey, whose previous novels include “ Nobody Is Ever Missing ” and “ The Answers ,” has long been interested in characters who grew up in religion-deranged families or were otherwise off the grid. We learn that X grew up in the Southern Territory — born Caroline Luanna Walker, in 1945 — and that she was a rare escapee.
Many of the almost throwaway details in “Biography of X” could spawn novels of their own. The anarchist Emma Goldman became F.D.R.’s chief of staff. The Vietnam War never happened. There has been a Bernie Sanders presidency. Kathy Boudin, of the Weather Underground, was among the dissidents who escaped with X from the South.
There’s much more. In 1943, a mob from the South stormed an art opening and killed Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Calder. The poet Frank O’Hara, on the other hand, gets to live. In this book he was only injured, not killed, when hit by a Jeep on Fire Island. By the time C.M. commences her reporting, the wall has fallen and the two sides (there is also a Western Territory) are attempting a difficult reconciliation.
There’s more enhancing going on at the bottom of the pages. Many of this book’s facts arrive with footnotes, citing old and imagined articles and interviews from a roll call of sophisticated writers and critics (Merve Emre, Naomi Fry, Durga Chew-Bose, Hermione Hoby, Michelle Dean), some of whom would have been toddlers or not yet born at the time of their writing. Lacey also shoehorns a funny lament about health insurance into her endnotes.
By its second half, “Biography of X” has begun to drag somewhat. We follow C.M. on interview after interview, and the form is too conventional; all that’s missing is a Peter Coyote voice-over. Some of X’s pretentiousness — she is given to statements like “To be rebellious and to distrust rebellion is the plight of the tragic artist” — bleeds over into the book itself.
But you will already be locked in. This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.
BIOGRAPHY OF X | By Catherine Lacey | Illustrated | 394 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.” More about Dwight Garner
Explore More in Books
Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries: In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him .
Jeff VanderMeer’s Strangest Novel Yet: In an interview with The Times , the author — known for his blockbuster Southern Reach series — talked about his eerie new installment, “Absolution.”
Discovering a New Bram Stoker Story: The work by the author of “Dracula,” previously unknown to scholars, was found by a fan who was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland.
The Book Review Podcast: Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .
- Member Login
- Library Patron Login
- Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim
Summary and Reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Biography of X
- BookBrowse Review:
- Critics' Consensus:
- Readers' Rating:
- First Published:
- Mar 21, 2023, 416 pages
- Mar 2024, 416 pages
- Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
- 1980s & '90s
- Dealing with Loss
- Physical & Mental Differences
- Music and the Arts
- Publication Information
- Write a Review
- Buy This Book
About This Book
- Book Club Questions
Book Summary
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.
The publisher was unable to provide an excerpt for this book.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
- In a Guardian review, Marcel Theroux called Biography of X "a lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book." Discuss the structure of Biography of X . How does Lacey employ methods typically used in nonfiction? Why do you think she choose to approach her subject in this way? What's the effect of doing so?
- What did you think of CM? What do you think attracted her to X initially? Describe her relationship with X. Do you think their relationship works? Explain your answer.
- What's the effect of having images interspersed throughout the book? Did they enhance your understanding of the events described? If so, how? Were there other images that you would have liked to see? What were they?
- Maureen Corrigan described Biography of X as "a...
- "Beyond the Book" articles
- Free books to read and review (US only)
- Find books by time period, setting & theme
- Read-alike suggestions by book and author
- Book club discussions
- and much more!
- Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
- More about membership!
Media Reviews
Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.
As a series of stories about an eccentric and bizarre person, Biography of X has plenty of moments of brilliance. The central premise that intrigued me was the question suggested by CM's quest: How well do we really know those we love, those we've chosen to spend our lives with? But CM's situation is so hyper-specific, her wife so willfully, intentionally unknowable, a literal master of disguise, that it lacks some of the universal appeal that might have otherwise invited readers to reflect on their own relationships. What holds the novel together is suspense. As CM finds out more about her wife, it becomes clear that X had a history of using and manipulating people, and even the occasional act of violence... continued
Full Review (741 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts ).
Write your own review!
Beyond the Book
Emma goldman.
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
Read-Alikes
- Genres & Themes
If you liked Biography of X, try these:
Anita de Monte Laughs Last
by Xochitl Gonzalez
Published 2024
About this book
More by this author
New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
Published 2020
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties .
Books with similar themes
Members Recommend
Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth
Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.
Who Said...
A library is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Solve this clue:
H I O the G
and be entered to win..
- Craft and Criticism
- Fiction and Poetry
- News and Culture
- Lit Hub Radio
- Reading Lists
- Literary Criticism
- Craft and Advice
- In Conversation
- On Translation
- Short Story
- From the Novel
- Bookstores and Libraries
- Film and TV
- Art and Photography
- Freeman’s
- The Virtual Book Channel
- The Lit Hub Podcast
- The Critic and Her Publics
- Fiction/Non/Fiction
- I’m a Writer But
- Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
- Write-minded
- First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
- Behind the Mic
- Lit Century
- Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
- Beyond the Page
- The Cosmic Library
- Emergence Magazine
- The History of Literature
- The Best of the Decade
- Best Reviewed Books
- BookMarks Daily Giveaway
- The Daily Thrill
- CrimeReads Daily Giveaway
Biography of X
Catherine lacey.
- Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain—and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk. With all the recent attacks, of course, security had tightened everywhere, and you had to have permission or an invitation to enter any building, and I never had such things, as I was no one in particular, uncalled for. One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them—the one person or the half person—but I never saw the one and I never saw the half, no matter how much I looked and waited, patiently, so patiently, and after some time I wondered if I could not find them because I was one of them, either the one or the half.
One evening, still alive at Penn Station to catch an upstate train, I asked a serious-looking man if he had the time. He had the time, he said, but not the place, as he’d been exiled from Istanbul years earlier but never had the nerve to change his watch, and looking into this stranger’s face I saw my own eyes staring back at me, as I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment. We parted immediately, but I have never forgotten him.
It wasn’t a will to live that kept me alive then, but rather a curiosity about who else might come forward with a story about my wife. Who else might call to tell me something almost unfathomable? 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 in with her.
Or maybe what kept me alive was all the secretarial work I had to do, as I’d become X’s secretary by necessity—she kept firing the others. I sometimes found a strange energy to shuffle through her mail in the middle of the night—signing contracts I barely understood, reviewing the amendments made “in the event of the artist’s death,” filing away royalty statements in the manner that X had instructed, and shredding the aggravating amount of interview requests addressed to me, the widow. The Brennan Foundation had invited me to come receive the Lifetime Achievement Award on X’s behalf, not knowing that she’d planned to boycott the ceremony in resentment for how long it had taken them to recognize her. There was also an appeal from a museum that had been eagerly anticipating X’s contractual obligation to make one of her rare public appearances at the opening of her retrospective that spring; by overnighted letter, they asked whether I, as a representative of whatever was left of her, might fly over to London in her stead? I sent back my regrets— I am currently unable to explain how unable I am to undertake such a task.
Tom called, despite a thirty-year silence between us. He’d learned of my wife’s death in the papers and wanted to tell me that he had been thinking about me lately, about our strained and ugly childhood as siblings. His own wife, he said (it was news to me that he’d married), had been given another few months to live, maybe less. His daughter (also news to me) was fourteen now, and there was a part of him that wished she were younger, that believed she might be less damaged by grief if she were protected by the abstraction of early childhood. What an awful thing , he said, to wish my daughter could have known her mother for fewer years.
But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.
When Tom was fourteen and I was seven we lived in a clapboard house on a dead-end with our mother and assorted others, and that summer as we were eating spaghetti in the kitchen Tom stopped moving, and sat there with his mouth open and the noodles unraveling from his poised fork as he stared into nothing, everything gone from his eyes, and he kept staring, unblinking and frozen as our mother shouted, Tom! Stop it! Tom! His eyes kept draining, nothing and nothing, then even less than nothing as Mother shouted for him to stop, to stop this horrible prank, until she finally slapped him hard in the face, which still did not bring him back but freed his fork from his hand and sent it into my lap. That night, slowly, he did start to come back, and later a neurologist was excited to diagnose him with a rare kind of epilepsy, which was treated with a huge pink pill, daily, and for months after my wife died I’d often find myself in some abject, frozen state—sitting naked in a hallway or leaning against a doorframe or standing in the garage, staring at the truck, unsure of how long I’d been there—and I wished someone could have brought me such a pill, something to prevent me from pouring out of myself, at odds with everything.
Tom and I were living in different griefs now—his imminent, mine entrenched—but I wondered if the treatment might still be the same, and I asked him if there was any kind of pill for this, some pill like that pill they used to give him all those years ago, but Tom felt sure there wasn’t, or if there was he didn’t know about it, and anyway, it probably wouldn’t work.
__________________________________
From Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Lacey.
Previous Article
Next article.
- RSS - Posts
Literary Hub
Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature
Sign Up For Our Newsletters
How to Pitch Lit Hub
Advertisers: Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Support Lit Hub - Become A Member
Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter
For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.
Become a member for as low as $5/month
Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.
Catherine Lacey’s Alternate America
Halfway through the novel Biography of X, the X in question — a brilliant performance artist, daring political dissident, and, according to her biographer, kind of a cruel jerk — is described by David Byrne as “incapable of returning friendship.” That appraisal, we’re told, was printed in a previous biography of the artist. Except at the end of this book-within-a-book, behind a sheaf of gradated pages, an endnote gives the real-life attribution to another Talking Heads member, Tina Weymouth — who was describing Byrne.
Catherine Lacey’s new high-concept work is full of these kinds of jokingly layered quotations, many of them ventriloquized by X. Through her speak Susan Sontag, Cy Twombly, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, to name just a few. “I wanted to write a real biography of a real person,” Lacey said in an interview last year, “but a teacher of mine encouraged me not to do that, saying it would ruin my life.” Instead, she has put together a real-seeming account of a fake artist. X takes on dozens of personae: a small-press publisher named Martina Riggio, an underground novelist named Cindy O, an imperious artist known only as Vera. X’s wife, C. M. Lucca, is the biographer — which is to say Lacey’s narrator. Their sour love story is woven through an alternate history in which the southern U.S. pulled off a surprise secession in 1945.
The text begins with C.M., freshly widowed, wandering New York and half-heartedly considering throwing herself from a building. She describes herself as seeming “plain and glamourless”; when X was alive, she felt like both a secretary and a mobster’s wife, required by her celebrity spouse to be a neutral administrative presence. Despite this, or because of it, she was unquestioningly devoted to the artist. C.M. left her husband for X, and when they were near each other she felt a “sort of buzzing sensation … as if I’d just been plugged in.” X, meanwhile, was proud, petty, often cold (especially toward C.M.), and remarkable to almost everyone who knew her from Byrne on down. A childhood friend who cries when she remembers X marvels that “she could write backward just as quick as she could write forward — even in cursive and everything.”
Spite shakes C.M. out of the worst of her grief. A man named Theodore Smith has published a biography of X, and it’s clumsily written, full of errors, and “practically radiant with inanity.” It barely punctures the surface of the artist’s life. C.M. sets out to write a corrective essay that uncovers her wife’s birthplace and real name, but the project spirals almost immediately. “I did not know that by beginning this research I had doomed myself in a thousand ways,” C.M. writes, and the gradual reveal of what, exactly, could be so horrifying is this narrative’s main thread.
X, C.M. is shocked to learn, was born in the Southern Territory, the portion of the U.S. that splintered off after a far-right Christian overthrow. Until the Reunification in 1996, it was almost impossible for any Southern citizen to escape to the Northern or Western Territories, and the few who did were tracked down to be brought back or killed. X was an exception. It’s a dizzying reorientation for a novel that initially seems to be about the art world. Lacey’s alternate America is dense with detail, and we learn about not only the factors leading to the secession (Emma Goldman’s appointment to FDR’s cabinet, for one) but also the specifics of, say, a spate of atonic seizures experienced by dozens of women in one Alabama county after the Reunification. In the North, same-sex marriage has long been legal and prisons are nearly abolished.
The Southern Territory and X’s perilous escape are a way for Lacey — who grew up religious in Mississippi — to get at the question of what happens when someone who was raised to believe they live in a world with a god absconds from that world. For all the detail, though, parts of her alternate America feel underrealized. The pages devoted to the Black citizens of the Southern Territory, who face a virulently racist society, pass quickly with a nod to the networks of “unfathomable charity” that sustained them. Surely a novel about a South that seceded in 1945 might lend more of its plot to Black communities, and surely the North at that time would have its own intense racism. But those ideas aren’t given much narrative priority here.
The side-stepping continues later. Describing X’s support of a collective of Black artists, C.M. admits she is “far from an expert” on the group, and she directs “those looking for further reading” to Black Futures, edited by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew. C.M. says the book was published in 1998; really, it came out in 2020 and is about Black creators more broadly. The gesture seems gracious but nervous, as if Lacey would rather leave that particular tangle of ideas to other authors.
It’s not the only place in the novel’s web of citations, names, and quotations that has a constraining effect. After X makes her way to the Northern Territory, she begins a grand tour of 1960s and ’70s America and Europe, exercising a subtle influence over familiar cultural products like an artsy, self-actualized Forrest Gump. She hangs out with Tom Waits at Electric Lady Studios. She goes to West Berlin with David Bowie. She moves to Italy and collaborates with feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and she stalks Sophie Calle for an art piece. In the chapters in which X lives with the cult-favorite songwriter Connie Converse, Lacey inches closest to straightforward biography. At times, it’s exhilarating, but the warped cultural history doesn’t consistently enhance the plot; at its worst, it feels like a distraction, and the point of it all can be hard to grasp. As X becomes famous for her writing and art, she is interviewed by journalists, many of them presented anachronistically and some imbued with a political life they might not actually have had. The culture writer Durga Chew-Bose, for instance, reports an article about Southern- Territory refugees in 1999 — when she would have been 13 in reality. Is this a joke? A wink? Flattery? Are we even supposed to notice Chew-Bose’s misplacement in time, or any of the misattributed quotes sprinkled throughout, unless we happen to flip back to those endnotes? It’s unclear.
The chapters in which C.M. makes a reporting trip to the Southern Territory are virtuosic; the material that follows a shift to the New York City art and publishing- worlds, with the egos and press cycles and shallow gallerists and mousy editors, doesn’t always gel in the same way. These sections are impressively populated, but, like a real biography, they can start to feel dutiful. Maybe all the actual people whose lives intersect with X’s are meant to give us recurring jolts of reality, and maybe Lacey’s use of them mimics the artist’s identity borrowing. Or perhaps the many prodigies who surround her, the Byrnes and Sontags, are there to convince us of X’s genius — a solution to that old problem of how an ordinary writer can persuasively portray a brilliant thinker within their novel.
But Lacey herself is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them. Under all the narrative scaffolding, the moments in Biography of X that land most reliably have to do with long-suffering C.M., whose mourning — she is “romanced by grief,” she says — turns to horror as she unpeels her wife’s layers of secrecy and manipulation. The quandary C.M. faces is something Lacey’s been puzzling over from the beginning of her career, and in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding. In her 2018 story “Violations,” a man tries to parse a short story by his ex-wife that may be about him, and The Answers (2006) follows a woman hired to participate in a simulated relationship with a super-celebrity. Here, C.M. has consented to submit to the experiment of love, but she’s only half-informed; much has been concealed from her. The same could be said of us.
More From This Series
- Alan Hollinghurst Tries to Atone
- Has Olga Tokarczuk Been Struck by the Nobel Curse?
- Hot Commodity
- vulture homepage lede
- vulture section lede
- book review
- biography of x
- catherine lacey
- new york magazine
Most Viewed Stories
- Cinematrix No. 215: October 27, 2024
- How Escape at Dannemora Actors Compare to Their Real-life Counterparts
- The 28 Best Horror Movies to Watch on Every Streaming Service
- Venom: The Last Dance ’s Post-Credits Scene Makes Closure Knull and Void
- The 12 Best Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Weekend
- A Guide to the Many Lawsuits Against Diddy
- What I Saw Inside the Love Is Blind Control Room
Most Popular
What is your email.
This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.
Sign In To Continue Reading
Create your free account.
Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:
- Lower case letters (a-z)
- Upper case letters (A-Z)
- Numbers (0-9)
- Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)
As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.
- ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN
BIOGRAPHY OF X
by Catherine Lacey ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph.
A widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife, a mercurial artist who adopted many personas, in this audacious intellectual history of an alternate America.
C.M. Lucca is a former crime reporter who resents the inaccuracies printed in the only biography of her wife, X, a famous performance artist who has recently died. Determined to correct the record, C.M. begins reporting on her wife's mysterious origins and career as a shape-shifting provocateur. "When she died, all I knew about X's distant past was that she'd arrived in New York in 1972. She never told me her birthdate or birthplace, and she never adequately explained why these things were kept secret," C.M. explains. Was X really born in the Southern Territory, a theocratic dictatorship separated from the Northern Territory for 50 years by a wall? If so, how did she escape? And how did her childhood shape the artist she was to become? C.M.'s reporting trips put her face to face with former spouses, lovers, revolutionaries, terrorists, friends, and hangers-on, but a clear picture of X remains elusive. Instead, Lacey creates a portrait of a biographer haunted by grief, struggling to untangle love from abjection, fiction from reality, art from life. "At first I had rules for researching X's life and I followed them...I have broken every rule I ever set for myself," C.M. mourns midway through the biography. "And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life." Throughout C.M.'s manuscript, Lacey includes footnotes and citations from imagined articles by real contemporary writers whose names readers well versed in cultural criticism will recognize. The effect is pleasurable and disorienting, like reading a book in a dream or surfacing a memory that's gone fuzzy around the edges. As C.M. circles closer to the truth about X, her memories about X's violent tendencies become clearer and sharper. "I did not know her, and I do not know who she was," C.M. admits at last. "I do not know anything of that woman, though I did love her—on that point I refuse to concede—and it was a maddening love and it was a ruthless love and it refuses to be contained."
Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60617-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
Share your opinion of this book
More by Catherine Lacey
BOOK REVIEW
by Catherine Lacey
More About This Book
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
New York Times Bestseller
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
More by Kristin Hannah
by Kristin Hannah
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION
More by Sally Rooney
by Sally Rooney
- Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
- News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
- Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
- Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
- Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
- More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
- About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Popular in this Genre
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
Please select an existing bookshelf
Create a new bookshelf.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
Please sign up to continue.
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Almost there!
- Industry Professional
Welcome Back!
Sign in using your Kirkus account
Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.
Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )
If You’ve Purchased Author Services
Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.
- NONFICTION BOOKS
- BEST NONFICTION 2023
- BEST NONFICTION 2024
- Historical Biographies
- The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
- Philosophical Biographies
- World War 2
- World History
- American History
- British History
- Chinese History
- Russian History
- Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
- Medieval History (500-1400)
- Military History
- Art History
- Travel Books
- Ancient Philosophy
- Contemporary Philosophy
- Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- Great Philosophers
- Social & Political Philosophy
- Classical Studies
- New Science Books
- Maths & Statistics
- Popular Science
- Physics Books
- Climate Change Books
- How to Write
- English Grammar & Usage
- Books for Learning Languages
- Linguistics
- Political Ideologies
- Foreign Policy & International Relations
- American Politics
- British Politics
- Religious History Books
- Mental Health
- Neuroscience
- Child Psychology
- Film & Cinema
- Opera & Classical Music
- Behavioural Economics
- Development Economics
- Economic History
- Financial Crisis
- World Economies
- Investing Books
- Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
- Data Science Books
- Sex & Sexuality
- Death & Dying
- Food & Cooking
- Sports, Games & Hobbies
- FICTION BOOKS
- BEST NOVELS 2024
- BEST FICTION 2023
- New Literary Fiction
- World Literature
- Literary Criticism
- Literary Figures
- Classic English Literature
- American Literature
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Fairy Tales & Mythology
- Historical Fiction
- Crime Novels
- Science Fiction
- Short Stories
- South Africa
- United States
- Arctic & Antarctica
- Afghanistan
- Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
- Netherlands
- Kids Recommend Books for Kids
- High School Teachers Recommendations
- Prizewinning Kids' Books
- Popular Series Books for Kids
- BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
- Books for Toddlers and Babies
- Books for Preschoolers
- Books for Kids Age 6-8
- Books for Kids Age 9-12
- Books for Teens and Young Adults
- THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
- BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2024
- BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2024
- Best Audiobooks for Kids
- Environment
- Best Books for Teens of 2024
- Best Kids' Books of 2024
- Mystery & Crime
- Travel Writing
- New History Books
- New Historical Fiction
- New Biography
- New Memoirs
- New World Literature
- New Economics Books
- New Climate Books
- New Math Books
- New Philosophy Books
- New Psychology Books
- New Physics Books
- THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
- Actors Read Great Books
- Books Narrated by Their Authors
- Best Audiobook Thrillers
- Best History Audiobooks
- Nobel Literature Prize
- Booker Prize (fiction)
- Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
- Financial Times (nonfiction)
- Wolfson Prize (history)
- Royal Society (science)
- NBCC Awards (biography & memoir)
- Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
- Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
- Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
- The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
- Audie Awards (audiobooks)
- Wilbur Smith Prize (adventure)
The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction
Biography of x, by catherine lacey, recommendations from our site.
“The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X , which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. It’s the book novelists are pressing into other novelists’ hands.” Read more...
Notable Novels of Summer 2023
Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor
The book, according to the author
The counterfactual aspect of the book came out of a need to create a world in which two women could be married without it being an issue, and in order to create a world in which a woman could be powerfully creative during the 20th century in America without having to first account or apologize for her gender. Before I wrote anything I had this sense of X, a brazenly creative yet deeply flawed woman, and the woman who loved her and their relationship. I could see and feel it so vividly, but I didn’t want the plot to be encumbered by the sexism of the 20th century. So I tried to envision a different, but still deeply flawed, world where they could create and love and suffer on their own terms—more or less.
The Best Counterfactual Novels recommended by Catherine Lacey
Other books by Catherine Lacey
Pew by catherine lacey, our most recommended books, the shining by stephen king, the road by cormac mccarthy, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, grace williams says it loud by emma henderson.
Support Five Books
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .
We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.
This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.
Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.
© Five Books 2024
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
In Catherine Lacey's new genre-bending novel, Biography of X, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist realizes her spouse — a fierce and narcissistic artist — was not who she believed.
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 ...
Biography of X is a 2023 alternative history novel by American writer Catherine Lacey published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel purports to be a 2005 biography of the musician and artist X, written by her widow, C.M. Lucca, as a response to an unauthorized and apparently inaccurate biography of her wife written after her death.
The narrator of “Biography of X,” the new Catherine Lacey novel, is a journalist named C.M. Lucca who worked for a Village Voice-like newspaper in New York City during the 1980s. C.M. has a...
Book Summary. 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 ...
Biography of X. Catherine Lacey. The following is from Catherine Lacey's Biography of X. Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Halfway through the novel Biography of X, the X in question — a brilliant performance artist, daring political dissident, and, according to her biographer, kind of a...
C.M. Lucca is a former crime reporter who resents the inaccuracies printed in the only biography of her wife, X, a famous performance artist who has recently died. Determined to correct the record, C.M. begins reporting on her wife's mysterious origins and career as a shape-shifting provocateur.
“The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X, which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary.
A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she 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. At ...