Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Biography of X Reviews

• 
  Meike

  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.
• 
  Beata

  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.*
• 
  Barry Pierce

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

  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!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Alwynne

  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

  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
• 
  Sarah Schulman

  The literary version of Tar.
• 
  fatma

  "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!
• 
  Paul Fulcher

  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.
• 
  Ari Levine

  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).
• 
  Kate O'Shea

  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.
• 
  michelle (travelingbooknerds)

  [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

  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.
• 
  mel

  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.
• 
  B. H.

  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

  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 !
• 
  Chris

  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.
• 
  Royce

  Catherine Lacey’s latest novel takes the reader on a wild adventurous ride through an America divided into territories, separated by walls, ideologies, race, and of course, GUNS. In Lacey’s America, there is the Northern, Southern, and Western regions. At the time the biography is written, the 1990´s, the wall between the Northern and the Southern regions has been destroyed and the two regions are attempting to reunify. However, visas are still required when traveling from the Northern to the Southern territory. The Southern Territory is a place where “guardians of morality, Southern citizens….citizen-informants much like those who worked with the Stasi in East Germany…rooted out and reported anyone suspected of sinful or unpatriotic behavior.” In a nutshell, it’s a frightening place.
  
  In this world Ms. Lacey has invented, based on so much of what is actually happening in the world, and more specifically, in states like Texas and Florida, one shudders as one reads. At first, it seems far-fetched, yet I realize we are only one small step away from this horrible shit show happening in real life. Like Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Catherine Lacey’s, “Biography of X,” paints a dark picture of a world fraught with division and hate.
  
  The Biography of X, narrated (unreliably? - although she provides endless sources and endnotes) by her widow, C.M.Lucca, is her (Lucca’s) attempt to ascertain who X was. Lucca also decides to write a biography of X because the one written is full of lies, (in her opinion). Thus, Lucca, a former journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning one at that, seeks to find the truth about X. She travels to the Western and the Southern territories of America, researching and talking with family, friends, and acquaintances of X. Her research leads her to Italy, where she discovers more about her widow. In the end, she finds she never really knew her wife.
  
  This novel is one of the most creative and brilliant books I have ever read. The amount of research, notes, illustrations, and simply, the ideas are fantastic. However bleak the story feels, there are glimmers of hope and even joy, reading this remarkable novel. I am enamored by the storytelling and the brilliant creativity of Catherine Lacey’s writing…gobsmacked!
  
  Although I highly recommend this book for many reasons as described above, like the writing, the unique way in which the story is told, I know this will not appeal to all readers.
  
  One final question lingers in my mind. Who was Emma Goldman? Through some internet searches, I learned she was a political philosopher and an anarchist during the early part of the 20th century. Along with Margaret Sanger, she openly disseminated information and access to birth control . On her gravestone is her quote, “liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty.” Possessing that knowledge, it’s entertaining to read that Catherine Lacey makes Emma Goldman the Chief of Staff in FDR’s administration.
  
  Spoiler alert : Bernie Sanders was the President of the U.S. in the 1990’s;)
• 
  Joachim Stoop

  Original, fascinating but also a bit too long
• 
  Marc Nash

  Video review
  https://youtu.be/cQnYbmfC02c
• 
  Blair

  Was SO looking forward to this, but I’d gained completely the wrong impression – was expecting metafiction/a mixed media approach/stories within stories, something like
  The Blazing World or
  The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas (or a combination of the two). Instead, it really is just a fictional biography, and the narrator has a style that I found quite stilted and cold. It also completely lost me with the alternate-history stuff, which feels like way too much to fit into the story on top of the narrator’s search for the truth about her wife.
  
  Review copy via Edelweiss.
• 
  nastya ♡

  love this fictionalized biography. dope as hell. let's go lesbians!
• 
  Vincent Scarpa

  “One night shortly after I’d first met X, she told me that when she thought back to people in her life who had abandoned her, it seemed to her they were dead, and when she thought of the people she had abandoned, she sometimes felt she had killed them. I told her this seemed to indicate that she rated her own company rather highly — that to be denied her presence was death itself. She laughed. Maybe so, she said. We were so newly in love, spending one of those endless days in bed, delirious over ourselves. But who would ever abandon you? I asked. Impossible! I had just left my husband to be with X, and my father had left my mother when I was a child, so I thought I knew a thing or two about abandonment. Of course I didn’t. Not really. Not then. Let’s not speak of such things, she said, and this became our agreement. New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands. We rarely spoke about those who had abandoned us or those we had abandoned. They were all dead to us now.”
  
  (The best new book I read in 2022, though it's not out until March of 2023!)
• 
  lisen

  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.
• 
  nicole

  probably the best book i have ever read
• 
  m.

  i wish x was a real person so i could send her death threats on twitter
  
  (a very unserious and self-important book but also very very good. the alternate version of the united states this book is set in is a very idiotic portrayal of the current political crisis in the country, it seems interesting at first glance but falls apart if you stop to think about about it. nethertheless it was very endearing and funny and heartbreaking)
• 
  Jan

  A cleverly constructed story of a widow trying to research and write a biography of her wife, a creative genius, narcissistic creep, and inveterate liar (or at least a concealer of identities). I enjoyed the narrative framework and the alternative history Lacey envisions, in which the US has split into three sections, but felt the book went on for too long.
• 
  Janelle Janson

  EXCELLENT. Review to come.
• 
  Thomas Kendall

  One of the best I've read this year.