This novel has so many layers that it kept me constantly on the edge of my seat not only in terms of the plot and characters, which themselves are compelling, but intellectually. It's not an "easy read and rewards the reader who gives it her full attention. The opening paragraph is masterful, instantly pulling the reader into this remarkable world where what we know, and how we know it, is turned around.... where even the story we're reading turns into another story, where the very author/authority of the story moves. The ending closes all those circles -- or rather, I should say, closes them and we fall through.... it's immensely satisfying. This novel will remain in my mind.

Personally I'm not a fan of brainy meta-fiction because it often is intellectual at the expense of character, story, setting, etc., all of which satisfy our human drive to know "what happens next" and to connect emotionally. "Biography of X" is a rare meta-fictional work that I believe can please all types of committed readers,

The novel deserves to do well in paperback as that pub date approaches.

this was everything i love in a novel, and i cannot wait to dive into interviews with Lacey about how this came about.

such an interesting and unique format, and we’re presented with an alternate history of the US but with real life events and celebrities included - but at the center of the book is really just the question of how well you really know your loved ones and what is worth the price of art.

There is an inherent danger in getting to know your loved ones, a perpetual risk of disappointment. And yet, for X’s wife, it is the only thing that makes sense.
In life, X was conventionally perceived as a sort of artistic genius, a multi-disciplined creative of considerably cultural significance for several decades. X was a fine artist, writer, singer/songwriter. And yet for all her outspokenness and strong opinions, she had managed to remain an enigma.
After her death, a biographer attempted to resolve the puzzle of X by publishing an account of her life. X’s widow, finding that account unacceptable, sets off to write her own story.
That’s the premise of the novel, and it alone would have been enough for a compelling narrative, but the author (showing off because she can, because she literally IS that good) also threw in some serious world building. Specially, she set her novel in an alternate US that had separated in two in 1945 and did not reunite until many decades later. The South had ceded and turned into the exact kind of nightmare one might expect: a backward, insular, oppressive ruinous place. The North progressed at a familiar pace.
X, we learn, was born in the southern territories and managed to get out. Since then, her entire life had been about reinvention, subterfuge, and new skins worn and shed.
Artistically, it made her fascinating. Personally, it made her a complicated mess. And yet, for her wife, she was … everything. A woman worth loving, a puzzle worth unraveling.
So this is the journey of solving the puzzle of X. Because in the end, perhaps people are only who they are as seen by their loved ones.
A mesmerizing read, albeit not an easy one. It’s stunningly written and exceptionally clever in its interweaving of real and imagined, but it’s rather dense and doesn’t have much by the way of conventionally likable characters. More than anything, it’s really interesting. And interesting is often wins over nice. For this reader, anyway. Overall, certainly worth a read and a great introduction to the new (to me) author). Thanks, Netgalley.

This is one of the more strange and bizarre novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read several. I initially received it as a digital ARC, for which I am grateful to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, author Catherine Lacey, and NetGalley. However, I’d forgotten I’d received it and was so intrigued by its premise that I also wound up purchasing a copy upon its publication.

As with many dystopian novels, this book seamlessly blends fact and fiction, frequently referencing actual people and historical events and intertwining them with fictitious characters and circumstances. The novel is brilliantly written and compelling to read but may have been even better had it been just a tad shorter. I found the constant footnote signs and symbols within the text to be distracting, and, unlike another review I read, I wasn’t the least bit interested in reading any of the footnoted material that followed the end of the text.

By the time I finished reading the story itself, I found the subsequent 200 pages of notes and references boring. Aside from the few pages discussing certain real life events and characters and describing how they were used or altered for literary effect, the endless pages of single-lined, fictitious “footnotes” was too much for me; I no longer cared.

The story is cleverly written as a biography of a woman’s deceased wife, who called herself X. Being a former journalist, of a sort, she initially began researching X’s life to disprove much of an already published and wholly unauthorized biography written by another. Ultimately, however, the further the author delved into her wife’s life, the more she came to realize how little of her wife she knew and how much her wife deceived her.

The book spans several decades from the 1960s through the mid 2000s. It takes place in a dystopian form of the United States divided along political and religious lines into three large territories. They’re called, simply enough, The Northern, Southern, and Western Territories. X never disclosed to anyone, including her wife, where she’d been born nor anything of her childhood or family, but through her research the author learns that X was born in and escaped from the Southern Territory. The Southern Territory had seceded from the rest of the country and became a fascist theocracy shortly after the end of World War II. Much like actual East Berlin, Germany, the Southern Territory erected a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and to keep them ignorant. X rebelled against the tyranny and fell in with a group that fought against the system.

Upon her eventual escape from the Southern Territory, X invented an entirely new persona for herself. She continued to reinvent herself multiple times. Throughout the remainder of her life, X used many, varied personas, names, and physical disguises to be a different person to a variety of friends and lovers and the whole of society. Under different guises she became a leader in the fields of art, literature, and music, without ever revealing her true self or origins, not even to her wife. When she eventually publicly acknowledged her various personas and deceptions, she turned her admission into the most spectacular and well known artistic achievement of her lifetime, for which she was greatly lauded and admired.

After X’s sudden death, her mourning widow seeks and eventually finds the real person behind the facades and doesn’t like her very much. The book creates a lot of food for thought, particularly in today’s political climate, and is an excellent choice for a book club to read and discuss.

I LOVED this book. It was as entertaining, thought-provoking, well-done, smart, and exciting as everyone said it was.

This started as an intriguing book and I was really digging it early on. However, I felt like it just did not deliver on the promise by the end and really left me wanting more.

I'm a big fan of Catherine Lacey's work in general and came into this book with high expectations. Lacey is undoubtedly smart, and talented, and this book shows an enormous dedication to craft and structure--it's really unique, ambitious, and overall successful. It's a great read, and I'd recommend it, especially for folks who want a literary dystopian world, more like speculative fiction versus traditional sci-fi. This book is queer, which I really appreciated, but I have to admit I was surprised at the lack of sex on the page, and wondered why that was, especially with the title character's reputation for being a hottie. I did find myself sometimes skimming footnotes/endnotes etc, though I did appreciate the effort in crafting and including it. This isn't my favorite from Lacey, but it's definitely a great read and one that's absolutely worthwhile if the conceit stands out to you.

The serendipity of cultural conversation is always fascinating to me, so landing on Biography of X as the first book in my 2023 awards season reading felt right in the age of Tár and the resurgence of interest in figures like Liebowitz and Didion.

BoX is also a puzzle box of layers of alternate history and cultural critique that I was not aware of coming into the book. Like most revisionist history and fake artist biography, I do think this one struggles a bit under the weight of trying to give the titular X relevance through points of comparison. However, Lacey also repurposes so much criticism, like the work of Cusk and texts like Black Futures, that the text is clear evidence of genius.

While I do not think this book quite sticks all its landings, it is worth reading for the breadth of imagination and effort alone.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Glorious novel about a woman who was everywhere in the New York art world: Author, artist shown in galleries, small book publisher, record producer. All done with different personas, complete with disguises. Her widow is trying to write a book about X, maybe the person in America with the most secrets that are slowly being revealed after her death.

So many interesting threads and ideas. For me, too many threads and ideas.

This is the story of a widow who is mourning the death of her enigmatic artistic wife, who went by the initial X, by trying to learn more about aspects that were kept from her. Using the goal of trying to write a book about her wife's life, she uncovers a history that paints a picture different than the one she knows. And it paints a picture of an artist whose goals, interests, and vision seemed to justify (at least in her estimation) any output she wanted, even at the expense of those around her.

While that is a story done before, I was engaged in that portion of the book. Then there was a twist with the introduction of an alternative history of the US that shaped X but prevented her from speaking about it. In this alternative United States, the north, south, and west split into territories right before WW2 and descended into Christo-fascism. I was engaged in that portion of the book and was both horrified and delighted by some of the twists the author posited could have happened in this other past.

What didn't work for me was the act of connecting the two ideas together. There was too much for me that felt thrown in that didn't add to the understanding of the character or plot, and I am still left questioning some of the ideas bandied about but never resolved. I found the ending disturbing but clever, however the whole didn't work for me.

This is one of the most creative and imaginative novels I have ever read! It is a fictional biography of a fictional character who is probably best described as a Zelig-like character. The premise is the widow of X wants to stop the author of a biography on her life and ends up doing her own investigation into X's life and back-story. In the process, we discover that she went by many different identities and we are unsure what is truth or fiction. The really fun part of the book was her interactions and stories with real life people (such as David Bowie, Ross McElwee (a great documentary filmmaker) and Connie Converse). There are also photos and footnotes with real articles referenced as well as fabricated interviews with "X." I have recommended this book to others because not only is it a really interesting read, it is just so incredibly creative! I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I went into this book with high expectations and I am very glad to say that it met all of them. I'm fully convinced that Catherine Lacey is a genius for the way that she constructed this story and I'll definitely be reading more of her work.

Biography of X is a book within a book. The mysterious artist, X, has died and her widow is writing a biography of her, against X's wishes. What starts as a writing project turns into a full-on investigation into her wife's life and the many secrets she kept while she was alive. All of this is set against an alternative history of America, which has split into Northern, Southern, and Western territories. As C.M. Lucca, the widow, dives deeper into X's life, she begins to question her own memories of and relationship with her wife. What was it truly like to live with the volatile genius that was X?

The genius of this book comes from the incorporation of primary source material that Lucca uncovers during her research. Many of the quotes, events, and ephemera are attributed to real people in our world. Lacey takes these bits and pieces and re-attributes them to X and the people in her orbit, essentially reinterpreting the context of the original. In a way, she is also creating X as an amalgamation of famous people by pulling these quotes together and attributing them to X. In the alternative universe that she has created, so many other people are combined to make a singular X.

I love books with a focus on art, so it's perhaps not a surprise that I loved this one. But unlike other books, I felt we got an excellent deep-dive into the contemporary art scenes (of the 1970s-90s in this fictional world) and the theory behind art. Lacey really pulls back the curtain on the art world and makes use question how much of what we are looking at is truly intentional or BS...in the best way possible.

In addition to art, Lacey makes us question the idea of identity. C.M. Lucca question the identity of her wife that she has always known as she draws back more and more layers. She was given a certain perspective on X, but was that truly who she was? And how is this complicated by all of the different identities X was known to assume in public? Is there really one true identity for everyone or do we all put on different faces for different audiences?

I think some readers could be put-off by the characters in this book; no one is truly likeable, particularly as you get to know more about them. But if you like unlikeable characters, unique storytelling, and/or art, this is definitely one to check out!

Halfway through reading my e-galley of Catherine Lacey’s kaleidoscopic novel, “Biography of X,” I swung by my local bookshop and purchased it in hardback because it was just that good! I didn’t even need to finish the novel to know that I would be re-reading it. (It also doesn’t hurt that the physical copy is gorgeous).

Pick this book up if you enjoy speculative fiction, historical fiction, modern art, or philosophy because Biography of X is a wild combination of all these. The novel is set in an alternate America, one in which the South succeeded from the U.S. in 1945, to create a theocracy not unlike that in Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ and decades later has uneasily rejoined the U.S. The setting was absolutely fascinating – I could have read an entire “history” of this alternative timeline. But the larger-than-life characters, twisting plot, and sharp, imaginative writing were just as exhilarating.

The book opens with the narrator, C.M. Lucca, explaining how she came to research and write a biography of her deceased wife, “X,” an iconoclastic artist, infamous for assuming multiple identities. We follow Lucca’s dark journey through many sensational and convoluted turns as Lucca attempts to pin down the slippery identity of her former lover. This is a book about knowledge and obsession and the collapse of reality and fiction. It’s also a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. If this description piques your curiosity, this creative and intellectually challenging novel might be perfect for you too!

A sincere thank you to FSG and Netgalley for an advanced reader's copy of this book.

After her wife dies and a biography about her wife is published that CM feels is full of inaccuracies and lies, CM sets out to write the real biography of X. But the artist known most prominently as X has a past filled with obfuscations and deceptions, not all of them done in the name of art. As her widow dives deeper into her wife's life, what emerges is a conundrum. Was her wife a great and multi-talented artist who acted with her art in mind? Or was she a narcissistic grifter who hurt far too many people? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between?

Catherine Lacey has created a confounding novel; the subject is largely unsympathetic and the narrator is made unreliable by her motivations and loyalties. It's the kind of novel that needs an assured and talented author to pull it off, and Lacey does have the chops. Adding to the mix, Lacey has also set this biography in an alternate history of the United States, parts of which are described in detail, larger questions are hand-waved away or ignored. It was a lot to put in one book. X interacts with pretty much every famous person from the seventies to the late nineties, from Andy Warhol and Kathy Acker, to David Bowie, Warren Beatty and Susan Sontag. Lacey sticks to the format and there are amply endnotes, often referencing real people who accomplished different things in this alternative world, sometimes flipping details, like Rachel Cusk becoming Richard Cusk.

So does this audacious project work? Yes, mostly, almost? The alternate history that allows X to be in/famous and allows her a large role in the lives of many well-known people, lessens the stakes of the novel by constantly reminding the reader that this is fiction. The world Lacey has created has some large holes that are never addressed, while other issues are carefully laid out and it left me increasingly impatient, waiting for the information that never arrived. This is a book that looks at sexism, as it exists in the different countries the US has split into, in detail but ignores racism, which seems to have never existed in this version of the world. And many huge changes occur peacefully and largely off the page. The US split without war, women took over art without more than an occasional article wondering if men can even create real art, and despite the fact that the US is now three separate countries, no one wanted names more creative than the Northern Territory, the Southern Territory and the Western Territory (I really had trouble believing that we wouldn't have ended up with variations on the United Republic of America, the Democratic Republic of America and the Free Republic of Real American States.)

Lacey is a fantastic author and as CM learns new things about her wife, she reassessed their relationship, that was structured very much as a traditional marriage, where CM gave up her own career and aspirations to be X's support staff. These realizations come slowly, having to penetrate the gloss that grief has put on her memories of X and it's very well done. And the endnotes look like they were a lot of fun to write.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher of the ARC. At first, I wasn't pulled in by the story and didn't really know where the story was going. But then I was pulled in for this same reason a slow unfolding. The story centers around X an artist, writer and chameleon of sorts, who has suddenly died. Her wife, CM, realizes she knows very little of X's life and starts on a search through various clues and people in putting the full story together. There are references to X interacting with real people in history such as Bowie, Waits, Sontag, etc. CM finds out interesting facts but also lies and deceptions which makes her question how well she really knew X. It was an interesting rollercoaster of a story but I felt there was a lot to the story that I didn't really resonate with me personally and I wasn't so interested. Yet, I do think the storytelling is quite impressive and the author has devised a novel way to slowly peel back the pieces for the reader to come to their own conclusions.

Loved this. What a fascinating character study of a mysterious artist and her wife. I loved the journalistic narration and the winding journey through time. I enjoyed this so much I went through it slowly to make it last longer.

Huge, huge, huge, huge. HUGE. Audacious and surprising in equal measure, beautiful and brilliant, tattoo this book all over me.

Big fan of catherine lacey and this did not disappoint. The way Lacey plays with fact and fiction, truth, and identity is extremely well done.

I really loved the storytelling and layout of this book. All of the secondary materials like photos and transcripts really added to my experience and made X and the people surrounding her feel so real, even in the somewhat dystopian setting that this book takes place. The format and layout of this book was so unique and definitely kept my attention. I felt like I was getting to know all the people in X’s life through the interviews, even more so than getting to know X, making her all the more mysterious.

I did feel as though the setting and change of history was slightly under explored. It was easy to forget about it reading through some of the chapters, so at times it felt a little out of place.

The writing style and choices were absolutely beautiful, and I loved going on the journey along with the author to learn more about the mysterious X.

Catherine Lacey has a uniquely captivating writing style. She has a knack for using seemingly ordinary sentences to deliver a powerful emotional impact, often embedding an incredibly insightful message in them.

Biography of X presents readers with an alternate version of American history. This is the first time I have encountered an alternate history novel and found it to be a fascinating read. Although the history depicted in the book is different from our own, it contains genuine truths that resonate with the reader.