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.

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.

While there were moments where I was wondering where this was going and "how can I go on because this is a bit boring," I found this to overall be a decent read. I think it went over my head a few times, and I found X to be quite insufferable (possibly the point?) but as the story went on I found the story to be more interesting. It took me a bit longer to get through than usual but it was an interesting and wild story nonetheless. Thanks very much to the publishing for the review copy!

Biography of X is a novel cloaked in biography's clothing. X is a brilliant performance artist, writer, and cultural icon. When she dies, her grieving widow CM sets out to set the record straight after an unofficial biography is published without X's consent. CM travels across an alt-history version of the US, wherein a Handmaid's Tale-esque South has managed to secede after World War II. Turns out CM doesn't know what she doesn't know. The wild revelations build as CM retraces X's trajectory, interviewing those with whom the enigmatic political dissident, shape-shifter, and possible spy has collaborated, cohabitated, confided, and conned. Hard to define but easy to become enthralled with, this is a puzzle of a novel, masterfully constructed. A sense of gas-lighting permeates the narrative as the author builds a world close enough to feel real, but counter-factual enough to blur that reality. It makes an effective setting for a grief-stricken and spiralling widow as she comes to realize her life and marriage have not been anything like she thought they were. 

[Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux @fsgbooks and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy and share my opinion of this book.]

Lacey packs a lot into Biography of X, a layered and imaginative book in which X's wife CM decides to research X's life in order to rebut an unauthorized biography that came out after X's death. There's a lot of world building, and world borrowing.

In this fictional world, the United States underwent "the Great Disunion" of 1945 in which the South became a raging fascist theocracy, the North continued its status quo and the West stayed kind of neutral. [shades of The Man in the High Castle]. It was from this setting that X was born.

The research X's wife undertakes in the years after X's death show that she didn't know her really well, if at all, despite their years together. Meticulously "researched", each chapter contains fake footnotes which reference fake magazine articles, books and interview material. We see that X tried on and shed personas when the mood struck, sometimes ones that interacted with each other, as she sneered at and conquered the art world, from literature to pop music to performance art and film. Actual artists and creatives from the various periods are woven into X's narratives. X did it all, even writing some of David Bowie's music.

The premise was clever, the structure creative, there are even photographs to augment the story, but over its 416 pages it became repetitive. CM uncovers layers, we learn more about X, more layers, more X, CM questions what she really knew about X, more of X's past unspools as she Forrest Gumps her way across 70s and 80s New York [if you're holding your breath for the obligatory Patti Smith reference, don't worry, it's there]. X is not a likable person, in fact she's pretty awful, and I've got questions for CM. So many questions.

3..5 stars rounded down for the liberties taken with David Bowie's music. While ballsy, this angle didn't sit well. At all.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing for the advance copy.

Thank you to FSG and Net Galley for the digital arc of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

The Biography of X is a triumph by author Catherine Lacey, and when I completed it, it felt like a triumph for me too. I think the author did something incredible, wrote a fictional biography but at times it felt so deeply real. She got all the details of a traditional biography down. I was deeply compelled by C.M Lucca’s narrative voice.

This book did take me some time to get into, but if you’re someone who doesn’t prefer slow starts to books I would say this one is worth it, because it does reach a point where you don’t really want to NOT finish.

The Biography of X follows C.M. Lucca as she writes about the life and death of her wife X. She goes down the rabbit hole of X’s religious and isolated upbringing in the “southern territory”. You learn that the United States has been split up into four territories and you learn that the southern territory is a terrorist state ruled by white supremacy and evangelical Christianity. You learn about X’s lives (literally she lives so many under different names) and loves. And you ultimately learn about the pain and destruction she leaves behind everywhere she goes.

My favorite parts of the book were C.M Lucca’s reflection on her relationship with X and the reader discovers that while this relationship was full of love, X was a person rife with trauma, anger, paranoia, and violence. I really appreciated the subject of domestic abuse in LGBTQIA relationships, because it does happen and it’s not a taboo subject.

I think the last 3/4 of this book makeup for the slow start. The ending is heart wrenching and beautifully done.

Bravo to Catherine Lacey for creating a non-fiction fiction story that was unlike anything I’ve ever read.

I've sat for fifteen minutes trying to think of how to approach a review for Biography of X, and there is truly so much going on here that I don't know if I landed on a good approach or not.

I suppose you could call this a work of experimental fiction, which always sounds like a bizarre cop-out or lack of exploration on the reader's part, but in this case, I think its most fitting. Biography of X lands somewhere between an obsessive diary entry and a meticulously researched piece of academia used as a vessel for the narrator's grieving after the sudden death of X: an influential multimedia artist who also happened to be her wife. And several other people.

The project begins innocently enough, as a persistent fan writes an unauthorized, posthumous biography of X that garners some attention. CM, our narrator/author, took no part in this as it was expressly against her late wife's wishes. Once the rogue text is published, CM obsessively reads through it, her ire growing stronger with each lazy inaccuracy. She sets off with a simple goal: to publish an article correcting the biographer's mistakes. Before long, the mysterious idiosyncrasies of X crack open to reveal a vastness and a complexity CM was never expecting. The project takes on a life of its own, consuming CM for nearly a decade after X's death—not unlike she consumed her during their marriage. CM spends the duration of her project—the very book we are reading—grappling what this could reveal about her late wife and their years together.

The Biography of X exists in a strange limbo between reality and fiction, both at the level of its characters and the level of the reader. The novel is peppered with names of iconic creatives from our world with whom X (the deceased, titular character) collaborated as often as it contextualizes fictitious historic world events that changed the reality of its internalized world drastically from that of the reader. This is a ton of ground to cover in a single novel, but the way bits of X's closely guarded secrets slowly flake away for CM as their shared world cocoons around the reader makes it manageable.

This is an interesting project, perhaps more so for anyone who is an art lover or has done any academic research purely for how the content was woven together. I read an e-galley, and I do think the experience would have been enhanced with a physical book to compliment the annotated research Lacey included with each meticulous chapter. It does come off a bit dry 0verall, though I'd argue the reasons for this present themselves within the text, and for that, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Now this is a BOOK!!!!! Whew!!!! What an absolutely brilliant piece of art. I am in awe of what Lacey did with this novel. A collage of fact and fiction, an alternate history in all technicality, but also so much more than that. I cannot recommend this book enough. I hesitate to even go deeper into explaining this book because so much of the experience is best enjoyed in the discovery. I knew nothing outside of the brief synopsis and whew, I loved this ride!

Brilliantly written and ambitious, spanning decades and continents but largely set in an alternate version of the United States, Biography of X is the biography of an iconic, enigmatic American artist, X, written by her widow, journalist CM Lucca. Structured as an actual biography, complete with footnotes crediting imaginary sources and archival photography, author Catherine Lacey artfully, ingeniously blends fact and fiction in her new novel.

Lacey has created a fully-realized alternate version of the U.S., one in which the southern states broke off from the rest of the country in the 1940s to live under a religious, fascist regime. In the early 1990s, when Lucca's biography begins, the country is just beginning a tentative journey to reunification. Lacey provides a meticulously detailed history of the conflict and life in the Southern Territory, almost to the extent that she gives us too much information; it read as a bit dense at times. Although the separation of the country occurred in the 1940s in the world of the novel, Lacey uses the Southern Territory's belief system to make some important parallels with the state of today's politics.

Outside of the history aspect, the focus of the biography is, of course, X, and her various relationships and personas throughout the years. Through X's life as a musician, filmmaker, artist, writer, and actress (of sorts), Lacey explores love, art, grief, betrayal, authenticity, identity, manipulation, and obsession through complex characters that, while they are not likable necessarily, feel incredibly real. (And some are real, actually: Susan Sontag and David Bowie are only a couple of the real people that make an appearance in X's life.)

It's such a fascinating concept, and the novel's construction must have been a monumental undertaking. Ultimately, though, I thought that the various parts of the novel didn't work together quite as well as they could have. This could have almost been two separate novels: one a fictional biography about the Southern Territory, and one a fictional biography about X's life. Creating an entire alternate history requires a lot of explanation -- political figures, geography, noteworthy events -- that, in my opinion, could have been better spent on generating an emotional connection to the characters, which was lacking for me. I don't think X was a character I was supposed to like; she is pretentious and manipulative and selfish, but despite her constant reinvention, she also becomes boring and predictable. And Lucca comes across as distant and cold; possibly this was an intentional choice, but I wanted her to react more strongly throughout the text.

Nevertheless, Biography of X is an inventive, thought-provoking novel with lots of important and worthwhile things to say. I went back and forth between the audio version and reading an electronic copy: The audiobook is read by Cassandra Campbell, whose steady, deliberate narration works well for this type of story, but in this case, I would recommend the physical book instead, which includes photographs that I felt brought the book more to life. Thank you to NetGalley, Recorded Books, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the complimentary reading opportunity.

Catherine Lacey's latest novel is a complex interweaving of the real lives of artists and the imagined life of the artist X, whose name serves as a stand-in for the composite of the many personas she makes up and the real personas she is made up of. I was most fascinated by Lacey's construction of an alternate history of the U.S., wherein there were three territories after World War II that only reunified around the time that the narrator's examination of X begins. Lacey injects this history throughout the biography, and I can't fault her for not prioritizing this history in a book that sells itself as a biography, though I was hoping for more. Overall, this book is a feat of revisionist imagining that had me considering the facts and fictions that make up people and nations.

X … writer, artist, record producer and friend of the ‘beautiful people’ has died, suddenly. Her grieving widow (CM) decides to write a biography of X when another author dares to write about her much celebrated life. CM was enthralled by X. She was an enigma! Destruction, feuds and collaborations with Tom Waits, Susan Sontag and David Bowie peppered her orbit
This task of biography is daunting and presents CM with the hard truth ‘how much do we really know about someone?’. X lived a life of mystery. The who, what and where of her life were well veiled and an intricate web woven that is impossible to unravel.
Mixing time, place, fact and fiction, Catherine Lacey writes with intrigue, intellect and suspense making an exciting experience for the reader.
Thanks to the author, NetGalley and Grants Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

This isn’t my first time reading Catherine Lacey—I’ve always enjoyed her work—but this is my first time being completely and utterly obsessed with her writing.

Like, what happens to me now? I’m just supposed to move on?? Should I start my own journalistic investigation into how this novel came about???

This book is so ambitious (it’s alternate history! which always sucks! how is it so good here?) and it nails it. Every scene, every word had me re-reading just for the sheer pleasure of it. I texted lines of this to my husband as I read, which I never do, because it’s all out of context and what does he care, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to share what I was reading with someone.

Highly, highly, highly recommend. Sorry to everyone in my life for my inability to shut up about this book.

(I will however deduct one million stars from this review because the book actually ends at 90% and it was devastating because I thought I still had 10% left of the book. I will never recover from this.)

This novel cements Lacey as one of my all-time favorite writers. Her work is often rooted in the impact of love, religion, and history on identity, questioning the possibility of understanding our fluctuating selves despite these forces. Here, she traces this existential question through a metanarrative framework, in which our narrator, CM Lucca, attempts to write a corrective biography of her deceased wife, the enigmatic and chameleonic “X,” a prolific artist with a mysterious past who embodies numerous identities throughout her life before falling dead at the novel’s opening. Told primarily in interviews with people who knew X’s many selves, the novel presents an alternate history of the US, in which the South as we know it became the “Southern Territory,” a fascist theocracy that seceded from the country after WWII. X’s history is enmeshed in the Southern Territory’s terrifying development, placing an additional wrinkle in the understanding of her elusive past.

Embedded in the narrative are illustrations and citations which distort the real world and add so much fun to the often grim story: fictional sources include David Bowie, a gender-flipped Rachel Cusk (Richard Cusk lol), a review in the voice of queen Merve Emre, FSG editor king Jackson Howard becomes the name of a publisher, etc. Easter eggs abound. Through Lacey’s ingenuity, the book at its core reveals itself to be a singular and revelatory account of a woman’s grief and lack of understanding of her own identity. The novel expands the reader’s conceptions of the stories we tell about ourselves, and the limits imposed on our understanding of perceived reality. As such, the novel makes a case for fiction as being at once sacred yet cruel, necessary yet destructive. A favorite quote comes from X’s appreciation of RuPaul (one of the few artists she admired). “‘You’re born naked and the rest is drag,’ but she pushed the thought further — that even the body is drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all.”

My interview with Catherine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfL07ZcXAqU

I had high expectations for this one, but found it profoundly uninteresting.
I like alternative history from time to time (Binet’s Civilizations especially, Roth’s Plot Against America) and the idea of using the form of a fictional biography chronicling the life of an artist in an alternative version of post-war America sounded like a creative way of asking thought-provoking questions about why we are where we are today.
Unfortunately, these expectations were not met at all. Mostly because we get an enormous amount of details about life in the seceded Southern Territories, an awful GDR-like police state with strict religious rules. The descriptions come complete with invented source material (articles, books, documentaries and associated distracting footnotes). Inventing politicians, protests, resistance groups, terrorists attacks…it all requires a lot of explaining and I just don’t see the relevance of inventing all this, especially because it is of little relevance to the main storyline: the search for the past of the enigmatic artist X. Reading through the (mostly very positive) reviews of this book, I am still not sure anyone has understood this, even though for some the reading experience was immersive.
As the novel progressed, the alternative history moves to the background and is replaced by an equally tedious account of X moving in artist circles in New York, which I guess is fun if you are interested in the real life events that are neatly interwoven in the text, but by then a feeling of complete indifference had set in…
I also did not feel the need to learn more about the late X or about the narrator, her wife CM Lucca. The problem is not that they are not particularly nice persons, but rather that they feel cold and distant.
It is possible that the rather flat and slow narration of the audiobook contributed to this insufferable reading experience, but even the best narrator couldn't have made this work for me.

This is a story that I never got bored of, not for one second. It kept me up at night and occupied my thoughts during the day. Biography of X explores grief, betrayal, loss, and the additional feelings that come with the loss of someone that you realize never really knew. The prose was so intensely gripping. Impactful and beautiful, but also read with an ease that felt completely natural and unforced. It was a perfect literary achievement in my eyes, and is one of those books that I know will stick with me for a long time.

Set in an alternate version of US History, Catherine M. Lucca is a journalist, and now the widow of prolific and mysterious artist, X. When Catherine and X first meet at a gallery opening, Catherine is immediately drawn in by X’s enigmatic energy. They soon begin a relationship that alters Catherine’s view of her current life with her husband, and she immediately knows that she cannot and will not be happy without X by her side. Naturally, as if there were no other choice in the world, Catherine leaves her husband and begins her life with X.

X’s career as a multi-disciplinary artist is just as mysterious as she is. Her work is equal parts provocative, maddening, offensive, confusing and relatable. A writer, musician, painter, photographer. People love her. People hate her. People obsess over her. But no one knows much about her past, where she came from, or who she truly is; including her wife.

After years of sharing a life together, Catherine finds X dead in her office. This is where our story begins, and what the whole book centers around. Not necessarily her death itself, but the research that Catherine spends years compiling after X’s death, trying to piece together information and fill in the missing gaps of someone she realizes to have barely known. At first, this research begins in response to a poorly written biography of X, by a man whom X specifically declined to interview with in regards to such a project. Alas, it is written after her death, and Catherine sets out with the sole purpose of righting all of the wrongs that this so-called biography contained.

But soon after she begins, this tepid research spirals into the unsettling discovery of X’s past that Catherine is unable to stop digging into. This book is the story of that research; this book IS the research, it quite literally is the biography that Catherine ends up compiling. The biography details numerous interviews with people in X’s past, and often drifts to passages where Catherine recounts the tumultuous nature of their relationship, pondering and reflecting with each new discovery. Complete with images, scans of old letters, and citations, this is written in a way where I kept forgetting I was reading a work of fiction. With an insatiable need for answers, Catherine continues to unearth countless secrets and devastating truths about her late wife.

man o man, i loooove me some catherine lacey. her writing impresses me forever - so sharp & creative & cynical. i especially loved the premise of this one, and that it was written as if it was a real biography about a real person (so well done that i often wondered if it was!!!).

this book was released this week and i'm sooo stoked to get my paws on a physical copy to have in my collection.

thank you netgalley and fsg for the advanced digital copy!

This is the exact type of mind-bending novel that I love, slowly peeling back layers of complexity and using the form of the novel itself to foster the propulsive sense of revelation. An exhilarating reflection on selfhood, reality, and control told against the backdrop of an alternate history USA torn in three after WWII. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s CASE STUDY meets TÁR.

When the famous and groundbreaking artist X dies unexpectedly, the world is shocked -- and no one more so than her widow. Her widow, consumed by grief and uncomfortable with the ways others in X's life have portrayed her, decides to write X's definitive biography. As she undertakes this ambitious project, she is not prepared for just how little she knew about X's background, her past work, and even the project that X was developing as her legacy. Along the way, she realizes how X's life intersects with the history of the country and with major artists across the world -- and just how cultivated all aspects of X's life, including their marriage, were.

This is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, in both its themes and structure. This is a book you will keep thinking about long after you put it down.

Highly recommended!

This ambitious novel takes place in an alternate version of the United States in which the South seceded from the rest of the country in the 1940s. For fifty years, the South remained impenetrable to Westerners and Northerners. Then, in the 1990s, reunification began. This unique setting and political context frames the entire "biography."

Biography of X is a sort of literary mystery that's entirely narrated by her widow, C.M. Lucca. C.M. intertwines her discoveries about X's secretive past with memories of her own toxic relationship to her. Readers come to discover alongside C.M. that X was an incredibly unlikeable and manipulative narcissist. At first, her narcissism is harder to see as X hides behind her art. Performance, film, novels - at some point, X did it all. From nearly the beginning of her life, X adopted so many different personas that she became a notorious and inveterate con artist.

X's fictional life as depicted in this story is both glamorous and fascinating. C.M. recounts X's friendships with real-life superstars such as David Bowie, Tom Waits, and Susan Sontag. However, it's not X's glamorous life that makes this novel so compelling to read. Rather, it's the immersive effect of the narration by C.M. C.M. is haunted by X and her controlling ways. Even years after X's passing, C.M.'s life revolves exclusively around X. As she embarks on her investigation, C.M. continues her pattern of deferring her own personality and interests to those of X. Ultimately, this novel offers a fascinating look into the long-term effects of an intimate relationship with a narcissist.

Sometimes I will read biography as a way of reminding myself of all of the possibilities that fiction can avail itself of—"this stuff really happened" can carve out possibility space with the undulating integrity of desert dunes, something that feels as though it was sculpted but in fact was a byproduct of forces, times, chance—wind’s illusion of decisiveness. This is the way I started to feel about Catherine Lacey’s extraordinary Biography of X. Lacey's novel succeeds at many scales at once. Of course there is the level of the sentence, and Lacey knows how to write one great one after another—sometimes showily, at others in understated fashion. Then there is the parade of distinctive, indelible characters, cleverly brought onstage one or a couple at at a time in the way of a documentary. There is X herself, at the center of it all but so resistant to being pinned down that she becomes, herself, a veritable parade of characters, some of them distinctive and some only mentioned (but their very fleetingness adds to her broader mystique). In fact, the plot of the novel hinges on this paradox—it is an attempt to write a biography of one whose every waking minute seems to have been devoted to sabotaging any attempt to reduce her to a “someone,” i.e. a person who might be encapsulated, circumscribed in any meaningful, coherent way. As the narrator posits, “People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.” The word “desperately” becomes more and more clear as the book proceeds; the narrator is X’s wife, who turns out to know very little about her. We feel that we are on an existential quest alongside her, and if the mode is documentary, it is one of those documentaries whose own making becomes so wrapped up into its story that we feel the urgency of the making, as if the film might be exposed at any moment and crucial frames—or everything--lost.

Lacey is so deft when it comes to love and relationships that in the early pages I was reminded of Norman Rush’s Mating, with its anthropological theorizing gaze coupled with an obsessive’s eye for nuance. “What do people ever talk about at times like this, the first meeting of years and years of meetings?” Lacey writes. “It seems at such times that we are the least in a hurry to explain ourselves, intuitively knowing there is time to get to all of it, that there is plenty of time.” And later: “Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.” Like Rush, Lacey is comfortable with the aphoristic, such as noting that people “vacation in a place renowned for its cliffs when they’re feeling very clear and glad—when they’re enjoying success in love or money and not at all at risk of stepping over a precipice.”

As the Passover song goes, Dayenu—all this, the sentences, the characters, the philosophical insight--would have been sufficient. But Lacey is just getting warmed up. Quickly the novel veers into all sorts of other realms—the socio-cultural and historical, an examination of religion that itself honors nuance over caricature, and the way art and life both shape and are shaped by one another, through everything from chance encounter to the forces of history. Perhaps the most virtuosic move in the book is the way it widens its aperture so slyly, as our attention on X becomes part of a larger story, that of an alternative history of America that is itself so inventively conceived and fleshed out that it becomes clear that America itself is an elusive shape-shifter and a product of the stories that it tells or tries to tell about itself. Indeed, the America in this novel warrants as much exploration as any individual, even one as multiplicitous and slippery as X—possibly could. We follow X through the various stages of her life. As the narrator traces X's story from her Southern childhood to young adulthood in Montana to New York, where she conceives The Human Subject, an project that attempts to thoroughly obliterate any boundaries between art and life, to Europe, and back to New York, the novel becomes as much about the people with whom she becomes entangled as about its eponymous subject. And about art, gender, power, violence and vulnerability, theocracy and hypocrisy. And loss. For part of the power of any x is that for its ability to represent anything, it also has the potential to represent nothing, call attention to what is conspicuously absent.

Early on, the narrator refers to the book as a “corrective biography,” although even this is stated tentatively, qualified by “if that is what this book is.” Lacey revels in the maybes, the unresolved, the hypothetical and speculative. At the same time, though, by giving us such a range of characters who feel, for lack of a better word, “real,” and dressed to the nines in the rhetorical garb of biography—replete with footnotes, photographs, artifacts, quotes, and references to encounters with actual artists, musicians, politicians, critics—Lacey’s superb, sui generis novel reminds us that what we are (desperately) seeking from fiction and nonfiction might not be all that divergent in the end.