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.

When a deeply-flawed tell-all biography of the late artist X is released, her widow, CM Lucca, decides to correct the record and write a biography of X that will tell the truth about the mysterious iconoclast, a writer, artist, and enigmatic cultural figure. When she does, she opens a Pandora’s Box of troubling revelations about who X was, where she came from, and the duplicity which became her personality and her art.

C.M. had a passionate love for X, starting with a whirlwind affair that led to her divorce—probably a good thing, to be frank. They married with CM knowing little about X except what she could see and experience in the moment. The past didn’t matter; who you were is not who you are; who you are is what you do. CM’s expectations were that, once they were married and settled into life, the barriers would come down, and everything about X’s past would come to light. In some ways it seemed like a game, a ritual of artistic and personal purity; in others, a challenge, a dare. But when life seems good in the now, why excavate the past?

When the definitive biography of X is released, with neither X’s or CM’s cooperation, mind, CM knows, well, she knows a few things: the friends and acquaintances who cooperated with the author are traitors; X is not the person on the paper; X is not the person she knows.

As CM follows a trail of breadcrumbs to X’s origin, Lacey uncovers an alternate history to her world. After World War II, the United States divided into three territories. Driven by a rebellion, the Southern Territory developed into a fascist theocracy, while the Western Territory became something of a laissez-faire Libertarian stronghold, and the Northern Territory resembling a liberal democracy. As CM investigates X’s past, the chasm of this split is only beginning to be healed, but not without a lot of southern recalcitrance.

Having uncovered X’s mystery, C.M. delves deeper into the detritus of X’s life, as evidenced by papers, interviews with friends, enemies, and those who fall somewhere in between. She tries to pin down an iconoclastic life separating truth from fiction, art from bullshit, and herself from the oppressive and consuming shadow of X.

I loved this book; Lacey has rewritten recent history in such an astounding way that the reader is mystified, but perfectly accepting of the new landscape. She sprinkles pop culture Easter eggs throughout in the historical characters X brushes against (or brushes off), or via historical anecdotes. The result is dizzying and compelling, a lot of dark, tense fun.

Catherine Lacey's BIOGRAPHY OF X is that quiet, powerful book that takes over your thoughts and keeps you up too late at night savoring spare prose that conjures a supremely accomplished and creative woman X through the memories and determined journalist C.M. Lucca. While I did not particularly like nor relate to many of the characters, I enjoyed the arts and music worlds of the latter 90s. I also appreciated the determination of C.M. to reconcile her relationship with a famously difficult woman and stories emerging from others. C.M. was uncompromising in her pursuit of the truth and arrive at a way of living without her wife. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

This book was so intellectually satisfying. After her wife's passing, a woman sets out to investigate and uncover the true life story of the woman she married: a renowned artist named X. The book is set in the late 20th century in an alternate United States where the Southern and Northern states are separated and divided by a wall. X escapes from the South and becomes this enigmatic, personality shifting, name changing being. As though Cindy Sherman stayed in character for months or years at a time. One who charms people she meets but also steals and leeches from their lives. X is an art monster, and her life story is so great. All her performance pieces, her books, her outfits. Lacey provided so many details and footnotes that X begins to seem as real a figure in the art world as Kathy Acker. It mocks the '90s artworld as much as it celebrates it. Lacey portrays artists as never having fixed identities, but as rootless rebels who refuse to ever be owned or defined. And her writing is, as always, as subtle and sharp as a razor blade.

This is one of the most intricately plotted and researched books I’ve ever read. It was gripping from start to finish, and so incredibly layered.

Framed as a biography of the late X, a mysterious artist, producer, and writer, written by her widow C.M. Lucca as a rebuttal to the biography a man wrote about X, the story takes on a different life: Lucca’s quest to learn the truth about her wife leads her down all kinds of paths, and ultimately to the writing of this biography. Set in an alternate universe version of the US, where the country split for about forty years, following World War II, we learn about a not-terribly-distant version of the US through the lens of Lucca’s journey to untangle the wife she knew from the stories that she was told, and the versions she gets from other people.

Lacey creates a full fictional world, so engrossing and perfectly researched that you believe it’s real - there are fictional footnotes throughout the novel, but at the end, Lacey provides the real-world inspiration for certain references and stories. I loved how clever and brilliant this was. It blew me away.

This is out on Tuesday! Read it!

“The Biography of X” might be the most original book I’ve read in years. A fictional biography of an elusive artist (hi Vonnegut influence) by her widow that details X’s strange life, this book hit all the marks for me: a dissection of the self with no true conclusion; alternate history!!!! I live for it; musings about love as ownership or true knowledge about another. I was hooked from the first 20 pages & couldn’t stop myself from devouring all of X’s plots and personas, not unlike her devoted fans and stalkers. Were the characters likable? No. Did I love them? Obviously.

Such a fantastic epic from Lacey & I for one am about to go read any & everything else she’ll write.

The ambition of this novel alone is immensely impressive. Written from the voice of a widow grieving the loss of her wife, a multihyphenate artist who left a trail of wreckage throughout her life, by writing the biography she never wanted to order to finally understand who she was married to. The novel is at turns an intimate examination of female artistry, a grappling with the ways we can never truly know another person, a dystopian alternate history of America and if you follow the footnotes to the appendix, a collage of real-life people, moments and ideas repurposed into fiction.

But the most impressive part is how perfectly it's pulled off.

Read if you like: The Handmaid’s Tale, Tar, megalomaniac artistes, David Bowie

Adrift in her grief, the widow of a highly polarizing and mysterious artist sets out to better understand the woman who tore through her life. X, who had gone by many names and taken on many faces throughout her life and careers, kept a tight grasp on her personal life and history. It isn’t until her widow interviews the people from X’s past that a more solid, more human portrait is created of her. As melancholic love turns to obsession, we watch the narrator cling to the remnants of the woman she idolized while coming to terms with the wreckage she tended to leave in her wake. Simultaneously a retelling of American history and a dazzling biography complete with unique photos, Biography of X is a dark, cerebral journey that begs the question: can we ever really escape our pasts?

Personally, I loved the style of this book. The narrator weaves her journalistic writing with personal anecdotes from her time with X, and an alternate version of the United States is delicately introduced in a completely believable way. You slowly get to know the narrator through her interactions with X’s former friends, lovers, and victims. The complexity of X’s character is central to the book, because the nature of her past and her very being required her to constantly shed versions of herself to survive. However, after a lifetime of alternating between identities, the boundaries of X’s person become blurred, and the narrator questions whether she ever really knew her wife. If anyone did.

This book is relatively slow-paced, which generally works with the tone of the story, but at times the story seems to snag on a few scenes that draw out without contributing much to the overall arc. Additionally, none of the characters are likable. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re someone who needs a character to root for to enjoy a novel, this one is not for you. I also felt that the ending, while appropriate, wasn’t completely satisfying. The narrator is lost in her grief and broken sense of self and reality throughout the story, and this doesn’t change by its conclusion. The only character that truly “develops” is X, and the people around her merely bend to her will.

I gave this book 4/5 stars because it was immensely enjoyable. It reads both like a true biography and a psychological thriller, and made me question my own judgements of the characters consistently. The story is complex in the best way, with the narrator’s interviews and stories forming thread by thread a tapestry of X’s many lives. I didn’t find this novel to be fully engrossing due to its slow pacing and narcissistic cast of characters, but nonetheless I inhaled all 416 pages at the precipice of midterms so… clearly it offers some much needed escapism.

If you’re a fan of dark, psychological character studies, this book is perfect for you! Biography of X comes out next week, and I’m excited to hear more people’s thoughts on it. Because I have a lot of thoughts. More than I can fit in an Instagram caption.

My review is available on my Instagram @blondeandabook

TLDR GOODREADS REVIEW

the way that Catherine lacey is a genius

thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

-- SOME THOUGHTS --

I can confidently say that Catherine Lacey is a genius, a certified genius, a woman that has managed to write a book that I love endlessly, that is endlessly fascinating. And is nothing like I've ever read.

The way that this book plunders grief and examines it under a microscope through the complicated narrator of C.M. and she begins excavating the life of her incredibly private wife, the iconoclastic artist X, and the way that the book does it through this pseudo biography that effortlessly blends fiction and nonfiction is truly breathtaking. The blurb calls Lacey one of our "fiercist stylists" and I wholeheartedly agree. I cannot imagine how difficult this book had to have been in the drafting phase but also, how hard it is to pull something off like this and not make me feel as if I'm bogged down my narrative detail, or bored at any points.

Neither of these things happened. This book entranced me, and it was all consuming. I cannot find words that express my fondness for this book enough. An absolute masterwork that I'll definitely be looking for when awards season -- the Booker, the National Book Award, etc. -- starts as this book most certainly deserves a spot on these lists.

My endless thanks and gratitude to Netgalley, FSG, and Catherine Lacey for allowing me the privilege to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Catherine Lacey returns with a new novel that is unique in its plot and format. I found myself fascinated by its construction. I love a made-up artist with an immense amount of sources/footnotes and images. The line between reality and fiction is blurred, where the world of this novel blends with real artists and history while creating an entirely new world within its pages.

This is a novel about grief, the loss of a spouse and how it is to see your spouse through the eyes of others and history itself. It is also about art, politics, and identity. It will be read differently by each reader and their takeaways will be their own. It has enough depth and complexity to spend a lot of time in. To piece together X’s life and motivations or to sit with the spouse’s motivations as she refuses to let X go. To let go would be to grieve and look upon herself when looking to X was a mission and distraction.

I loved Pew, and Biography of X delivers something entirely different and original.

4 1/2 stars, rounded up to 5 stars

I did have some issues with this book, mainly with plausibility (X's talent in all these different artistic fields when she grew up in the Southern Territories void of art education or pop culture), but the sheer scope and undertaking of this book is so impressive that I must elevate the book above some of my recent four-star ratings.

Parts of the story read like Donna Tartt crossed with Patti Smith's Just Kids (a fictionized Smith is even quoted at one point), while other sections mimic the investigate journalism pieces X's wife CM won a Pulitzer for. Lacey's choice to set the book in an alternate version of the United States puzzled me at first, until I realized that someone like X could not keep her past a mystery in today's world. There's just too much documentation--no way to remain untraceable.

I'm someone who is interested in the malleability of the self, and the discussion of the many personas of X is fascinating. Is she all of them? Is she none of them? Is it possible to know anyone, really? The book is at times structured like a mystery, as CM waits until after X's death to ask the questions she was dissuaded from asking during her life.. While the larger questions are answered--where is X from? What is her real name?--the larger question of "Who is X?" remains impossible to answer.

As is often the case, the first few chapters are the best. I first read them in Granta and enjoyed them so much that I decided to get the whole book. Overall a very ambitious, very impressive accomplishment. Enjoyable to read, but I did find it rather repetitive after a while; there were so many chapters, so many interviews, that didn't seem to add anything of substance or really transform our understanding of the central characters in any significant way. I also found the alternate history to be politically naive. Emma Goldman became an American politician, really? All the wickedness of the United States is exported to the so-called "Southern Territory," really? The depiction of the Southern Territory is as unimaginative as 1984—it's just a lazy remix of popular narratives about the South, East Germany, and North Korea. That being said, I did find X fascinating, and I liked the overall form of the novel even if a good number of the chapters could have been cut.

This was interesting to read right after Y/N by Esther Yi —both are about feeling an obsessive devotion and love for a celebrity, a kind of worship that takes the place of religion. Funny that they have the same pub date!

This isn't a bad book... it's a good story, well written. It's an alternate history of the 20th century using an interesting character as the way in. I liked/hated X in the ways I was intended to. So it definitely isn't a BAD book. But it IS annoying. The main crime is the footnotes. The ENDLESS FOOTNOTES. In the digital version it's easy enough to ignore them, but the audiobook pauses at least once per page to cite a fictional source. The footnotes take up a full 7% of the ebook. While they do help establish the reality of the book - that this is a biography of a real person - it could easily have cut 2/3 of the repetitive references.

The other annoyance is maybe personal, but I was hugely, HUGELY annoyed by a segment of the novel that gave X credit for writing a few of Bowie's songs. It's one thing to use real people to make the world feel familiar. But to say she wrote his lyrics... and to give her FULL CREDIT for writing "Heroes" (and changing the real-world meaning of the song, and it's impact on the Berlin Wall) was almost enough to make me stop reading. I don't know why but it felt offensive to me. Not quite Back to the Future turning Chuck Berry into a plagiarist, but in the same wheelhouse.

So I enjoyed the story. I thought the writing was extremely good. But I can't quite give it full marks.

In Biography of X, Lacey confronts identity in the opposite direction that she did in Pew — or perhaps in all directions at once. X, the subject of the biography we are reading, took on a multitude of personas in her life, often to manipulate the world around her, and ultimately to reshape the people in it, including her third wife, the author of the book, who has embarked on this task to set the record straight after an unauthorized biography was released. The author soon discovers there was much she didn’t know about X either, and in fact she had given up most of herself to fit with a narcissistic woman—or so we are led to believe. Because what is true about anyone, really; aren’t we all performing for the sake of others, down to general acts of decorum, and doesn’t perception only go one way? This is a fascinating, compelling novel that I could use more time to dissect. For instance, could the narrative still function if it were not set in an alternate America where the South had seceded from the North? In one breath I think it could, and in another breath I think it couldn’t, and maybe that lack of definitiveness is the point.

This book just didn't make sense to me in several ways. The narrator sounded pitiful, and X sounded like a clinical narcissist who lived in a fantasy world of her own importance, rather than in a real world of consequences, including rejection by her claimed associations and connections. Why was the narrator so obsessed with X, considering how X treated her? What or who was the author writing for?

I found it a tedious wild goose chase for meaning.

Set in an alternate America in the late 20th century, there was for more than 50 years a wall between north and south, and those in the south lived under conditions that seem a blend of Mormonism, Nazi Germany, Russia, the Stasi in East Germany, Iran, etc., this alternate world created in great detail with footnotes and more. It is with journalist C.M. Lucca that we learn about this other world as she investigates the prior life of her wife, now dead, the multi-hyphenate artist X, an art star who wrote books and recorded with David Bowie, who we learn came from that walled-in South. As Lucca investigates for several years, she comes to realize how little she knew about X. A thoroughly imagined work, and yet I only sometimes found it compelling, I had to keep pushing myself to read it. Could be my fault.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

Some of Biography of X is brilliant. Some of it is a little dry. The dry parts made it difficult to continue on, though when I did, I found the writing to be almost heart-stoppingly beautiful. I've never read anything in this format before, in terms of fiction novels, and I appreciated how unique it was.
I think, ultimately, what made it hard to connect fully was that biographies are typically something you pick up when you're invested in a person's life. Because this was about a fictional person that you're piecing together through the book itself, I struggled at times. Nevertheless, Catherine Lacey proves to be a weird and lovely author.

"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."

Catherine Lacey writes as C. M. Lucca, who writes a biography of her dead wife, who went by the name X. The novel is set in an alternate timeline in which the United States split into Northern, Southern, and Western territories at the end of World War II. Behind a wall reminiscent of the Berlin Wall, the Southern Territory (ST) became a fascist theocracy à la The Handmaid’s Tale.

Other revelations about this nebulous new timeline both amused and distracted me in turn. For example, fictional Frank O'Hara survives the accident that caused his death in real life. Why not save O'Hara — call it a privilege of poetic license. Also, the Vietnam War doesn't happen. But also, post-war modern art becomes the exclusive domain of women in the Northern Territory. In fact, Duchamp, Calder, Kandinsky, and Pollock are massacred by Southern terrorists. I didn't understand why this change was necessary, but Lacey spends a lot of time following the idea to its conclusion.

Ostensibly, Lucca's biography is a research project intended to set the record straight about the mysterious woman she once loved. She includes footnotes at the end of each chapter, citing fictitious archival material and familiar figures (Susan Sontag, David Bowie, etc.) alike. I was delighted to discover in Lacey's notes at the end of the novel that many of these materials are real, only with attributions or contexts changed.

This is a singular, thought-provoking experiment in identity and its permeable boundaries. It reminded me of S. and Trust, though I think Lacey's novel is the most successful. At times, however, the gimmick of it all got in my way. Sometimes, the scenes were too absurd to be believable, even within my active suspension of disbelief. I didn't think this was disruptive though, because I know this dilemma was likely intended by Lacey, for how carefully the work was constructed.

I think this book will be especially interesting for writers to study and deconstruct. I want to discuss it so badly; I feel like there was so much that went over my head on this first read in a delightful way. It's almost more of an artistic and intellectual exercise than a novel. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.

Thank you NetGalley and FSG for an eARC! I'm entering my bookfluencer era.

"But I know now that a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely. 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."