Incredible- as Peters said, one of the most ambitious books I've ever read. The level of detail committed to this novel, with the citations and the attention to world building is really astounding. Definitely will be thinking about this one for awhile.

This was an incredible book. On paper, the idea seems like something impossible for a writer to actually flesh out. The protagonist's efforts to fill in the many blanks in her recently deceased lovers previous life (lives) told such a compelling story that I found myself as a reader wondering where reality ended and the fiction began. I couldn't recommend highly enough. Well worth the page count!

Biography of X is a fascinating book, a fictional biography of an enigmatic female artist and writer. Upon X’s death, her wife C.M. sets out to uncover the mysteries of X’s life. Among the facts that X kept secret are such basics as her real name and birthplace. As C.M. delves deeper and deeper into X’s history, she discovers the many guises and fronts behind which she lived.

Set in a fictionalized America, where the fascist South split from the North and West following World War II and reunified in the 90’s, Biography of X is an absorbing collection of interviews, photos, references to real people, footnotes and a huge bibliography. My kindle read just 93% when the book ended…the remaining 7% was pseudo bibliography, just to give an idea of how far this author went to sell the story. I loved the intellectual prose, finding the style of writing just to my tastes. It’s a book that won’t be for everyone, but it sure hit the mark for me.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this book.

BIOGRAPHY OF X is an inventive and playful departure, even for Catherine Lacey, who I have been a fan of for years, and will continue to read anything new she publishes. The novel, which is biography of a fictional artist named X written by her wife, reads exactly as a biography would. Less in scene and more summary. But what separates this novel from others of its ilk is its speculativeness. The US it is set in is an alternate US, one in which a Southern succession succeeds. The biography arrives just after the wall between territories comes down. I loved this very peculiar world-building, one in which many of our most prominent artists and critics continue to exist, all of whom have something to say about X. This is fun! The moments I loved most were those between X and the MC, though, being a biography, there weren't so many of these. Still, I had a blast reading this. 

Thanks so much to the publisher for this e-galley!

I wasn’t sure what to expect before I picked up the book and even wasn’t certain where it was leading once I started. This fictional biography was very interesting, and I was fascinated by the amount of detail in the footnotes and the tie ins to people and places we know, even though it’s clearly set in an alternate version of our country. I would have loved to learn more about the setting and the culture in this imagined place but I enjoyed the ride. It’s exciting to read a book so inventive. Thank you for the opportunity!

Do we ever really know the person we love? Catherine Lacey created a “biography” together with footnotes, references to real people, photos and a huge bibliography within her novel. The setting is post WWII where the US is divided into the democratic Northern Territory, the theocratic, dictatorial Southern Territory and the more open Western Territory. The “author,” CM, is the grieving widow of X, an artist, novelist, socialite, music producer, photographer, lyricist, performance artist, etc. Someone had published a biography of X and the widow felt it was incorrect. The reader is to believe CM left her husband to marry X with the proviso that she could not ask questions and would accept unannounced departures. Not knowing anything about her wife’s past, after eight years of grieving, she was determined to find the truth.

CM travels around the US, including plying her way into Southern Territory to discover X’s roots, and Europe. Each step of the way she learns how manipulative and destructive X was to all who came in contact with her, and most especially to CM. Even from the grave, her actions have had a devastating effect. She learned of various personas X affected over her life and the mind games she played with people. She may have been the best performance artist of her time.

At times, I was frustrated by CM’s whining and interjections, which interrupted the desire to keep reading more about the not very likable X, it served a purpose. I couldn’t get enough of X, but felt the book could have been shorter. Lacey did an amazing job of dealing with social, cultural and moral issues through a creative format.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions are my own.

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.

I heard enthusiastic reviews of Pew by Catherine Lacey and was eager to read her when I saw this appear on NetGalley. Thought on Biography of X: Lacey writes in that lush, literary prose that I always enjoy and admire, but the central character (not the narrator/protagonist, but her deceased wife) struck me as hackneyed and annoying. It was hard to wrap my head around why anyone would be so deeply obsessed with her or consider her an artistic genius. She does twee, showy things like, the first time they meet, slipping a note into her future wife's pocket to meet her at a random spot, where X appears by throwing down a rope ladder from a structure, and writes tired existential garbage in her diaries. She comes off as asinine and a bit MPDG. Luckily, side characters are there to call out X for being kind of a hack and manipulative and phony. The book is supposed to be X's wife's version of X's biography, one she never meant to write but that she embarks on in revenge for another journalist publishing an unauthorized one that is (possibly, probably?) filled with factual errors. Turns out that X's wife has no idea where X was born or any basic facts about her, so chameleon and artistically obnoxious is X.

Soon it becomes apparent that X does actually have a good reason for being secretive about her past: she is a refugee from the Southern Territories, an authoritarian region that seceded from the US after WWII. I won't spoil anything else. Between this and Pew, it seems Lacey has much to explore about what we project of ourselves and our expectations onto others. Both Pew and X are canvasses able to be anything to anyone, albeit in different ways. In both cases, Lacey seems to question how much we can really know one another, and the role that art plays in communicating who we are and who we wish we were. A mixed bag, but definitely readable and interesting!

This was an interesting read and overall I enjoyed it. The revisionist history at the centre of this work didn't seem that necessary - so many of the new or changed historical events weren't very different from actual history so I was often frustrated learning a whole new history when rooting this in actual history would have been simpler.
The characters were interesting and complex and the story was gripping - although I didn't find the end to be as satisfying as I would have liked. Having real historical figures as characters in the novel also pulled me out of the story.
Overall it was an interesting idea, the execution just didn't work that well for me.

"Biography of X" is an intriguing novel, where you are never sure if what you are reading actually happened in real life, and once you quit fretting about reality and fiction, the legitimacy of footnotes and photos, you see our main character, a grieving woman who decides to write a more authentic biography of X, her deceased wife, and how she learns so much more about her as she researches her history.

It's interesting how little she really knew about her wife, who went by X with her, and had many other identities with others. At one point, we realize the author was considering how their relationship may have been coming to an end, but then X dies unexpectedly at home, and she finds the beginning of a note that makes her think it was suicide, and maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, that's just how the novel flows. You think one thing, then realize there's an alternate.

I can't say that X comes across as particularly likable, but she does come across as compelling and potent, and it is easy to understand how the author became so infatuated that she seems to give up on her own self, which makes this novel more humane and relateable.

In a long lifetime of reading and teaching innovative contemporary fiction, I have never encountered anything quite like Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I hardly know where to begin discussing it. The narrator, the same-sex widow of a multitalented artist, discovers devastating and ultimately astonishing things about her deceased wife, who is a kind of composite of people such as Kathy Acker, Sophie Calle, and many more. Along the way, we encounter a huge cast of characters which includes at least as many real historical people as fictional ones, though their lives are often remarkably scrambled. For example, in a theocratic, fascist south which has seceded from the United States, a group of young antifascist rebels carry out a bombing which goes wrong, killing some of them. The three who manage to get away are Carrie Lu Walker, who will eventually become the fictional artist X; Kathy Boudin, a real Weather Underground founder who survived a Greenwich Village bombing by her cell; and Ted Gold, who was actually killed in that bombing. The book also features hundreds of fictional source notes, as well as a large separate section of real source notes.

These postmodern characteristics do not, however, overshadow the very real, and very tragic, humanity of the narrator, which constitutes the heart of the novel. We believe the possibility of the narrator’s story, as we believe the possibility of nearly everything else in the novel, with one exception. Despite the unfortunately real possibility of another civil war in this country today, the novel’s account of the mechanics of secession—“twenty-two million America citizens woke up to the news that they were no longer living in America—a wall had been erected between much of the Deep South and the rest of the country”—is so fanciful that it is jarringly out of place with the rest of the novel. The author clearly recognizes this and tries to mitigate it—“Though the Disunion seemed sudden from the outside, the so-called Christian Coup had been in the works for years.”—but this is only partly successful. The fait accompli of Disunion is important for the novel, so I just wish that the author could find a more believable way of describing the act.

That small issue aside, Biography of X is a brilliant novel which belongs on a shelf with such works as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Jerome Charyn’s underappreciated The Tar Baby. I hope that it gets the audience it deserves, and I appreciate this opportunity to read it.

A small handful of typos should be corrected before going to press:

“a failed insurgency in Byhalia the late 1960s” (Should be “in the late 1960s.”)

“We waited for a nearly an hour” (Should be “for nearly an hour.”)

“But why, I asked him, hadn’t he felt compelled to correct the mistake Mr. Smith’s biography?” (Should be “the mistake in Mr. Smith’s biography.”)

“I can and must logically conclude that the by the virtue of the existence of the possibility” (Should be “conclude that by the virtue”)

“Then to hear that they had the same last name—where they married already?” (“Where” should be “were.”)

“first wives have certain a right” (Should be “a certain.”)

“a young reporter who was working on an story” (Should be “a story.”)

“told her the story of very unusual job” (Should be “a very.”)

Paul Cohen
pc06@txstate.edu

Received an ARC in NetGalley and was absolutely floored by this book. The author created not just two compelling characters, but a fully fleshed out alternate history of the United States. The amount of world-building that was done in the pages created a totally realistic and unfortunately possibly horrifying vision of the United States. The author utilizes real-life figures such as Emma Goldman to describe the route the US could have gone after World War II and these characters fit nicely into that narrative.

As a character, X is supposed to be mysterious, however as her wife's investigation continues this veil is brought down. This is a real strength of the book as the reader sees X, not as the enigma that everyone else did, but as a flawed and at times abusive character. X fascinated me so much because while she struggled to wholly unique and herself, I felt like I had experienced people like her and she actually felt normal. That is a testament to the writing and character description.

Overall, this book is a great encapsulation about reinvention, art, and historical trauma. The world-building reminded me of Emily St. John Mandel and I would highly recommend this book.

Catharine Lacey experiments with form in a way I haven't seen from any other author to date. The eponymous X's personal history is so intricately crafted that reading her biography within the fictional narrative disrupts readers' grasp on reality. As in Pew, Lacey seems transfixed by the concept of projection: how we see people through the lens of our own insecurities, needs, and often prejudices. While, perhaps, lengthier than necessary, the variety of perspective from X's past meticulously documented by her widow, makes this pseudo biography an impressive and unique feat.

An engrossing, exciting, art-mystery that goes to unexpected places. Couldn't put it down. Very fun and immersive read.

Catherine Lacey has written another unique masterpiece of a novel. A combination of fact and fiction full of experimental writing interesting characters.A book that drew me in from first to last page.#netgalley #fsg

Catherine Lacey's work is always wonderfully innovative, and this book is no exception, I was fascinated by her use of footnotes, names of real people and her representation of the dystopian context here. The characters and the investigative work of the narrator are so interesting,

I could write a list of pros and cons of this book instead of a review.

Biography of X is a fictional biography taking place in a semi-fictional world, of an artist by the name X, written by her wife. It is based on X's notes, diaries, letters, art projects, and interviews with people her wife could find after her death.

It's definitely one of the more interesting and well-written/made books, the amount of work put into it is obvious. The structure and the writing caught my attention immediately, but it is simply too long. I spent more than a month reading it, partly because of a reading block, partly because 250 pages in, I still had no opinion on the book. The "plot twist" happens very late and is barely acknowledged.

It's hard not to let my hatred of the characters affect my actual opinion on the book itself, which just proves that the characters are perfectly written, but they are so very unlikable it was hard to finish the book. [ In a way, narcissism and plain cruelty are an interesting topic to observe, but by the end, X just felt like a very simple sadist and contrarian, just for the sake of being a sadist and contrarian. There is not depth to her character, there is no substance. Same could be said for her wife, but I cannot blame a victim of this abuse for being a plain person with no personality and barely any spine.

Overall, definitely an interesting read. A long one as well.

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.

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, critically, 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.

<i>Thank you to FSG for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!</i>

Absolutely spectacular. Catherine Lacey gets better and better with each book -- I tremble to think of the heights she may achieve. This book is a stunning reflection on partnership and art-making and storytelling, a gripping alternate history, and a tricky metafiction too. It has lived in my mind since finishing it and I am already planning to re-read it when it comes out in hardcover.

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.