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Everything she knew about her wife was false — a faux biography finds the 'truth'.

Maureen Corrigan

To those readers who prize "relatability," Catherine Lacey's latest novel may as well come wrapped in a barbed wire book jacket. There is almost nothing about Biography of X , as this novel is called, that welcomes a reader in — least of all, its enigmatic central character, a fierce female artist who died in 1996 and who called herself "X," as well as a slew of other names. Think Cate Blanchett as Tár, except more narcicisstic and less chummy.

When the novel opens, X's biography is in the early stages of being researched by her grieving widow, a woman called CM, who comes to realize that pretty much everything she thought she knew about her late wife was false. The fragmented biography of X that CM slowly assembles is shored up by footnotes and photographs, included here.

Real-life figures also trespass onto the pages of this biography to interact with X — who, I must remind you, is a made-up character. Among X's friends are Patti Smith , the former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin , and the beloved New York School poet, Frank O'Hara .

As if this narrative weren't splintered enough, Lacey's novel is also a work of alternate history, in which we learn that post-World War II America divided into three sections: The liberal Northern Territory where Emma Goldman served as FDR's chief of staff (don't let the dates trip you up); the Southern Territory, labeled a "tyrannical theocracy," and the off-the-grid "Western Territory." A violent "Reunification" of the Northern and Southern Territories has taken place, but relations remain hostile.

Feeling put off by all this experimental genre-bending? Don't be. For as much as Lacey has written a postmodern miasma of a novel about deception and the relationship of the artist to their work, she's also structured that novel in an old-fashioned way: via a Scheherazade -like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating in its calculated brutality.

But let's return to the beginning. In what CM calls the "boneless days" in the aftermath of of X's death, she tells us that:

"It wasn't a will to live that kept me alive then, but rather a curiosity about who else might come forward with a story about my wife. ... And might I — despite how much I had deified and worshipped X and believed her to be pure genius — might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her."

I hesitate to mention any of revelations CM stumbles upon in the course of her research into X — a person CM says, "lived in a play without intermission in which she cast herself in every role." Watching those bizarre costume changes take place on these pages is part of the pleasure of reading this novel. It's not giving much away, though, to say that one of the earliest shockers here is that X, who arrived in New York in the 1970s ready to create experimental music with David Bowie and pricey conceptual art out of boulders, actually was born Carrie Lu Walker into the repressive Handmaid's Tale world of the Southern Territory.

Hiding her own identity as X's widow, CM travels to the Southern Territory to interview X's parents — a risky move in a land where women who deviate from the repressive norm are still stoned to death. During this research trip and the many that follow, CM also investigates the mystery of her own metamorphosis: namely, how did she — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — allow herself to be drawn into what Emily Dickinson called the "soft Eclipse" of being a wife, the very same kind of wife the folks in the Southern Territory would approve of? X may not be relatable, but, as we come to know her, the duped CM certainly is.

"The trouble with knowing people," CM says at one point, "is how the target keeps moving." The same could be said of Lacey's brilliant, destabilizing novel. Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper.

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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey review – who is this mysterious artist?

An impressive and enchantingly strange novel plays with genre, identity and politics in an alternate America

C elebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in 1996, one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in 1982, it was never clear which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This is a biography drawing on X’s archives and a range of interviews with the people closest to her, joining the dots about her background and exploring her difficult relationship with contemporary America. And it is, like X herself, entirely a work of fiction.

Catherine Lacey, the author of this haunting, genre-bending novel, has form investigating characters with mysterious identities. Her previous book, Pew , was a gothic fable set in America’s Bible belt, narrated by an unnamed protagonist whose race, gender and age are never established. Pew, so nicknamed because they are discovered sleeping in a church, mirrors the anxieties and fractures of the world they turn up in – a world that becomes progressively weirder as we read the novel.

Though it is structured in a similar way and drawn to the same themes, Biography of X is a stranger, more ambitious and more accomplished book. The conceit is that the book’s actual author is CM Lucca, X’s widow. Annoyed by the publication of an inaccurate biography of her late wife, Lucca has resolved to set the record straight. Complete with extensive bibliography, photographs, footnotes, images of X’s books and art, and even front matter that attributes the copyright to CM Lucca, 2005, Biography of X is presented to the reader as a simulacrum of a nonfiction work. This is an enchantingly strange proposition and, like Pew, it only gets stranger.

First of all, as the prickly and somewhat self-involved CM Lucca attempts to explain her motives for writing the book, you are troubled by little oddities in the narrative. Pretty soon it becomes clear that the events of the book take place on an alternative timeline of US history in a world very different from our own. The election of a female socialist president in the 1940s has led to the secession of some of the southern states. These so-called Southern Territories have become a dictatorial theocracy complete with their own morality police. Meanwhile the north has pursued a range of radically progressive policies – a kind of wish list of enlightened thinking that ought to have created a utopia yet somehow hasn’t.

There’s something wondrous about the way the book backs into its high concept. While CM Lucca is fretting over the meaning of her relationship with X and settling scores with the other biography, a huge vista opens up behind her. It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background.

It turns out that X’s origins lie across the border, in the recently reunified (or conquered?) Southern Territories. Visiting them, like a traveller to North Korea, the narrator is assigned a Travel Mentor and begins tracking down X’s family members and childhood friends. This parallel reality is evoked with brilliant specificity. One tiny example: when the narrator visits a house there, a man briefly enters the room to ask his sister for a glass of milk. “A grown man unable to pour himself a glass of milk, I thought. This is the sort of person an authoritarian theocracy produces.”

The different versions of America – one where same-sex marriage has been legal for decades, another where it’s regarded as an abomination – are clearly extrapolations from our present. Yet the conflict between their mutually uncomprehending worlds is not fuel for a polemic but presented with thoughtfulness and nuance. “Their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again,” we read of the oppressed population in the theocratic South. It’s a great line that suggests links between the speculative world of the book and the victims of other utopian schemes.

As the book uncovers details of X’s past in the Southern Territories, it forces us to re-evaluate her art, which acquires more urgent and political overtones. X’s exploration of artistic freedom and refusal to be confined by any single identity seem very different in the light of her upbringing in a virtually totalitarian world. But the move to the north is not a happy ending. X remains a contrarian to the end, ruffling feathers, bracingly defending her right to inhabit multiple personas. “There was no con, there was no crime. There was only fiction,” she says. And as the book builds to its unexpected and yet somehow inevitable conclusion, the line between life and art becomes menacingly blurry.

At times I couldn’t tell the difference between the real and imagined characters. Among X’s acquaintances are a half-Russian New York socialite, Oleg Hall, who owes his fortune to his parents’ murder-suicide, and a folk musician called Connie Converse , who vanishes in mysterious circumstances, leaving a trove of unreleased recordings. Both seemed equally bizarre; only one of them is invented.

There is so much that’s impressive about this book. It makes you think afresh about America and American history. It roves over the muddy trenches of identity politics while saying things that are original and not parti pris. At its centre, X is a charismatic, tantalising figure who takes aim at all orthodoxies. My one quibble with the novel is that there’s a tendency to apostrophise too much about the puzzles of love, art and identity at the heart of the book. The courageous world-building and bold storytelling carry these themes without any need for additional rhetorical flourishes.

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It’s hard to locate influences, but one mention of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges made me think of his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius . In this strange tale, objects from a fictional world penetrate our world and transform it. A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered.

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0 days and 02 : 48 : 59, biography of x, catherine lacey.

416 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

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And might I - despite how much I had deified and worshipped X, and believed her to be pure genius - might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived with her.

"The 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."

"It seemed to be all I had ever wanted to know--how I might have changed her, what effect I'd had upon her. She had always seemed to me too powerful a mind and heart to ever fully breach, least of all by someone as fearful and flimsy as myself."

"My name is X and my name has always been X, and though X was not the name I was given at birth, I always understood, before I understood anything else, that I was X, that I had no other name, that all other names put upon me were lies. The year and location of my birth no longer pertain—few know that story, some think they know it, and most do not know it and need not know it. From 1971 until 1981—a youthful decade—I suspended the use of myself; that is, I was not here, I was not the actor within my body, but rather an audience for the scenes my body performed, a reader of the fictions my body lived. If this sounds ludicrous, that's because it is ludicrous; it is ludicrous in the exact same way that your life is ludicrous—you who have convinced yourself, just as nearly all people do, of the intractable limits of your life, you who have, in all likelihood, mushed yourself into the miserly allotment of what a life can be, you who have taken yourself captive and called it living. You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen. On some level you must know this already or have suspected it all along—but what, if anything, can be done about it? How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent? You may believe, as it is convenient for you to believe, that there is no escaping that confinement, and you may be right. But for a period of years I, in my necessarily limited way, escaped.”

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Catherine Lacey’s Alternate America

Halfway through the novel Biography of X, the X in question — a brilliant performance artist, daring political dissident, and, according to her biographer, kind of a cruel jerk — is described by David Byrne as “incapable of returning friendship.” That appraisal, we’re told, was printed in a previous biography of the artist. Except at the end of this book-within-a-book, behind a sheaf of gradated pages, an endnote gives the real-life attribution to another Talking Heads member, Tina Weymouth — who was describing Byrne.

Catherine Lacey’s new high-concept work is full of these kinds of jokingly layered quotations, many of them ventriloquized by X. Through her speak Susan Sontag, Cy Twombly, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, to name just a few. “I wanted to write a real biography of a real person,” Lacey said in an interview last year, “but a teacher of mine encouraged me not to do that, saying it would ruin my life.” Instead, she has put together a real-seeming account of a fake artist. X takes on dozens of personae: a small-press publisher named Martina Riggio, an underground novelist named Cindy O, an imperious artist known only as Vera. X’s wife, C. M. Lucca, is the biographer — which is to say Lacey’s narrator. Their sour love story is woven through an alternate history in which the southern U.S. pulled off a surprise secession in 1945.

The text begins with C.M., freshly widowed, wandering New York and half-heartedly considering throwing herself from a building. She describes herself as seeming “plain and glamourless”; when X was alive, she felt like both a secretary and a mobster’s wife, required by her celebrity spouse to be a neutral administrative presence. Despite this, or because of it, she was unquestioningly devoted to the artist. C.M. left her husband for X, and when they were near each other she felt a “sort of buzzing sensation … as if I’d just been plugged in.” X, meanwhile, was proud, petty, often cold (especially toward C.M.), and remarkable to almost everyone who knew her from Byrne on down. A childhood friend who cries when she remembers X marvels that “she could write backward just as quick as she could write forward — even in cursive and everything.”

Spite shakes C.M. out of the worst of her grief. A man named Theodore Smith has published a biography of X, and it’s clumsily written, full of errors, and “practically radiant with inanity.” It barely punctures the surface of the artist’s life. C.M. sets out to write a corrective essay that uncovers her wife’s birthplace and real name, but the project spirals almost immediately. “I did not know that by beginning this research I had doomed myself in a thousand ways,” C.M. writes, and the gradual reveal of what, exactly, could be so horrifying is this narrative’s main thread.

X, C.M. is shocked to learn, was born in the Southern Territory, the portion of the U.S. that splintered off after a far-right Christian overthrow. Until the Reunification in 1996, it was almost impossible for any Southern citizen to escape to the Northern or Western Territories, and the few who did were tracked down to be brought back or killed. X was an exception. It’s a dizzying reorientation for a novel that initially seems to be about the art world. Lacey’s alternate America is dense with detail, and we learn about not only the factors leading to the secession (Emma Goldman’s appointment to FDR’s cabinet, for one) but also the specifics of, say, a spate of atonic seizures experienced by dozens of women in one Alabama county after the Reunification. In the North, same-sex marriage has long been legal and prisons are nearly abolished.

The Southern Territory and X’s perilous escape are a way for Lacey — who grew up religious in Mississippi — to get at the question of what happens when someone who was raised to believe they live in a world with a god absconds from that world. For all the detail, though, parts of her alternate America feel underrealized. The pages devoted to the Black citizens of the Southern Territory, who face a virulently racist society, pass quickly with a nod to the networks of “unfathomable charity” that sustained them. Surely a novel about a South that seceded in 1945 might lend more of its plot to Black communities, and surely the North at that time would have its own intense racism. But those ideas aren’t given much narrative priority here.

The side-stepping continues later. Describing X’s support of a collective of Black artists, C.M. admits she is “far from an expert” on the group, and she directs “those looking for further reading” to Black Futures, edited by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew. C.M. says the book was published in 1998; really, it came out in 2020 and is about Black creators more broadly. The gesture seems gracious but nervous, as if Lacey would rather leave that particular tangle of ideas to other authors.

It’s not the only place in the novel’s web of citations, names, and quotations that has a constraining effect. After X makes her way to the Northern Territory, she begins a grand tour of 1960s and ’70s America and Europe, exercising a subtle influence over familiar cultural products like an artsy, self-actualized Forrest Gump. She hangs out with Tom Waits at Electric Lady Studios. She goes to West Berlin with David Bowie. She moves to Italy and collaborates with feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and she stalks Sophie Calle for an art piece. In the chapters in which X lives with the cult-favorite songwriter Connie Converse, Lacey inches closest to straightforward biography. At times, it’s exhilarating, but the warped cultural history doesn’t consistently enhance the plot; at its worst, it feels like a distraction, and the point of it all can be hard to grasp. As X becomes famous for her writing and art, she is interviewed by journalists, many of them presented anachronistically and some imbued with a political life they might not actually have had. The culture writer Durga Chew-Bose, for instance, reports an article about Southern- Territory refugees in 1999 — when she would have been 13 in reality. Is this a joke? A wink? Flattery? Are we even supposed to notice Chew-Bose’s misplacement in time, or any of the misattributed quotes sprinkled throughout, unless we happen to flip back to those endnotes? It’s unclear.

The chapters in which C.M. makes a reporting trip to the Southern Territory are virtuosic; the material that follows a shift to the New York City art and publishing- worlds, with the egos and press cycles and shallow gallerists and mousy editors, doesn’t always gel in the same way. These sections are impressively populated, but, like a real biography, they can start to feel dutiful. Maybe all the actual people whose lives intersect with X’s are meant to give us recurring jolts of reality, and maybe Lacey’s use of them mimics the artist’s identity borrowing. Or perhaps the many prodigies who surround her, the Byrnes and Sontags, are there to convince us of X’s genius — a solution to that old problem of how an ordinary writer can persuasively portray a brilliant thinker within their novel.

But Lacey herself is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them. Under all the narrative scaffolding, the moments in Biography of X that land most reliably have to do with long-suffering C.M., whose mourning — she is “romanced by grief,” she says — turns to horror as she unpeels her wife’s layers of secrecy and manipulation. The quandary C.M. faces is something Lacey’s been puzzling over from the beginning of her career, and in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding. In her 2018 story “Violations,” a man tries to parse a short story by his ex-wife that may be about him, and The Answers (2006) follows a woman hired to participate in a simulated relationship with a super-celebrity. Here, C.M. has consented to submit to the experiment of love, but she’s only half-informed; much has been concealed from her. The same could be said of us.

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BIOGRAPHY OF X

by Catherine Lacey ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023

Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph.

A widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife, a mercurial artist who adopted many personas, in this audacious intellectual history of an alternate America.

C.M. Lucca is a former crime reporter who resents the inaccuracies printed in the only biography of her wife, X, a famous performance artist who has recently died. Determined to correct the record, C.M. begins reporting on her wife's mysterious origins and career as a shape-shifting provocateur. "When she died, all I knew about X's distant past was that she'd arrived in New York in 1972. She never told me her birthdate or birthplace, and she never adequately explained why these things were kept secret," C.M. explains. Was X really born in the Southern Territory, a theocratic dictatorship separated from the Northern Territory for 50 years by a wall? If so, how did she escape? And how did her childhood shape the artist she was to become? C.M.'s reporting trips put her face to face with former spouses, lovers, revolutionaries, terrorists, friends, and hangers-on, but a clear picture of X remains elusive. Instead, Lacey creates a portrait of a biographer haunted by grief, struggling to untangle love from abjection, fiction from reality, art from life. "At first I had rules for researching X's life and I followed them...I have broken every rule I ever set for myself," C.M. mourns midway through the biography. "And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life." Throughout C.M.'s manuscript, Lacey includes footnotes and citations from imagined articles by real contemporary writers whose names readers well versed in cultural criticism will recognize. The effect is pleasurable and disorienting, like reading a book in a dream or surfacing a memory that's gone fuzzy around the edges. As C.M. circles closer to the truth about X, her memories about X's violent tendencies become clearer and sharper. "I did not know her, and I do not know who she was," C.M. admits at last. "I do not know anything of that woman, though I did love her—on that point I refuse to concede—and it was a maddening love and it was a ruthless love and it refuses to be contained."

Pub Date: March 21, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-374-60617-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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This Novelist Is Pushing All the Buttons at the Same Time

Catherine Lacey invents the ultimate fun-house novel for her exploration of biography and art.

y favorite work by the artist X, An Account of My Abduction , depicts a kidnapping. For part of the 87-minute video, a woman lies taped up on the floor, writhing, while a voice off camera hisses threats at her. The woman on the floor is named Věra. The one off camera is named Yarrow Hall. The video is disturbing for multiple reasons. It captures suffering and vulnerability. It presents brutality as art. And both of the women are actually characters inhabited by X. The abduction is staged, performed, fabricated, whatever word you prefer. But its first viewers didn’t know what they were looking at, or whether it was real or invented. And once they realized it was the latter, they were confused by what felt like deception—a reaction that seems to have been the point.

I’ve never actually seen An Account of My Abduction . No one has, or will. But you can “view” it yourself in Catherine Lacey’s genre-quaking new novel, Biography of X , which invents X, and her assumed identities, and her big, brash, occasionally stunty body of work. X is a creation in the vein of David Bowie and Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman and Andrea Fraser—a shape-shifter who encourages her fictional selves to metastasize until they kick her out of her own life, an iconoclast with many noms de plume but no answers about her own childhood or upbringing. “It only seems to be a simple question— Where are you from? It can never be sufficiently answered,” she enigmatically tells a magazine interviewer, posing the question that animates every inch of Biography of X .

This is Lacey’s fourth novel, and she has shown a keen streak of inventiveness and ambition that’s been rewarded with much recognition: She’s won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim, and a Whiting. But Biography of X revels in the kind of identity theft that artists (and writers) employ to build the stories of their work and themselves. Lacey fashioned the enigma that is X—a woman known for her “uncommon brutality” and venomous disdain—out of dozens of artists and provocateurs and hucksters who inhabit our world, but she also made her something inimitable, a vehicle for exploring Lacey’s favorite theme: the fungibility of identity. “I think because I’m an artist,” X says, “my image will always come before me.” In creating this character made up of characters, Lacey has posed an unanswerable question about whether an artist can bury herself so far under work that it becomes impossible to find the traces of an authentic self.

Sitting at a downtown-Manhattan restaurant on a warm, gusty winter afternoon, Lacey came across as more contemplative and unencumbered than enfant terrible—she was wearing a fluffy, forest-green coat and looked at me through wide blue eyes; large paper-clip tattoos on each wrist appeared to secure her hands to her body. She looked slightly perplexed when I came at her with sharp-angled questions, like I was trying to pry open a shell for a pearl already strung on a necklace.

X hides herself so well that her own wife doesn’t even know her birthplace. But the Catherine Lacey who wrote Biography of X and produced its brilliant, vicious, capricious protagonist—an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature—doesn’t believe in a unified theory of the self, so she was happy to hand me remnants of her own life and let me create some Cubist version of her. Under a photo of us that she posted to Instagram right after we met, she wrote that she still has “no idea how to properly organize past selves,” an idea she explained to me that day: You contain multiple people, from different periods of your life, and you lose some of them along the way. “There’s a part of me that feels really troubled by [that] separation of identities,” she noted. “I don’t know; isn’t it troubling?” It seems to me that it is: The lifelong project of making a self is, by nature, hopeless. Turning Lacey into one firmly outlined person seems against the spirit of her project.

A few facts anyway: Lacey is 37. She was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but hasn’t lived in the state since she left for boarding school at age 14. She pinballs around: Right now she’s living in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, swapping houses with a friend for the place she shares in Mexico City. “I don’t have a region,” she told me. “I’m not of any one place.” She’s been married (to a performance artist) and partnered and un-partnered and re-partnered again. In the past nine years, she’s emerged as the rare young writer who has successfully produced a true oeuvre: Her novels vary thematically—they include a hypnotic road-trip tale ( Nobody Is Ever Missing , 2014), a speculative pseudo-satire of dating and mating ( The Answers , 2017), and a Shirley Jackson–esque race-and-gender fable ( Pew , 2020)—but they all share Lacey’s particular ability to build sturdy narratives that point to the flimsiness of narrative itself.

Lacey is an open book but a profiler’s riddle, even though that’s the kind of writing she once hoped to produce: “I wanted to be doing what you’re doing,” she said, with a look of wonder—she wanted to write nonfiction and coerce artists into sharing their lives. Biography of X , a true magnum opus, plants real lives—like Bowie’s and Acker’s, along with figures as varied as Connie Converse, Frank O’Hara, Richard Serra, and Susan Sontag—alongside the fictional, Spirographing the two together. It’s almost a form of profile writing, but she’s suitably busted up the whole thing to retrofit those “real” lives to her protagonist’s purposes.

Read: Understanding your past won’t liberate you

Biography of X serves as the title of two books, actually: Lacey’s novel and the biography “inside” that novel (“published” by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005), written by CM Lucca, a lapsed journalist. She is also X’s widow—the story is told in retrospect by a grieving spouse using biography to make sense of the unknowable person she loved. CM (alternately Charlotte Marie or Cynthia Malone, depending) obsessively roots through paperwork and gallery slides, interviews old friends and enemies, tries to fill in the broad gaps in the personal history of a woman who appeared seemingly out of nowhere in New York in 1972 and ended up with a retrospective at MoMA two decades later. X was the kind of artist who provoked conversation whenever she exhibited new work—less a lightning rod than the lightning itself. She had several personas: Clyde Hill, a cult novelist with New Directions; Martina Riggio, a feminist small-press founder; the aforementioned Yarrow Hall and Věra, who each put out work of their own.

Lacey’s power as a mimic is on full display here: Her creations are all as believable as X is, even when we know they are Cindy Sherman–like roles, pulled on as a kind of winking game. Longing rises up from every crack. X, CM explains, “lived in a play without intermission in which she cast herself in every role.” But who was she? CM can gather all sorts of information on her wife—through Vanity Fair profiles, towers of notebooks in her study, critics’ takedowns. But she yearns to identify the precipitating event that turned her into X: a name that signifies no name, a woman who claimed, “It’s not that I am a private person; I am not a person at all.” CM wants to know where X came from in order to make sense of her.

L acey is happy to disclose bits from her own past. As we scanned our menus, she told me that she’s been a vegetarian ever since she read Leviticus during her church-intensive childhood and decided that no matter what her mother said, she’d likely spend eternity in the furnaces of hell if she mixed milk and meat. Her attachment to her Christianity was fierce and then suddenly gone: “I had a total certitude about why the world was put together, the way that it was put together, what happens after you die. It made all these answers completely clear.” She left her faith and Mississippi around the same time, and wound up with a hole that those identities used to occupy.

Her answerless fiction is a new way of working through those big questions; it’s also gorgeously anti-solution—those “viewers” who witness An Account of My Abduction have been conned by the art world into believing that revelation is the end point of any narrative. “I’m constructing this whole fictional thing because it feels like the only way to clearly convey something that I’m feeling,” Lacey noted with a head shake and some laughing exasperation, “which is ridiculous.”

As if its main conceit isn’t distorting enough, Biography of X also steps through a side door to present a bizarro alternate version of American history. Just months after X’s birth, in 1945, the novel’s America split into three big chunks: the libertarian Western Territory, the socialist Northern Territory, and the theocratic Southern Territory, which covertly built a wall and locked itself in. The latter didn’t reunite with the rest of the country until weeks after X’s death, in 1996—“as if her very existence were tethered to that dangerous, doomed boundary.” This lets Lacey imagine a South that could physically trap X as a child, and hint that X might be so powerful as to bend the world, once out of her control, to her whim.

Lacey’s characters usually don’t escape the South intact. (“I felt wrong there,” Lacey offered—an idea she repeated to me over and over.) In The Answers , a girl is entirely isolated on a farm in Tennessee with her radical-Christian father and simpering mother, fed Bible verses and kept blind to pop culture, that American golden calf. She wanders adulthood in search of experiences that might make her a full person. Pew revolves around someone with no discernible age, gender, or race, no background or history—found in a church in a small, unnamed southern town, where citizens fight to decide whether the vulnerable stranger should be sheltered, as Jesus commands, or rejected. Pew ends up “alone” and “gone” and entirely unaccounted for. In Lacey’s South, the region’s external pressure to conform produces irreparably cracked identities.

Read: She never meant to write a memoir

Early on, CM learns that X was one of a very small number of people who escaped the Southern Territory, where, as along the Berlin Wall, armed guards shot down anyone caught crossing. X’s birth identity, it turns out, was Carrie Lu Walker of Byhalia, Mississippi (75 miles from Lacey’s Tupelo); her childhood of purged libraries, global isolation, church-house education, and female submission radicalized her into rebellion and then escape. X’s manifestos embrace the notion that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges.” And the revelations about X’s childhood give CM the feeling that she is making progress toward understanding her wife’s work, now “more folded with meaning and complication.” For X, a refugee from religious tyranny, the act of self-creation was about addition, not subtraction.

This alternate America is a distorted version of our own, ratcheted up just enough that it reads like a dream state. The result is pleasantly disorienting; it gives the feeling that history is operated by a series of levers, and that fiction can yank on some of them to spit out varied, unruly results. If art kick-starts a “total, ongoing delusion,” as X writes, then Lacey understands that setting her work inside a prototype of a slightly different world—with the socialist Emma Goldman as an architect of the American economy, with Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder killed off so that “women were seen as the sex to whom ‘art’ belonged,” with reparations paid for the descendants of the enslaved—keeps the ground just unsteady enough that certainty floats away.

J anet Malcolm has called biography “the arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life.” Biography of X came from an experiment designed to amplify that notion by turning it on its head: Use a novel to create a fake biography, then splice in enough of those “bits and pieces of a life” to make it seem real even as Lacey never loses sight of the artifice of it all.

Readers might feel the impulse to parse CM’s reporting for some base truth, but they’d be missing the point. Practically speaking—and Lacey is a devotee of practicality, meticulously explaining to me how each decision in the novel resulted from a set of what she called “enticing boundaries” she’d set for herself—the book is a highly stylized crossbreed of genres. A set of footnotes cites imaginary magazine articles, interviews, and profiles about X by real-life writers such as Joshua Rivkin, Naomi Fry, Hermione Hoby, and Renata Adler. Some of them swirl our reality with the book’s—Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker , her biography of the punk writer, is cited, but with a publication date 15 years early; there’s a magazine (perhaps a cousin of this one) called The Atlantic Coast ; the artist Alex Prager films a documentary about a seditious librarian in the Southern Territory. The second set of annotations are Lacey’s 13 pages of endnotes. They cite the parts of our world that she’s collaged into hers: a Tom Waits speech that X recites verbatim; a character’s murder that’s modeled on the assassination of Kim Jong Un’s brother; a quote from Lacey’s own first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing , that she attributes to another one of X’s personas, called Angel Thornbird.

The writer David Shields, whose book Reality Hunger employed written collage to illustrate the power of creative borrowing, counseled Lacey to leave those annotations out and let the audience wonder. “But I’m not really trying to get away with something,” she said, while we ordered tea after lunch. It’s vital to her that readers see the wires she crossed and the easy co-opting of one reality for another. What better material to screw with than what people already believe to be indubitable? For Lacey, fiction—and biography—aren’t precious little feats to be preserved in formaldehyde. “The more you buy into the idea that you are somehow the entity that’s really responsible for your work, the unhappier you are,” she said. She wishes her own name weren’t on her novels, and claims she isn’t the authority on them. The self can’t be siphoned off from the work, but it needn’t be the work. “X believed that making fiction was sacred,” CM writes, “and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world.” Biography of X moves past autofiction: The reality of a personal history is no more reliable than the uncertainty of fiction.

Read: Six books that will change how you look at art

By sheer luck, the artist Alex Prager, known for her staged, cinematic photos, and now grafted into Lacey’s book, had a new multimedia show that had just opened, and Lacey and I took the C train up to Chelsea to catch it. Part Two: Run! was set in one of Prager’s signature simulacrums: a movie set so luminous and sharp-cornered that it was obviously constructed for the camera. In a short film, four aggressively wigged and costumed actors—to me, all Xs in their invented selves—pushed a giant pinball down the set’s street; it mowed down everyone in its path, but they were miraculously resurrected, standing back up, brushing themselves off. There was a pinball machine too, so observers could implicate themselves: Neither of us was any good. And in the corner, there was a sculptural installation in which a life-size “body,” in a demure gingham dress and sensible heels, lay crushed under the movie’s mammoth mirrored ball. Where the head ought to have been was the ball, and the reflection created a continuation of the body, another body, another self.

While we watched the film, Lacey wondered out loud how the camera wasn’t captured in the ball’s reflection—an artist concerned with the technicality of craft. Standing in front of the orb, we could easily see ourselves, made small but still present, us and another version of us. For a moment, I could imagine that Lacey’s reflection would simply walk away without her.

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StarTribune

Review: 'biography of x,' by catherine lacey.

When Catherine Lacey's latest novel begins, X, a famous artist, is already dead, but she is omnipresent on the page. The narrator of "Biography of X," journalist C.M. Lucca, is also X's widow, and her grief is exacerbated by how little she knows about her late wife. (Examples include X's place of birth, X's parents, and X's given name.)

X declined to cooperate with her would-be biographers during her lifetime, and in the wake of her death, C.M. assumes the role of oppositionist. "Her life will not become a historical object," C.M. insists. Shortly thereafter, in seeking the stories of X, she becomes a reluctant biographer.

Lacey complicates X's willful air of mystery by setting the work in a dystopian landscape. Although states and cities maintain their current names, the country that X and C.M. inhabit has an alternative history: "In 1945 … a wall had been erected between much of the Deep South and the rest of the country."

X, born in what is known as the Southern Territory, flees after an act of political rebellion, abandoning her first identity (Caroline Luanna Walker), a husband, Paul, and Zebulon, a son she never mentions to C.M. "The trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving," C.M. muses — an understatement in the case of this marriage. With each interview C.M. conducts or file she reads, she gains a deeper understanding of how little she knew.

Lacey's approach to the making of fiction, in this case, is to adopt the structure and trappings of nonfiction. There are photographs of X and her family, as well as numerous citations and document clippings. There are excerpts from letters, interviews and diaries.

Lacey invokes the names of real publications, places, and, occasionally, people, to create this convincing pastiche. She takes risks by including, for instance, dense exposition — the history of the Southern, Northern and Western Territories has a detached, dry, purely informational tone — but these are risks taken in the service of authenticity. The prose feels bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Biography of X

By: Catherine Lacey.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 394 pages, $28.

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Biography of x, by catherine lacey, recommendations from our site.

“The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X , which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. It’s the book novelists are pressing into other novelists’ hands.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Summer 2023

Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

The book, according to the author

The counterfactual aspect of the book came out of a need to create a world in which two women could be married without it being an issue, and in order to create a world in which a woman could be powerfully creative during the 20th century in America without having to first account or apologize for her gender. Before I wrote anything I had this sense of X, a brazenly creative yet deeply flawed woman, and the woman who loved her and their relationship. I could see and feel it so vividly, but I didn’t want the plot to be encumbered by the sexism of the 20th century. So I tried to envision a different, but still deeply flawed, world where they could create and love and suffer on their own terms—more or less.

The Best Counterfactual Novels recommended by Catherine Lacey

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Pew by catherine lacey, our most recommended books, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, the shining by stephen king, the road by cormac mccarthy, judge dredd by john wagner, alan grant and carlos ezquerra.

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‘Biography of X’ is a brilliant novel that remixes art and history

Catherine lacey’s new book is written from the perspective of a journalist investigating the life of her wife, a renowned and notorious artist.

Catherine Lacey’s brilliant, astonishing new novel, “ Biography of X ,” is presented to the reader as a book by a fictional character, a journalist named C.M. Lucca. More than a year after the death of her wife, a renowned and notorious artist who called herself X, Lucca embarks on a mission to uncover the most basic facts of her spouse’s life: her real name, the date and place of her birth. It’s 1997, and Theodore Smith’s unauthorized biography of X, “A Woman Without a History,” has just been published to fantastic acclaim.

Like all biographies, Smith’s is false. How can the infinite contours of any one life be contained in a book? As Lacey-as-Lucca observes: “People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative”; or, as X herself remarks in an interview Lacey imagines with the real-life critic and curator Robert Storr, people “don’t stay the same unless they’re dead.” “The trouble with knowing people,” Lucca writes, “is how the target keeps moving.”

Still, Smith’s biography is even more pandering and deceptive than most. At first, Lucca is driven by grief and revenge. At the end of her seven-year search, she will have completed “The Biography of X” and distanced herself almost entirely from the woman she thought she knew and still loves.

Everything in Lacey’s novel is turned upside down. At the time of X’s death in 1996, the United States is attempting reunification after its bloody division into the Northern, Southern and Western Territories two decades before. The state of Kentucky stands alone, having refused the Southern theocracy’s alcohol ban. By the 1970s, cultural commentators in the elite, educated North worried that female artists had become overrepresented. “Outsider” artists Larry Rivers and Yves Klein staged a guerrilla show of their work outside the Guggenheim to protest because the museum hadn’t exhibited any work by a man in more than 10 years.

X herself, and her prodigious oeuvre, is an amalgam of nearly every important cultural figure in late-20th-century writing, music and art. She collaborates with the forgotten singer-songwriter Connie Converse. She writes lyrics for David Bowie. Like Kanye West, she begins as a self-taught producer but ends up a star. Her writings appropriate work by Denis Johnson, Jean Rhys, Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag.

Her artworks — created, for the first decade of her career, under a series of aliases — mirror projects by Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, Adrian Piper, Louise Bourgeois and the collective Bernadette Corporation. For example, in the novel, Bourgeois’s famed 1978 performance “Confrontation” becomes X-as-Vera’s 1979 debut, “Provocation.” After a survey exhibition in 1982, “The Human Subject,” X retires her dozens of aliases and settles upon X as her name.

Even the commentaries on her work and career are created by Lacey from skewed sources — essays by real household names, mine included, in the very small town of American art criticism. The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse.

As Lucca quickly discovers, X’s compulsion for fictitious identity arose from a practical need. Born (like Lacey herself) in Mississippi as Caroline Luanna Walker, X married young, had a child and participated in a doomed attempt, when she was 23, to blow up the Revelation Rifle factory with six like-minded friends. “Art,” as X once declared, “is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves.”

Presumed dead, she flees and then drifts around the libertarian Western Territory between campgrounds and jobs, using a series of forged IDs. Two of her fellow survivors, Ted Gold and Kathy Boudin, also remain defined by the factory attack. Gold defects to the North and becomes a professional advocate of all liberal causes, a respectable version of his younger self. Boudin meets the sad fate of her contemporary Valerie Solanas — destitute, drunk and then dead in a San Francisco SRO.

But X chooses life, chooses change. After meeting and falling in love with Converse (a real-life pioneer singer-songwriter who failed to receive recognition and disappeared in 1974), X moves to New York as “Bee Converse” in 1972. Adopted by a bored socialite, she strategically works her way into the heart of New York’s underground, even doing a stint at the live Times Square sex show Fun City, as Acker did in 1971.

Assuming the diligently plodding persona of Lucca, Lacey writes about the divisions between North, West and South with timely ambivalence. Despite the North’s social progress in guaranteeing universal income, health care and child care, Lucca is unmoored by its intrinsic materialism and spiritual chaos. Appalled by the South’s racist brutality, she remains sympathetic to the simple need for belief that its theocracy fills. She is fully aware of how numbed people are by misinformation and how it undermines the very idea of objective truth, but like X, she believes deeply in the power of fiction. X, Lucca writes, longed to live in fiction (“that sanctity”) and “not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world.”

As Lucca’s investigations into the unknown corners of X’s life progress, she comes to see her beloved’s brave, reckless forays beyond boundaries as acts of intentional cruelty, as when she seduced and ghosted the feminist theorist Carla Lonzi during a few intense weeks in Milan. Lucca’s quest culminates with the shocking discovery of a never-before-seen exhibition, housed in a Santa Fe, N.M., storage locker, which reveals X’s control of their marriage and of Lucca’s own life. Like Maurice Conchis in John Fowles’s novel “ The Magus ” (1965), X was a master manipulator, drawing the unwitting Lucca into a seductive series of games.

Lacey’s remarkable debut novel, “ Nobody Is Ever Missing ,” captured the disturbed mental drift of a young woman as she hitchhiked around New Zealand in a cloud of unprocessed grief. Lucca’s quest to “know” X is more focused, and she emerges by the end of the book as someone more certain. Declaring an uneasy truce with irresolution, she is aware that she’ll never know X, “as if we could ever say for certain where she ended and where the world began.”

Chris Kraus is the author of eight books, including “I Love Dick,” “Summer of Hate” and “After Kathy Acker: A Biography.”

Biography of X

By Catherine Lacey

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 394 pp. $28

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Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

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From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

The publisher was unable to provide an excerpt for this book.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• In a Guardian review, Marcel Theroux called Biography of X "a lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book." Discuss the structure of Biography of X . How does Lacey employ methods typically used in nonfiction? Why do you think she choose to approach her subject in this way? What's the effect of doing so?
• What did you think of CM? What do you think attracted her to X initially? Describe her relationship with X. Do you think their relationship works? Explain your answer.
• What's the effect of having images interspersed throughout the book? Did they enhance your understanding of the events described? If so, how? Were there other images that you would have liked to see? What were they?
• Maureen Corrigan described Biography of X as "a...
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As a series of stories about an eccentric and bizarre person, Biography of X has plenty of moments of brilliance. The central premise that intrigued me was the question suggested by CM's quest: How well do we really know those we love, those we've chosen to spend our lives with? But CM's situation is so hyper-specific, her wife so willfully, intentionally unknowable, a literal master of disguise, that it lacks some of the universal appeal that might have otherwise invited readers to reflect on their own relationships. What holds the novel together is suspense. As CM finds out more about her wife, it becomes clear that X had a history of using and manipulating people, and even the occasional act of violence... continued

(Reviewed by Lisa Butts ).

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In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

Published 2020

About this book

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A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties .

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At once a twisted psychological portrait of a woman crumbling under unimaginable pressure and a razor-sharp satire of the contemporary art scene, Fake Like Me is a dark, glamorous, and addictive story of good intentions gone awry, from the critically acclaimed author of I'll Eat When I'm Dead .

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Meta’s Smart Glasses Are Becoming Artificially Intelligent. We Took Them for a Spin.

What happens when a columnist and a reporter use A.I. glasses to scan groceries, monuments and zoo animals? Hilarity, wonder and lots of mistakes ensued.

Brian X. Chen, left, and Mike Isaac, reporters for The New York Times, trying out Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses. Credit... Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

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By Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac

Brian X. Chen is The Times’s personal tech columnist, and Mike Isaac is the beat reporter covering Meta.

• March 28, 2024

In a sign that the tech industry keeps getting weirder, Meta soon plans to release a big update that transforms the Ray-Ban Meta, its camera glasses that shoot videos, into a gadget seen only in sci-fi movies.

Next month, the glasses will be able to use new artificial intelligence software to see the real world and describe what you’re looking at, similar to the A.I. assistant in the movie “Her.”

The glasses, which come in various frames starting at $300 and lenses starting at $17, have mostly been used for shooting photos and videos and listening to music. But with the new A.I. software, they can be used to scan famous landmarks, translate languages and identify animal breeds and exotic fruits, among other tasks.

To use the A.I. software, wearers just say, “Hey, Meta,” followed by a prompt, such as “Look and tell me what kind of dog this is.” The A.I. then responds in a computer-generated voice that plays through the glasses’ tiny speakers.

The concept of the A.I. software is so novel and quirky that when we — Brian X. Chen, a tech columnist who reviewed the Ray-Bans last year, and Mike Isaac, who covers Meta and wears the smart glasses to produce a cooking show — heard about it, we were dying to try it. Meta gave us early access to the update, and we took the technology for a spin over the last few weeks.

We wore the glasses to the zoo, grocery stores and a museum while grilling the A.I. with questions and requests.

The upshot: We were simultaneously entertained by the virtual assistant’s goof-ups — for example, mistaking a monkey for a giraffe — and impressed when it carried out useful tasks like determining that a pack of cookies was gluten-free.

‘Hey, Meta, What Am I Looking At?’

What happens when a columnist and a reporter use A.I. glasses to scan groceries, monuments and zoo animals?

A Meta spokesman said that because the technology was still new, the artificial intelligence wouldn’t always get things right, and that feedback would improve the glasses over time.

Meta’s software also created transcripts of our questions and the A.I.’s responses, which we captured in screenshots. Here are the highlights from our month of coexisting with Meta’s assistant.

BRIAN: Naturally, the very first thing I had to try Meta’s A.I. on was my corgi, Max. I looked at the plump pooch and asked, “Hey, Meta, what am I looking at?”

“A cute Corgi dog sitting on the ground with its tongue out,” the assistant said. Correct, especially the part about being cute.

MIKE: Meta’s A.I. correctly recognized my dog, Bruna, as a “black and brown Bernese Mountain dog.” I half expected the A.I. software to think she was a bear, the animal that she is most consistently mistaken for by neighbors.

Zoo Animals

BRIAN: After the A.I. correctly identified my dog, the logical next step was to try it on zoo animals. So I recently paid a visit to the Oakland Zoo in Oakland, Calif., where, for two hours, I gazed at about a dozen animals, including parrots, tortoises, monkeys and zebras. I said: “Hey, Meta, look and tell me what kind of animal that is.”

The A.I. was wrong the vast majority of the time, in part because many animals were caged off and farther away. It mistook a primate for a giraffe, a duck for a turtle and a meerkat for a giant panda, among other mix-ups. On the other hand, I was impressed when the A.I. correctly identified a species of parrot known as the blue-and-gold macaw, as well as zebras.

The strangest part of this experiment was speaking to an A.I. assistant around children and their parents. They pretended not to listen to the only solo adult at the park as I seemingly muttered to myself.

MIKE: I also had a peculiar time grocery shopping. Being inside a Safeway and talking to myself was a bit embarrassing, so I tried to keep my voice low. I still got a few sideways looks.

When Meta’s A.I. worked, it was charming. I picked up a pack of strange-looking Oreos and asked it to look at the packaging and tell me if they were gluten-free. (They were not.) It answered questions like these correctly about half the time, though I can’t say it saved time compared with reading the label.

But the entire reason I got into these glasses in the first place was to start my own Instagram cooking show — a flattering way of saying I record myself making food for the week while talking to myself. These glasses made doing so much easier than using a phone and one hand.

The A.I. assistant can also offer some kitchen help. If I need to know how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon and my hands are covered in olive oil, for example, I can ask it to tell me. (There are three teaspoons in a tablespoon, just FYI.)

But when I asked the A.I. to look at a handful of ingredients I had and come up with a recipe, it spat out rapid-fire instructions for an egg custard — not exactly helpful for following directions at my own pace.

A handful of examples to choose from could have been more useful, but that might require tweaks to the user interface and maybe even a screen inside my lenses.

A Meta spokesman said users could ask follow-up questions to get tighter, more useful responses from its assistant.

BRIAN: I went to the grocery store and bought the most exotic fruit I could find — a cherimoya, a scaly green fruit that looks like a dinosaur egg. When I gave Meta’s A.I. multiple chances to identify it, it made a different guess each time: a chocolate-covered pecan, a stone fruit, an apple and, finally, a durian, which was close, but no banana.

Monuments and Museums

MIKE: The new software’s ability to recognize landmarks and monuments seemed to be clicking. Looking down a block in downtown San Francisco at a towering dome, Meta’s A.I. correctly responded, “City Hall.” That’s a neat trick and perhaps helpful if you’re a tourist.

Other times were hit or miss. As I drove home from the city to my house in Oakland, I asked Meta what bridge I was on while looking out the window in front of me (both hands on the wheel, of course). The first response was the Golden Gate Bridge, which was wrong. On the second try, it figured out I was on the Bay Bridge, which made me wonder if it just needed a clearer shot of the newer portion’s tall, white suspension poles to be right.

BRIAN: I visited San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art to check if Meta’s A.I. could do the job of a tour guide. After snapping photos of about two dozen paintings and asking the assistant to tell me about the piece of art I was looking at, the A.I. could describe the imagery and what media was used to compose the art — which would be nice for an art history student — but it couldn’t identify the artist or title. (A Meta spokesman said another software update it released after my museum visit improved this ability.)

After the update, I tried looking at images on my computer screen of more famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa, and the A.I. correctly identified those.

BRIAN: At a Chinese restaurant, I pointed at a menu item written in Chinese and asked Meta to translate it into English, but the A.I. said it currently only supported English, Spanish, Italian, French and German. (I was surprised, because Mark Zuckerberg learned Mandarin.)

MIKE: It did a pretty good job translating a book title into German from English.

Bottom Line

Meta’s A.I.-powered glasses offer an intriguing glimpse into a future that feels distant. The flaws underscore the limitations and challenges in designing this type of product. The glasses could probably do better at identifying zoo animals and fruit, for instance, if the camera had a higher resolution — but a nicer lens would add bulk. And no matter where we were, it was awkward to speak to a virtual assistant in public. It’s unclear if that ever will feel normal.

But when it worked, it worked well and we had fun — and the fact that Meta’s A.I. can do things like translate languages and identify landmarks through a pair of hip-looking glasses shows how far the tech has come.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the blue-and-gold macaw. It is a species, not a breed.

How we handle corrections

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix , a column about the social implications of the tech we use. More about Brian X. Chen

Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley. More about Mike Isaac

Tech Fix: Solving Your Tech Problems

Trying Meta’s Smart Glasses: What happens when a columnist and a reporter use A.I. Ray-Bans to scan groceries, monuments and zoo animals? Hilarity, wonder and lots of mistakes ensued .

Ditch Your Wallet: Using your phone as a digital wallet is attainable , but it requires preparation and some compromise.

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Apple’s Vision Pro: The new headset  teaches a valuable lesson about the cost of tech products: The upsells and add-ons will get you .  

Going Old School: Retro-photography apps that mimic the appearance of analog film formats make your digital files seem like they’re from another era. Here’s how to use them .

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The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello ’s new picture “The Beast” (“La Bete”) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he’s talking about.

“‘You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing — may correspond to some possible reality?’

‘To some possible reality.’

‘Then you will watch with me?’”

And so May does. And Marcher’s fear translates into a passivity that compels him to hold May at arm’s length for the rest of his life. At the end of the story, he mourns a love he never allowed himself to have and understands that the catastrophe was his own fear.

In Bonello’s film, the fear belongs to the popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier ( Lea Seydoux ), who, around the time of the great 1910 flood of France’s City of Lights, confesses this fear to Louis ( George MacKay ), a young Englishman with whom she soon begins a tentative liaison. But the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with Gabrielle’s reticence to enter into a romantic relationship with Louis—although that does exist.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. A vision of three (actually four) nightmare times, all of them in the same vexed world.

The cataclysms that fall upon Gabrielle—played by a superbly controlled and often heartbreaking Lea Seydoux—aren’t spiritual or conceptual (well, of course, at first, they are), they’re “real,” or Real. They’re corporeal/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they’re unavoidable. Boy oh boy can you not stop what’s coming. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm, none of it will do you any good. Not even an alteration in the fabric of reality itself—and this seems to occur at least a half dozen times in the picture—will stave off horror. The beast isn’t in the jungle, it’s in the house, and it’s in the air we can only barely breathe when the movie gets to 2044. It is in us; it is us.

Sounds cheerful, right? Well, what can I tell you? Bonello has a way of throwing us into an enhanced vision of the degrading noise of contemporary life that’s all the more engaging for being so even-handed and deliberate. I mentioned three timelines that are actually four—the movie is framed, kind of, by a green-screen session in which Seydoux, possibly playing Gabrielle, possibly playing herself, is coached through paces for a scene in which she actually apprehends “the beast” and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The image degenerates into a gorgeous abstract mural of pixels. Digitization is here both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of aural and visual glitch. The movie then bounces through three time periods: 1910, 2044—where Gabrielle’s character seeks to abolish her reincarnation torment through a “DNA purge”—and most terrifyingly, 2014, wherein “Gabby” is housesitting in L.A. and targeted by the angry incel version of MacKay’s Louis—Louis Lewansky, who’s 30 and never been with a woman despite his “magnificence,” and who’s now getting ready to avenge himself.

Dolls are a recurring motif here—there are old-fashioned ones made for fans of the pianist Gabby, and unhelpful talking doll in the Hollywood house, and a walking, talking A.I. helper (played by Guslagie Malanda , as impressive here in a relatively small role as she was in the lead of 2022’s “ Saint Omer ”). An electrical fire figures in the 1910 sequence; a malware attack on a laptop is one of the insane blowups in the 2014 scenario. There are bits and pieces here that feel Lynchian, especially in the Los Angeles scenes, during which Gabrielle is fascinated/repulsed by a TV singing contest show that feels like it might have sprung full blown from the creator of “Twin Peaks.” Then there’s the fact that the love song recurring throughout shows up at the very end, sung in its original version by, well Roy Orbison. But unlike Lynch, Bonello has a decidedly un-obscure point to make. Mainly about how the pursuit of the authentic in life is invariably thwarted by roadblocks of humanity’s own making. (Although one supposes that the eighth episode of the 2018 “Twin Peaks” season treated that theme in a relatively unambiguous way.)

“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tries to reassure the movie’s scariest version of Louis at one point. Bonello, and this movie’s, greatest dread is that someday a terrible order will emerge, one that will make whatever beauty remains disappear. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Beast (2024)

146 minutes

Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle

George MacKay as Louis

Kester Lovelace as Tom

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Flint: Treasure of Oblivion First-Look Preview: Bringing the Pirate Life to a Tactical RPG

This new pirate crpg embraces life on the high seas in pursuit of treasure..

Even with Sea of Thieves and Skull and Bones out there, the pirate setting for video games still feels woefully underutilized. But now, another game aims to blend the big stakes and dangers on the high-seas conceit with a narrative-driven tactical RPG framework. The upcoming Flint: Treasure of Oblivion looks to bring that pirate fantasy to life in an interesting new way by leaning into the mystique and intrigue of living life on the high seas.

In this first look at the upcoming CRPG, I got to see Flint's approach to a swashbuckling tactical RPG in action. It's all about building up a trustworthy crew and exploring the port towns and dangerous waters during the rebellious golden age of pirates.

As the debut game from developer Savage Level, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel Treasure Island, a story focusing on pirates in search of a lost treasure trove left behind by the infamous Captain Flint. In this tactical RPG, we follow the exploits of Captain Flint, his shipmate Billy Bones, and a larger crew of pirates as they search for glory and tons of loot during a booming and dangerous period of piracy.

Flint: Treasure of Oblivion – Spring 2024 Screenshots

Along with the many tavern and back alley brawls the crew will get into, Captain Flint will also run into a swath of co nflicts with rival pirates in temples and on the open waters, all leading up to the discovery of a mysterious treasure cache that sets the stage for the original novel.

According to the developers in our preview, Flint leans heavily into the life of being a pirate and managing a crew, with some elements of dark fantasy seeping in as the adventure progresses. Speaking with production director Saïda Mirzoeva, she stated that the story aims to be historically accurate to the era and the original novel while leaning into the freeform experience of a tactical RPG.

Flint follows that tried and true CRPG formula, with you exploring the world from an isometric view to engage in combat and social interactions with various characters throughout the game. Focusing more on a stylized, "double-AA" adventure instead of the sprawling scope of games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, the pirate CRPG features a mix of scripted story encounters with choice-driven moments, all presented in a comic book-style adventure as Flint's ragtag crew of pirates grows their influence.

As you explore more of Flint's world, you'll expand your crew of pirates, all carrying unique skills and archetypes to experiment with. Your crew choices will be tested in battle, which plays out in turn-based combat, with you commanding the crew's movement and actions on a hex-tile battlefield. The success of your actions to trade steel or fire your flintlock pistols at your opponents is determined by the luck of the dice, with a success= ful roll resulting in connecting hits or critical damage but a bad roll resulting in a miss.

Flint's take on combat carries many of the familiar ideas and designs from other CRPGs in the current boom for the genre, but the pirate mystique adds a lot of charm and intrigue, which makes Flint's take on a tactical RPG feel unique. One attractive trait that I wish we got to see more of was the crew synergies. By pairing crew members with similar or complementing archetypes, you can power up your skills in battle – turning your pirate crew into more of an imposing force.

Another area that applies pirate logic to the role-playing experience is in how you power up your crew. In Flint, loot is a monetary an=d experience resource, and you'll have to decide whether to buy items or give money to your crew to level them up and augment their skills. While most RPGs generally give you upgrades by taking out enemies, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion focuses more on the acquisition of loot by any means, which can be found from social engagements and other activities – and in some cases, talking your way out of combat can also net you loot as well.

Living out a pirate's life during the golden age within a CRPG is such a cool concept, and so far, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion shows off some clever ways of marrying the weird and seafaring pirate lifestyle with a role-playing game. While I wish I could have gotten to see more of its more significant ideas about exploring the high seas with its crew, the golden age of pirates is a prosperous era for a game to explore, and Flint: Treasure of Oblivion has the makings of a compelling setting to navigate in a role-playing game.

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Best term life insurance companies

How to find the best term life insurance company for you, frequently asked questions.

Not everyone needs life insurance that covers you for your entire life. For anyone looking for more temporary coverage — like those with young children or a mortgage to pay off — there is term life insurance. Term life insurance provides coverage for a pre-set period of time, which is usually between 10 and 30 years. In exchange for your regularly paid premium, your beneficiaries receive a payout if you die while the policy is active. However, the payout tends to be lower compared to other types of life insurance policies. Bankrate’s guide to the best term life insurance can help you find an insurer that meets your policy needs and budget.

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Whole life insurance combines life insurance with an investment component.

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Term life insurance is precisely what the name implies: an insurance policy that is good for a specific term of time.

• Fixed premium over term
• No savings benefits
• Outliving policy or policy cancellation results in no money back

The best term life insurance companies depend on an individual’s needs and preferences. While your quoted premium will typically not vary as much as for life quotes as home or auto insurance, different companies do offer different coverage types and levels. We chose the following companies based on their third-party financial strength and J.D. Power customer satisfaction scores , as well as the policy options and available coverage capacities (the maximum dollar amount a policy can be). It may be helpful to start your research with the following providers:

Why we chose it: State Farm has the highest J.D. Power score for customer satisfaction on our list.

State Farm is our 2024 Bankrate Awards winner for Best Term Life Insurer for the third year in a row thanks to its superior AM Best score and near-nationwide availability. State Farm offers several term insurance products, but its return-of-premium policy option may be particularly helpful for certain term life insurance policyholders. This add-on coverage (also known as a life insurance rider ) lets policyholders choose between a 20- or 30-year payment term and receive a portion of their premiums back if they outlive the term. The return-of-premium policy can be renewed annually until age 95. While the return-of-premium option comes at an additional cost, it also builds cash value , which is rare in a term life insurance policy.

Why we chose it: Mutual of Omaha offers easy online quoting for its term life insurance policies and a wide array of riders for potential policy customization.

If you want to get an idea of how much term life insurance might cost, Mutual of Omaha offers a term life insurance quote tool online. Enter your gender, date of birth, tobacco usage and coverage amount to get a rate. Mutual of Omaha offers a plethora of additional riders that can be added to its term life policies. It should be noted that not every rider can be used with every type of policy. To verify how much coverage you need and which riders can be added to your policy, you may want to consult with an agent. This company also offers a locator service to help you find a financial advisor near you.

Why we chose it: Pacific Life has term life insurance policy options with high coverage levels.

Anyone wanting to tailor their term life insurance with riders or purchase higher coverage limits might consider Pacific Life for term life insurance. The carrier offers two policy options, Promise Term and Elite Term, both of which are convertible to cash value life insurance. Its Promise Term policy offers a minimum amount of $50,000 in coverage, while the Elite Term starts at $750,000 and goes to $3 million or more. Available options include a waiver of premium for disability, as well as a terminal illness and child term rider.

Why we chose it: Northwestern Mutual offers a wide array of informational resources and policy management tools online.

Northwestern Mutual is the largest life insurer in the U.S. by direct premiums written, with just over 7 percent of the total market share. The company has been insuring consumers for more than 150 years. Its term policies allow you to select your coverage period based on either a set amount of years or until a specific age, depending on which option is most suitable for you. Northwestern Mutual plans are also convertible to whole life insurance , meaning you may be able to adjust your policy as your needs evolve. The company’s A++ (Superior) financial strength rating from AM Best is the highest level available. However, the company only offers one term life insurance rider, so if you want greater policy customization, it may not be the carrier for you.

Why we chose it: Guardian life insurance offers four different term lengths and a long list of potential riders.

Guardian's term life insurance policies are available in four term lengths. The carrier also has a long list of riders for potential policy customization, including a guaranteed renewability clause in the event that you are diagnosed with a serious illness. However, be aware that the company does not offer a network of local agents, so if you prefer to handle your insurance needs face-to-face, you may not be satisfied with the level of service.

There are several factors to consider when shopping for a quality term life insurance policy. Since your life insurance will ultimately be responsible for providing the coverage you want for your family, these considerations may be beneficial to keep in mind when determining which provider is right for you. In addition to policy types, you could consider the following.

Consider customer satisfaction scores and financial strength ratings

Customer satisfaction scores may provide insight for consumers looking to purchase insurance products. These scores reflect how satisfied existing customers may be with the customer service and claims process. You might use these scores to get an idea of how your customer experience could be and which carrier might best fit your expectations.

A life insurance company’s financial strength score reflects its past ability to pay out claims and could help you decide if a company is financially sound. Third-party agencies such as AM Best and S&P publish financial strength ratings for each major provider.

Consider your personal situation

Term life insurance remains active for only a set number of years. To decide whether term life insurance is right for you, it may be helpful to consider what you want coverage for. Do you simply want coverage while your children are young, or would you prefer lifelong coverage?

While term life insurance may be sufficient for temporary needs, like ensuring you could pay off debt and finance college for your kids if you were to pass away, it may not be the right choice if you want coverage for longer. If you need coverage for final expenses or to take care of a lifelong dependent, permanent life insurance may be a better choice. There are several options to choose from, including:

• Whole life insurance : Whole life offers level premiums and a guaranteed death benefit for life. It also builds cash value over time, which you may be able to access through withdrawals or loans. 
• Universal life insurance : Similar to whole life, universal life offers permanent coverage with more flexibility. You can increase or decrease premium payments or the death benefit if life circumstances change. 
• Final expense life insurance : If you only need a small amount of coverage or have serious health issues, final expense life insurance may be your best option. It works like whole life, but doesn’t require a medical exam. Some policies are guaranteed issue, meaning there is no medical exam or health questions on the application. 

Compare multiple quotes

Getting quotes for different types and levels of coverage may help you get an idea of how much you’ll pay for your life insurance. However, keep in mind that term life insurance quotes for the same person and policy type likely won’t vary as much from company to company as auto insurance or home insurance quotes do.

How does term life insurance work?

Term life insurance is a type of life insurance that offers coverage for a set period of time, or term. Term life is usually the most affordable type of life insurance because it only lasts for a specific number of years, usually 10 to 30 years. Unless you buy return-of-premium life insurance, you receive nothing back if you outlive the term. However, many term life insurance policies offer the option to convert to a permanent life insurance policy at the end of the term. Many carriers also provide the option to renew a term life policy annually if you still need coverage past the expiration date.

What is the difference between term and whole life insurance?

Term insurance is designed to provide a death benefit if the insured passes away within the policy term. As the name suggests, term life insurance remains active for a predetermined “term,” which is the window of time that the policyholder chooses — typically between 10 and 30 years. When the term expires, the policyholder stops paying the premiums and the death benefit will no longer be paid out. Whole life insurance , on the other hand, is a type of permanent policy that pays out when the insured dies as long as premiums are paid. It typically contains two parts: a death benefit and a cash value component. Because whole life insurance policies usually have larger payouts, premiums can be two to three times more expensive than a term policy.

What factors impact my life insurance premium?

Life insurance premiums are largely based on mortality risk. In general, the higher the likelihood someone has of passing away while the policy is active, the higher the premium will be. Each insurer has its own underwriting algorithm for calculating your rate. Although each underwriting process is different, your age, gender, weight, health conditions, smoking history and occupation are typically used to help calculate your premium. The amount of coverage that you want to purchase is another key factor in determining the cost of life insurance . For those looking for cheap life insurance , it may be wiser to start shopping at a younger age.

Does having a preexisting condition impact my ability to purchase term life insurance?

Yes, having a preexisting condition may impact your ability to purchase term life insurance. Different conditions may be considered more or less serious by different insurers. If a life insurance provider does approve you for a term life policy with a preexisting condition, your premium may be high to reflect the health risks. Insurance providers may be more likely to approve you if you have conditions that can be managed. For instance, if you have Type 2 diabetes and maintain a healthy lifestyle, you may be more likely to be approved for term life insurance. If you have a preexisting condition, speaking with a licensed insurance agent may help you navigate your life insurance options.

Is term life insurance cheaper than whole life insurance?

The cost of life insurance will vary based on your policy details and personal rating factors, but term life insurance coverage is typically cheaper than whole life insurance, a type of permanent coverage. This is because whole life insurance is designed to offer coverage for your entire life and guarantee a payout to your beneficiaries, as long as premiums are paid and terms of the policy are met. Term coverage, on the other hand, may not pay out a death benefit if you outlive the policy term and do not renew your coverage. That being said, the cost of life insurance coverage varies based on coverage amount and individual risk rating factors, so a term policy with a high coverage amount for an older individual may cost more than a permanent policy for a younger applicant with a low coverage amount.

REVIEW: ‘X-Men ‘97’ Episode 4 — “Montendo/Lifedeath”

J ubilee ( Holly Chou ), Storm ( Alison Sealy-Smith ), and Gambit’s ( A. J. LoCascio ) crop top get the spotlight in X-Men ’97 Episode 4 , “Montendo/Lifedeath.” Following the explosive nature of Episode 3 , Episode 4 allows for more playfulness in the first half before transforming into something with more emotional weight. While the Storm-centered storyline is more poignant, the split between the two doesn’t allow for dissonance so much as it plays into the comic framework it’s built on. It’s a necessary breather, even if that doesn’t negate the grief and trauma Storm is working through.

The first storyline, however, revolves around Jubilee, who is turning 18. All she wants to do is go to the arcade to celebrate. But, much to her chagrin, her plans deflate due to Magneto ( Matthew Waterson ). He believes the team needs to prepare for any and all potential ensuing battles. She unleashes her teenage angst against Roberto ( Gui Agustini ). Roberto, who spends a lot of time at the X-Men mansion following Episode 1 . Jubilee tries to alleviate her mood by playing video games, only for the two to be transported into a video game themselves.

This is all due to the work of the villain Mojo. Mojo is an alien TV producer looking to entertain and grow his intergalactic audience. Each level of the game is based on moments that Jubilee has experienced. She accepts the challenge even if the risk of dying in the game would also mean they die in real life. But considering the shift that comes with turning 18, she’s looking for any semblance of familiarity. There’s comfort even in fighting an evil Magneto rather than the newly reformed version of him who knows how Rouge ( Lenore Zann ) takes her coffee.

It’s not a high-stakes storyline, but it allows for several things. First, fans can see the entire expanse of Jubilee’s powers. There’s a joyful vibrancy to how the animatos capture them, expressive and eager in a manner that matches her personality. Secondly, it allows the animators to play with style and form as they indulge in ’90s game aesthetics and callbacks. Again, there’s an apparent reverence for the original series and the decade it’s set in, from the ensembles the characters do to the way the video game comes to life.

Jubilee’s growth and romance with Roberto might not be as critical as the revelation of Jean being a clone in Episode 3. However, X-Men ’97 Episode 4 remembers that a crucial feature of the team is tracking how they all deal with growing and developing their powers. Jubilee is young and embraces her powers. It makes sense that the biggest hurdle would be the lack of stability and the change that comes from growing older.

It proves a stark difference from the storyline Storm is facing. She, too, gets a hint of romance with Forge ( Gil Birmingham ). But her storyline more directly confronts grief . Specifically, grief over the powers she no longer has. It’s perhaps one of the main tethers to two stories that couldn’t, on paper, be more different. Both Jubilee and Storm demonstrate love and pride for their powers. Of course, Storm is devastated. She no longer possesses what, to her, made her who she is and the hero people see as a goddess.

Forge is trying to help get Storm’s powers back to absolve his guilt and atone for past wrongs. After suffering injuries in a war resulting in the loss of one of his arms and legs, he was desperate to find material to help him heal. This, in turn, led him to create blueprints that the government distorts. His designs become a means to control and neutralize mutants. His guilt is obvious, though he tries to appeal to Storm’s empathy anyway. She isn’t ready to forgive this misdoing despite his attempts to help and their mutual fondness.

Instead, the episode ends on another cliffhanger as the two face off against a monster who preys on misery. It’s an exciting development. Now we must see if the attack initiates the return of Storm’s powers. That or if she must deal with the threat without them. The entire story between Storm and Forge is engaging. This is peak melodrama from the animation that emboldens the story with visual romanticism through sunsets and moonlit skies to the writing that tips into gripping declarations. It’s what we want from these stories and characters.

X-Men ’97 Episode 4 might not have the full narrative heft of Episode 3, but it delivers two stories that in turn are playful and mournful. By highlighting Jubilee and Storm, the series turns the spotlight on two deserving characters who enrich the story and the team at its center by grounding it in two different types of realism. The fear of growing older and the fear of the unknown.

X-Men ’97 Episode 4 is available now on Disney+.

The post REVIEW: ‘X-Men ‘97’ Episode 4 — “Montendo/Lifedeath” appeared first on But Why Tho? .

Denver, NC church fires lead pastor for sexual misconduct

Wbtv investigates: former pastor speaks; sheriff’s office ‘not aware of any crimes’.

DENVER, N.C. -- A large Denver church fired its lead pastor for violating workplace policies regarding sexual misconduct and harassment, church leaders announced in a detailed public letter this week.

Pursuit Church leadership terminated Jordan Green in a unanimous decision made effective on April 1.

In his first public statement on the matter, Green spoke to WBTV via text saying he was deeply heartbroken over the pain he had brought the church but disputed some of the statements made both in the public letter and in online discourse.

“Although I do believe there are things being said that are twisted versions of the truth or aren’t true at all, at the foundation of this is my genuine grievous sin against God and the church,” he said (his full statement is posted at the bottom of this article).

Pursuit Church posted the letter to their website on April 1, the timing of which also prompted confusion in a Facebook post. To date, the post has received more than 1,000 comments both supporting and opposing the church’s letter explaining their decision in detail.

“We want to be clear, Jordan Green committed acts of sexual misconduct which has deeply wounded his victims, the people who call Pursuit Church home and this leadership team,” leadership stated in the letter.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Naomi Kowles (@naomikowles)

The letter provided a timeline of when church leadership discovered the misconduct, including details about several meetings that took place between Green and other church leaders. The letter accuses Green of telling partial truths and manipulating his telling of events.

“Brave souls began to share their personal stories of how Jordan had harmed them during their employment at Pursuit Church,” the letter continued. “It was raw. It was angry. It was real.”

Leadership did not respond as of publishing time to a WBTV email asking if any incidents had been reported to law enforcement.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s spokesperson Larry Seagle told WBTV Wednesday night that his agency was not aware of any crimes involving Green at this time.

Founded in 2005, the church has a large following online with its 2022 annual report listing viewers in fifty countries and 220,000 streams on YouTube.

Much of that online popularity can be linked to Jordan Green himself, who as of this week has more than 55,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 15,000 followers on Instagram where he posts short clips from his sermons.

In 2022 , the church had more than $7,000,000 in total assets and received more than $2.7 million in donor cash, a 36% increase from the previous year. Online financial filings, including 990T forms with the IRS, did not list Green’s salary.

Jordan Green’s full statement to WBTV:

I am deeply heartbroken over the pain I’ve brought to the church and the shame I’ve brought on the name of Christ. Although I do believe there are things being said that are twisted versions of the truth or aren’t true at all at the foundation of this is my genuine grievous sin against God and his church. The Lord brought judgment and discipline down on my life which I am extremely thankful for. When God disciplines us it is always to deliver and never to destroy. I have and will continue to repent before the Lord and seek him through this season of discipline. I am deeply sorry for the pain I’ve caused to those involved and to the whole church. I love Pursuit Church and the whole church family and my hope and prayer is God will continue to immensely bless it now and in the future.

Copyright 2024 WBTV. All rights reserved.

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Biography of X Kindle Edition

When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed, counter-factual literary adventure, complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from David Bowie and Tom Waits to Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realises her wife's deceptions were far crueller than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art and love, and that introduces an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

• Print length 468 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Granta Books
• Publication date March 23, 2023
• File size 8588 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." ―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." ―Chris Kraus, The Washington Post "Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." ―Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic "In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." ―Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times "Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." ―Marcel Theroux, The Guardian "Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive―at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness―fiction can be." ―Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic "A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." ―Jude Cook, TLS " Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes―X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra―into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own." ― The New Yorker "Bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity." ― Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune "Brimming with negative capability, intrigue, and erudition, Biography of X is at once a tense, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the United States and a robustly supported argument for the idea that biographical knowledge alters the reading of an artwork." ―Jenny Wu, Los Angeles Review of Books "Lacey is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them . . . in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding." ―Emma Alpern, Vulture " Biography of X is criminally good, building on [Lacey's] previous five books’ fascination with the mutability of self with kaleidoscopic depth and astonishing propulsion . . . What is most spectacular is Lacey’s sleight of hand, inviting us to become engrossed in the unknowability of others, while gently reminding us that we, too, are unknowable―even and especially to ourselves." ―Ayden LeRoux, BOMB "Sweeping, ambitious . . . too expansive to simply be called a novel . . . The book is a provocative project―one that mirrors and refracts our own cultural obsession with celebrity and our nation’s broken politics." ―Sammy Loren, Document "One of the most inventive works I’ve read in a long time, Catherine Lacey’s latest novel is a must-read for fans of ambitious, genre-bending literary fiction." ―David Vogel, Buzzfeed "Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph." ― Kirkus (starred review) "An audacious novel of art and ideas . . . The author also perfectly marries her [character's] history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams." ― BookPage (starred review) "A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels." ― Library Journal (starred review) "Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process." ― Booklist "Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny, and a pure joy to spend hours with . . . Suffice it to say that it feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X , Catherine Lacey somehow―magically―makes the nearly impossible look easy." ―Lauren Groff, author of Matrix "I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once: a biography revealing masks beneath masks and faces beneath faces, a quest narrative unsure of what it's seeking, an impossibly ambitious parable about art and the enigma of others, an alternate history of America that serves as an X-ray of our own fractured country. Biography of X is a profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll―and maybe the con―of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it." ― Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You " Biography of X is the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed." ―Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby " Biography of X is a triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator." ― Sara Nović , author of True Biz

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNML8PM8
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books (March 23, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 23, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 8588 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 468 pages
• #229 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #756 in Marriage & Divorce Fiction
• #1,427 in Alternative History

About the author

Catherine lacey.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books— Biography of X, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.

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