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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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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, 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

Other books by Catherine Lacey

Pew by catherine lacey, our most recommended books, the shining by stephen king, the road by cormac mccarthy, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, grace williams says it loud by emma henderson.

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She Never Existed. Catherine Lacey Wrote Her Biography Anyway.

In her new novel, “Biography of X,” Lacey dreams up a larger-than-life, narcissistic artist, and rewrites American history to tell her story.

Share full article

The writer Catherine Lacey is seated, wearing a black scoopneck shirt with long sleeves. One of her tattoos, under her collarbone on her right side, is visible, and her face and right side of her body are in shadows. A desk with a lamp and mirror propped on it are in the background, as are two potted plants in a windowsill.

By Joumana Khatib

Tom Waits went to her wedding. David Bowie recorded her work — music so significant it was credited with helping to erode support for the Berlin Wall — but eventually found her odious. Like any interdisciplinary provocateur in the 1980s, she was an “occasional friend and occasional enemy” of Susan Sontag.

And, crucially, she never existed.

This controversial, identity-eschewing artist is the subject of Catherine Lacey’s new novel, “ Biography of X ,” a sneaky book that purports to be a work of investigative nonfiction written by X’s widow, C.M.

The story opens after X’s death in 1996, when C.M., incensed by an unauthorized book about her wife, sets out to write a corrective. A reporter by trade, she digs into X’s archives and legacy, compelled to understand the woman who had fascinated and terrified her. C.M. knew X was willing to trample on others in service of her art, but was not prepared for the extent of X’s deception and violence, leaving her to reconcile her love for an evasive monster.

Lacey once harbored the idea of being a journalist — she received an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction at Columbia — though over her career has found herself turning to fiction when she gets stuck. “Biography of X” began when Lacey tried to write a real biography. When that project stalled, she swerved back to familiar ground: fiction.

Lacey realized that many of the biographies that interested her were written by someone who was compromised in some way. In setting out to write her book, she explored the idea: Who would be the worst possible person to write a biography? Her answer was C.M., a widow torn apart by grief over the loss of a partner she revered.

A few things about the novel clicked right away: Lacey wasn’t interested in writing about a world where the internet or even cellphones existed. She didn’t want to grapple with the power dynamics inherent to a heterosexual couple. And she knew the subject had to be dead.

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Book details

Biography of X

Author: Catherine Lacey

Award Winner

Lambda Literary Awards - Winner
Lambda Literary Award - Nominee
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REGARDING MR. SMITH _______________ After two years of ignoring his letters, I took a meeting with Theodore Smith, at X’s request, to put an end to his nonsense. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said, “I can’t believe it. X’s wife—incredible.”* Though it was 1992, I was unaccustomed to such fawning, as she and I avoided the places where such people lingered. The sole purpose of this meeting, which I recorded for legal purposes, was to inform Mr. Smith that X would not cooperate with his supposed biography; she would not authorize it, would give no interviews, and would allow no access to her archives. As my wife’s messenger, I encouraged Mr. Smith to abandon the project immediately, for he would suffer greatly trying to write a book that was ultimately impossible. “If you truly want to write a biography,” I told him, “you must first select a subject who is willing to comply, advisably a ghost.” Mr. Smith sat there blinking as I explained, in slow detail, our total disapproval of this endeavor. The estate would not license any reproductions of any of X’s work, nor would he be allowed to use any of the portraits of X to which we held the copyright. We would not give permission for him to quote her lyrics, essays, scripts, or books, and of course X had no time to answer any of his questions, as she had no interest in his interest, nor any respect for anyone who intended to exploit her work in this way. “It is her explicit wish not to be captured in a biography, not now and not after she’s gone,” I reminded him, my tone absolutely cordial, or at least judicial. “She asks that you respect this wish.” But Mr. Smith refused to believe that X would choose to be forgotten, to which I explained that X had no such intention and already had plans for what would happen to her archives in the event of her death; all I knew of those plans at the time was that access would require forfeiture of the right to biographical research. “Her life will not become a historical object,” I explained, as X had explained again and again to me. “Only her work will remain.” “But she’s a public figure,” Mr. Smith said, smiling in a sad, absent way. (How odd to remember the face of someone I hate, when so much else is lost to the mess of memory.) He slipped a page in a plastic sleeve from his briefcase. I glanced down—it was unmistakably her handwriting, dated March 2, 1990, and addressed to My Darling , and though I should have been that darling, given the year, I had a way of overlooking certain details back then. “I have several others,” he said. “The dealers always call me when they come across one, though they’re rare, of course, and quite expensive.” “A forgery,” I said. “Someone has ripped you off.” “It’s been authenticated. They’ve all been authenticated,” he said. I thought I knew what he was doing—dangling false artifacts to entrap me and compel my cooperation—but I would not budge. The letters must have been (or so I wanted to believe) all fakes, and even if X had written such a letter to someone else, which she most likely had not, she would’ve never associated with anyone treacherous enough to sell her out. This pathetic boy—no biographer, not even a writer—was simply one of X’s deranged fans. I don’t know why she attracted so many mad people, but she did, all the time: stalkers, obsessives, people who fainted at the sight of her. A skilled plagiarist had merely recognized a good opportunity and taken it, as people besotted with such delusion hold their wallets loosely. “You must understand that my wife is extremely busy,” I said as I stood to leave. “She has decades of work ahead of her and no time for your little project. I must insist you move on.” “She won’t always be alive, you know.” I did not believe myself to be such a fool, but I was, of course, that most mundane fool who feels that though everyone on earth, without exception, will die, the woman she loves simply cannot, will never. “Whether she wants there to be a biography or not,” Mr. Smith went on, “there will be one, likely several, after she’s gone.” I told Mr. Smith, again, to cease all attempts to contact us, that we would file a restraining order if necessary, that I did not want to ever see or hear from him again; I was certain that would be the end of it. * * * Four years later, on November 11, 1996, X died. I’d always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was. For weeks all I could do was commit myself to completely and methodically reading every word of the daily newspaper, which was filled with articles about the Reunification of the Northern and Southern Territories, a story so vast that I felt then (and still feel now) that we might never reach the end of it. I gave my full focus to reports of the recently dismantled ST bureaucracies, the widespread distrust of the new electricity grids in the South, and all the sensational stories from inside the bordered territory—details of the mass suicides, beheadings, regular bombings—and even though my personal loss was nothing in comparison to the decades of tyrannical theocracy, I still identified intensely with this long and brutal story, as I, too, had been ripped apart and was having trouble coming back together. Reading the paper gave a shape to my boneless days: each morning I walked the length of the gravel driveway, retrieved the paper, walked back, and read it section by section in search of something I’d never find—sense, reasons, life itself. Immersed in the news, I felt I was still in the world, still alive, while I remained somewhat protected from the resounding silence she’d left behind. In early December of that year, I read something in the arts section that I could not, at first, comprehend. Theodore Smith had sold his biography of my wife to a publisher for an obscene advance.* It was scheduled to be published in September of the coming year. For a few days I succeeded in putting it all out of mind. I thought, No—no, it is simply not possible, it will fail, they’ll realize the letters are frauds, that it is a work of obsession, not of fact, and when I, executor of X’s estate, deny them all the photo and excerpt rights, that will be the end of it. How could there be a biography without any primary sources? As it happened, the editor who’d purchased the book was someone with whom I shared a close friend. She called me that winter— a courtesy , she said, as she was under no obligation to gain my approval. She insisted the research was impeccable. Scrupulous but respectful , she said, whatever that means. She assured me that Mr. Smith truly revered and understood X as an artist, as a woman, and that he had so many wonderful insights about her work, but of course, some would find the book a little controversial, wouldn’t they? Your wife never shied away from controversy , the editor said. Is that so? The editor suggested I come to her office to meet with Mr. Smith while there was still time to correct the text, that I might want to dispel some rumors he’d been unable to detangle, and though I’d been sure I’d never see Mr. Smith again, by the time I’d hung up I’d agreed to the meeting. Two days later I was sitting in a conference room with Mr. Smith, his editor, and two or three lawyers. The cinder block of a manuscript sat on the table, practically radiant with inanity. I asked for a few moments with our author, and once alone, I asked him how he’d done it. Oh, just, you know, day by day , he said, the false modesty so pungent it could have tranquilized a horse. But what could you have had to say about her? What could you have possibly known? He insisted he still had plenty to go on without the archive, as she’d given thousands of interviews since the 1970s, that she rarely repeated herself, and of course there were the ex-wives, ex-lovers, the collaborators, others. They all had plenty to tell him, and lots of original letters to share. It had all gone quite well, he said, except for his interactions with me, of course, and the fact that he’d never been able to speak with X herself—a miscarriage he still regretted. But I did not care what he wanted from me and only wanted to know who had given him interviews. He listed a few inconsequential names—hangers-on and self-important acquaintances—then, surprisingly, Oleg Hall. Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Lacey

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Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New...

Book Details

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New York Times , the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times , Vanity Fair , Esquire, the Chicago Tribune , Kirkus , Lit Hub , and Amazon . National Bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. “A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times 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, CM, 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 knows where X was 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, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she 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. At last, 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 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.

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

9780374606176

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"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 "a towering work that comments on, among things, art-world ridiculousness, the elasticity of identity, culture divides in the United States, and the fool’s errand of compressing a life into narrative . . . Beyond the book-as-book exercise, Lacy’s inventiveness when describing X’s various attention-grabbing exhibitions, and the genius visual annotations, Biography of X consistently stuns on a sentence-to-sentence basis. This is a wise, wise work." — Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel " 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

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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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Plot- or character-driven? Character
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Mark Coleman

Non-Fiction Writing On Books & Music Plus Life In NYC

Book Review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Beginning with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continuing with so-called New Journalism during the late Sixties, people tossed around the term Non-Fiction Novel when referring to book-length reportage written in modestly ambitious prose. Beginning with Catherine Lacey’s audacious novel Biography of X , published in 2023, we need to invent a new label, along the lines of Fictional Non-Fiction. Right now, however, Biography of X occupies its own corner of the universe. The only precursors that come to mind are Nabokov’s Pale Fire or possibly a few Borges short stories.

Reviews of her third novel have suggested, or implied, that Catherine Lacey flirts with DTM (doing too much) in Biography of X . Book within a book meta-narrative: check. Counterfactual or alternate history of the 20th Century: check. Potentially confusing pseudonyms and multiple identities: check. Guest appearances by real-life figures: check. Citations of wholly invented, anachronistic articles by contemporary journalists: check.

Somehow it reads much smoother than it sounds. This mock-biographical structure permits Lacey’s narrator — her pseudonym is C.M. Lucca — to slowly reveal the truth about her late wife “X” and their seven-year relationship. You bet it’s complicated.

Readers who require “relatable” or “likable” characters in novels should steer well clear of Biography of X . But the eponymous enigma X isn’t repellant, not to me anyway, and her erstwhile biographer’s voice, C.M. Lucca or Catherine Lacey’s voice, pulled me in straight away.

At various times during her half-century on a planet resembling ours, X is known as Caroline Walker, Clyde Hill, Dorothy Eagle, Bee Converse, Vera, Martina Riggio and Yarrow Hall. She becomes mildly famous, or infamous, for her (overlapping) creative work as an author, visual artist, conceptual performer, record producer, and indie press publisher. Sorry I forget precisely which name pairs with each job description. X is a human mashup of Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith, and more obscure figures such as the cult author Kathy Acker.

Unlike Acker, who produced relentlessly experimental and oft-impenetrable texts, Catherine Lacey employs approachable prose to describe difficult, purposefully unapproachable characters. Still X’s fictional connection to Kathy Acker, and the downtown Manhattan demimonde she helped define during the waning decades of the last century, is crucial to understanding her Biography .

X and and her widow C.M. Lucca live in a dystopian alternative United States though readers should be forgiven if they don’t realize that at first. Gradually we learn that the country has experienced The Great Disunion of 1945 aka The Christian Coup. This cataclysm coincides with the birth of X, who died in 1996.

In Lacey’s counter-factual, Northern states became a woman-dominated liberal stronghold while the Southern zone stood tall as a backward region of fundamentalist belief, systematic racism and institutional sexism. The West, fleetingly mentioned, was vaguely Libertarian and geographically isolated. If this sounds too familiar, or “on the nose” in current parlance, then the truly subversive element of this alt-history creeps up behind you. Despite all these radical changes in society and politics, popular culture and the arts, especially the more adventurous pursuits, have evolved pretty much the same as in the real world, i.e. our world. David Bowie and Tom Waits, two of the recognizable names that X collaborates with, make the same music and emit the same personas that they did in our own weird sphere. Catherine Lacey dares to suggest that art and music and writing are actually independent, functioning outside, or alongside, the larger world.

Near the end of her life, X is contacted by a biographer seeking her cooperation, which she unsurprisingly fails to grant. When Theodore Smith’s unauthorized A Woman Without A History appears after X’s passing, her widow, incensed, embarks on her own research. Biography of X is the result.

“What bothers me about it [Smith’s book] is that his lies have been held up as the definitive account of X’s life, that his work speaks the final word about her groundbreaking, multihyphenate career and its impact, that every reader and critic seems to believe that Mr. Smith successfully navigated the labyrinth of secrets X kept around herself, and that he illuminated some true core of her life. This is far from the case.”

C.M. Lucca works through her grief by unearthing the layers and levels of her late wife’s life — or lives. Along the way she learns a lot, maybe too much, about X, their relationship, and herself. By the end both narrator and readers begin to realize that entering into a marriage with X resembled enlisting in a cult. Lucca relinquished control of her life, and her mind. Writing X’s biography represents her only hope of reclamation.

“What was there to say I had no life to risk anymore. She had my life. I didn’t know how she had or what she was doing with it, but that’s what it felt like — she had my life and I had a home.”

C.M. Lucca ends her biographical quest with no easy answers or pat closure. She’s left alone with the inevitable grind, the unending daily labor of long-term mourning, and the eventual acceptance of loss. Reviewing Biography of X in Bustle , Erin Somers writes:

“Does the famous wife wrong, abuse, and otherwise trammel the unfamous wife? She does. But the trammeled wife regains some agency in the end by writing the famous wife’s definitive biography, thereby reclaiming the journalism career she forfeited in service of her marriage, and reckoning with her own trammeling. No well-intentioned future writer will have to re-draw her from a fragment; the wife has already written the story of her own fragmentation.”

Ultimately we’re stuck with our own identities, our own stories, even or especially when they’re entwined in someone else’s grand inventions. Unravelling that mix of fiction and fact leads to something like the truth.

Book Club Discussion Questions for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Biography of X

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Mar 21, 2023, 416 pages
Mar 2024, 416 pages

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Book Club Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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 Scheherazade-like sequence of stories." What's the effect of presenting X's life in this way? How would you describe her? Do you think that CM ultimately got to the heart of who X was? Why or why not?
Lacey was praised by The New Yorker for "making uncomfortable connections between X's fragile world and our own." Did the inclusion of historical anecdotes and real figures change the way you thought of them or how you thought of X and her life? If so, how? Why do you think that Lacey chose to include fact and fiction within Biography of X ?
Although X was widely recognized as a crucial creative force in her time, she largely kept her personal history and life story a secret, even from CM, her wife. Why do you think that X was so secretive about her life? Why do you think she was so furtive about her life story? Was there anything that CM discovered about X that was particularly surprising? If so, what made the discovery so explosive?
In a review for the Los Angeles Times , Jessica Ferri writes, "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." What did you think of the worlds that Lacey created? How was she able to make them seem so real? Would you have liked to spend more time in any of the worlds in Biography of X ? Which ones and why?
The relationship between X and CM often verges on toxic, particularly through instances of deception, manipulation, and the couple's imbalance of power. But can their relationship be broken down into "toxic" or "healthy"? How does CM's loyalty to her wife change over the course of the novel?
Lacey is from Mississippi, and her novels often reference or incorporate the culture of the American South, both positively and negatively. How does the South come across in the novel? How do the Southern characters come off compared to their Northern counterparts? How does knowing Lacey's home state change your understanding of the South within her novel? Is it a positive depiction?
Are there contemporary figures who remind you of X? How do you think X would've fit into our current world, particularly with the internet and social media?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Picador. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.

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Catherine Lacey’s Provocative Novel in Disguise

Illustrations of branches extending out from the silhouette of a woman.

The first thing that you notice about Catherine Lacey ’s new novel is the lack of a determiner. Nouns float, unhooked from any article. I found myself habitually inserting “The” in the title when the book came up in conversation, that brief sound of specificity, the most common word in the English language and the most wishful. As you open Lacey’s “ Biography of X ,” turning past the expected copyright and title, you reach a sequence of gradually lightening blacked-out pages, “ Tristram Shandy ” turned flip-book. Darkness lifts to reveal a second, nested title page, for a slightly different book: “Biography of X,” by C. M. Lucca. This copyright reads “2005,” rather than “2023”; you might rustle back a couple of pages to compare, and notice, on Lacey’s title page, the subheading “A Novel,” missing in C. M. Lucca’s version. Both title pages mention the same publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It makes sense that there is no “the”—or “a” or “this” or “my”—in Lacey’s title, as the project that the title alludes to quickly slips from its grasp. “X” is already a placeholder for the undetermined, the interchangeable, the illiterate, or the nameless. And “biography”? The whole story of a whole life, an aspiration that glides so flush into the corners of the untrue that one could easily assume that fiction is its rightful category, its most logical shape.

Lacey’s book, which is trimmed with photographs, historical data, collected interviews, and secondary sources, joins a recent spate of critically acclaimed novels that adorn themselves with the formal signifiers of nonfiction—imaginary footnotes or citations, the haze of archival research, narratives that peel themselves from the individual and float over a wider range. Benjamín Labatut’s “ When We Cease to Understand the World ” drifts through histories of scientific discovery with fantastical insertions. Hernan Diaz’s “ Trust ” builds itself in reverse across three backstories. Lucy Ives’s “ Life Is Everywhere ” manifests Ursula K. Le Guin’s “ Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction ” by including all the books, one an academic monograph, that are found in a character’s handbag. “Biography of X” sheds the container, with no frame story to situate the discovery of its inner document. C. M. Lucca’s fictional biography makes up the entirety of Lacey’s novel. The result is not really a book-within-a-book but, rather, a book encased in the glistening film of a different title, author, and genre. As they accumulated on the floor by my bed, part of my own purse’s detritus, alongside scattered lip glosses and a wriggle of empty tights, I started to think of these books as novels in the drag of nonfiction, a flamboyant application of familiar norms, less an effort to convince than to reveal our shared methods of convincing—academic authority drawn onto the text like eyebrows pitched across a forehead, bibliographies sticky with wig glue. As Lacey’s X declares, riffing off RuPaul, “Even the body is a drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all.”

Lucca’s biography begins with a wail of grief, and a repudiation of history. Lucca, the narrator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is mourning the death of her wife, X, a maverick star of the art world, who built such a baroque structure of mystery around herself that even Lucca struggles to identify whom she has lost, whom her widowhood honors. X has done everything, been everyone: a conceptual artist à la Sophie Calle , a lyricist and producer on David Bowie’s “Low,” a stripper in Times Square alongside Kathy Acker, an interlocutor with the feminist Carla Lonzi, a fiction writer who inspired Denis Johnson , a terrorist on the run, even a secret F.B.I. agent. Familiar uncertainties—Who was this person whom I loved? Did I ever know her? Is it possible to love what one cannot know?—turn into a far-reaching, propulsive detective story that spans the last half of the twentieth century.

The question driving Lucca’s investigation appears, at first, to be a simple one: What was her wife’s name? An incorrect answer is circulating through another biography of X (“A Woman Without a History,” by Theodore Smith, which Lucca reviles), published hastily after X dies unexpectedly. Smith claims to have discovered X’s birthplace, and with it a name that Lucca knows to be fabricated: Dorothy Eagle, of Missoula, Montana. Lucca experiences this false unveiling as a violation. X, famed for her various personas, always banished the fixed past from their shared life, gladly affirming every rumor or theory, however contradictory, about her origin. For X, Lucca writes, “making fiction was sacred . . . 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.” Their marriage was riddled with X’s violence toward Lucca, rewritten as paroxysms of devotion, and her infidelity, rewritten as fate. Other women, visitors from X’s seemingly infinite worlds, loiter outside their apartment.

It is clear that X wished to remain permanently past-less, the true American Dream, but Lucca cannot resist correcting the conceited Mr. Smith, to “avenge reality itself,” as she puts it. Violating X’s edict, she embarks on a journey to discover all the selves her wife accumulated in the course of her life—eighteen names, at my count. As Lucca moves through Dorothy, Caroline, Maeve, Bee, Deena, Pamela, Martina, and Cassandra, X’s edges stutter into and out of focus. This kick line of egos serves as Lacey’s entryway to another alternate time line, grander in scale, one that tracks a dramatic fictional sundering of the United States. Lucca discovers that X’s date of birth coincides with “the Great Disunion” of 1945, also known as the Christian Coup, a secession of Southern states that occurred overnight on Thanksgiving, complete with a border wall, manned by armed guards, and the installation of a new “fascist theocracy.” X was born on the Southern side of the wall, as Caroline Luanna Walker of Byhalia, Mississippi, and is a refugee from the Southern Territory, an understandable cause of the desire for anonymity that anchored and delimited her life.

Lacey’s Christian Coup is not a new novelistic premise—Margaret Atwood’s recently ubiquitous “ Handmaid’s Tale ” is built on a similar overnight coup—but Lacey creates a particularly elaborate and polarized counterfactual world on its basis. What motivates this second attempt at the Confederacy is the well-established impetus behind much of American politics: retribution. Unexpectedly, the figure who sets this reaction in motion is the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman. In reality, Goldman was deported from New York City to Russia in 1919 under the Anarchist Exclusion Act. In Lacey’s novel, Goldman instead becomes the socialist governor of Illinois, and later the chief of staff for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she influences to adjust the New Deal toward her principles of “Socialist Capitalism.” Under her direction, the United States legalizes same-sex marriage; succeeds in the “near-abolition” of prison; federally mandates equal pay for women, subsidies for housework, and paid maternal leave; and ratifies a fictional Twenty-second Amendment, a collection of laws that establish (unspecified) immigrant rights. All of this alienates and enrages the Southern states, which spend the next decade plotting their secession. In 1945, the same year as the Disunion, Goldman is assassinated.

Lacey shucks Goldman from her name, craggy and pearled, and drains the soft salt of reality out to repurpose the shell. The real Goldman wrote in 1908 that she believed private property to be “not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle . . . to all progress”; the existence of state government, she claimed, was “necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly.” A “Socialist Capitalist,” whatever that may be, Goldman was not. Connie Converse, a virtuoso folksinger who intentionally vanished after a life of persistently unrecognized talent, co-writes her songs with X. Lacey amends her fate: after falling out with X, Converse survives, and winds up running a laundromat in Queens; in this version, obscurity—and loneliness—is bearable. “Biography of X” is built from these carapaces, historical figures without the meat of their lived deeds and principles. Names, Lacey proposes, are merely vessels, as X so brazenly demonstrates, and anything can be poured inside.

Lacey’s recycling of identities frequently extends to her own very alive contemporaries, a Who’s Who of writers and critics who are referenced anachronistically within the novel as commentators on X’s freewheeling career, such as Max Porter, Hito Steyerl, and Merve Emre . Names are not the only things plucked from their context. Lacey weaves appropriated quotations into the body of her text, Acker-like, aggregated from an extensive and associative library, which are unmarked in the text but credited in a Notes section in the back, a master key to Lacey’s research that contrasts with the unreality of Lucca’s footnotes found on the page. These excerpts are freely tailored, contorted, and collaged. (Full disclosure: I was surprised to find my own name in that same section, for a meme that I made many years ago. Oh, that’s me! I thought, in a quick slash of pride, a dangerous feeling for a critic.) The extent of “Biography of X” ’s use of plagiarism and authorial ambiguity became clear slowly, until eventually I was reading with one finger holding place in the Notes, flipping back and forth, consumed by the question that fidgeted underneath every resonant sentence: Who wrote these words? In that way, Lacey’s form skillfully evokes what her character Lucca is experiencing in the story itself: a reluctant disquiet and gnawing curiosity over the given material’s true source. And, to Lacey’s credit, I can’t remember the last time that I’ve read a recently published novel and amiably wondered if its narrative strategies were, in fact, completely legal.

All realities are patchwork, with visible stitches, and all language is borrowed and rearranged, turning scraps into stars into blankets of meaning. Lacey’s willingness to use and misuse every kind of material comes with a certain thrill. But, without an underlying pattern, “Biography of X” acts more as a blender than a quilt-maker, whirring the twentieth century into a blur and sacrificing cause and effect. At times, it felt like icons and actions were paired through chance, scribbled identities licked and pressed onto the unseeing foreheads of cultural moments. The law of the random would be a more generous interpretation. An alternative one is that boundless irreverence can often gravitate toward a strange and impetuous conservatism.

Just as Goldman is turned from an anarchist icon to an F.D.R. Cabinet member, Ted Gold, a member of the Weather Underground who was killed at twenty-two by an accidental explosion, lives to become an established F.B.I. informant, a collaborator with the state. The art world is unfairly dominated by women, after the Painter’s Massacre of 1943, when “a mob of Southern separatists stormed an opening at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, killing fourteen male artists— Marcel Duchamp , Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock among them—while sparing all the women.” (Why an ideology that forbids women from wearing pants would strategically protect female abstract painters goes unexplained.) The surviving artists benefit from the murder of their peers—Dorothea Tanning makes Yves Klein-style body prints titled “Death of the Patriarchs.” Men are forced into art administration and assistant positions, and they hold guerrilla anti-museum protests against their lack of representation.

Bernie Sanders becomes the President of the Northern Territories—but only after the first female President, a despot. Her unpopular methods motivate her far-right party to adjust its image by running Jesse Jackson in the election against Sanders. Sanders is elected only by an overpowering bloc of anti-Black protest votes against the conservative Jackson by his own base. (In reality, both Jackson and Sanders have endorsed each other’s campaigns for the Presidency, in 1988 and 2020, sharing an ethos of working-class, multiracial coalition-building.) Most striking, the 1945 secession of the Southern Territories is conspicuously not motivated by white supremacy. The Southern fascists even manage to briefly implement a program of reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. Racism is most directly acknowledged through the lens of acquiescence: “The vast majority of Black Southerners (after some uprisings in the 1950s) came to tacitly accept that the intensely racist structure of their society, the tailwind of slavery, was simply ‘God’s plan.’ ” Yes, that is the entirety of the civil-rights movement wiped out in a parenthetical.

The words “Jim Crow” do not appear in the book, but segregation is mentioned twice: once in a passing reference to laws against interracial marriage in the South’s shelter system, and a second time in the Notes section, where Lacey concedes, “I have substituted the term “theocratic fascism” for [Renata] Adler’s ‘the segregationist community.’ ” The altered quote (“ ‘The more cultivated elements of theocratic fascism,’ Adler wrote, ‘have evolved their own schizophrenic logic’ ”) is adapted from Adler’s description of the 1966 March Against Fear , a civil-rights demonstration that crossed two hundred and twenty miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in solidarity with James Meredith, who attempted the same journey to defy the violent intimidation of Black voters, when he was shot and wounded by a white supremacist. Thus Lacey appropriates a fragment of Adler’s firsthand account of the march while cutting out the movement that the march was part of, using the archive of Black activism as raw material for the novel’s imagined dystopia.

What would change, “Biography of X” asks, if civil rights had been expunged from the South, and actualized in the North—rights that both North and South still lack nearly a century later? What would life be like decades into an alternate version of New York City, one without the horrors of the prison system, without state-enforced misogyny and bigotry, armed and murderous police, health care for profit, overwhelming poverty? At the very least, the dance music would be different. But the world that Lacey conjures, born of such drastically different politics, is almost culturally indistinguishable from our own, down to the same words in the same songs. “Biography of X” ossifies a sliver of bohemia as it already existed, preserving the basic provocations of the counterculture while evacuating the material conditions of the culture that it responded to. The novel’s conclusion is ultimately sorrowful: everything could change, and nothing would be different.

Lacey is clearly invested in the political slipperiness of liberal and artistic heroes, how fame can put marbles in a person’s mouth and a persona can seduce its creator. X models a disdain for continuity that grows into a kind of splashy carelessness, assuming constant impunity; responsibilities, both public and private, are slipped on and off like dresses. Later in her career, she develops a serious coke habit and endorses fascism in an interview—her quote is taken from Bowie, during his Thin White Duke era, similarly intellectually bedraggled by amphetamines. Eventually, X recants, as Bowie also did. (She blames drugs and encroaching obscurity, with a line lifted from Bob Dylan .) It is true that being famous demands the accommodation of so many projections that a singular self cannot stretch wide enough to hold them all, and ethics often tear, with a sound like an animal’s cry. But the novel’s presupposition that within a certain context every individual is capable of all depths of passivity and wrongdoing is not a radical one. The scrappier, more compelling idea is its inverse: that every human being is capable of great determination and kindness in the name of the collective, within all contexts, even all histories.

As I was describing this novel to my mother, cataloguing X’s various accomplishments and exploits, how she moves from the sixties through to the nineties vanishing and reappearing in unexpected places as different women, all artists and writers, my mother interrupted me: “Oh, I understand. . . . X is feminism! ” “No, no, no,” I quickly responded. “Sorry, I should’ve mentioned, X is evil .” We laughed. I don’t usually use that word; evil is an idea for cartoons, a philosophical anvil, light enough to casually hand to someone and heavy enough to flatten them. But there seemed no better adjective for the shape-shifting, amoral, world-dominative quality that X accrues. At one point, she literally materializes over Lucca in the branches of a tree, like the Cheshire Cat, and no one, except Kathy Acker, notices that she’s the same person in a slightly different wig.

The term “art monster” comes to mind, as coined by Jenny Offill , who used it to mean a figure that is inextricably linked to its shadow twin: “the wife,” the monster’s stamp-licking assistant, part servant, part scribe. While X is alive, both she and Lucca accept the extreme asymmetry within their coupling as a natural by-product of X’s genius. In an interview with the Guardian , Lacey said that she “didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man,” avoiding the inherent power imbalance, but X and Lucca act like Nabokov and Véra, titan and helpmeet. The most alive parts of “Biography of X” are about widowhood, as Lucca is liberated from the monster and bereft of the duty, and sincere pleasures, of care.

Is Lucca’s quest to uncover her wife’s past an effort to expose her cruelty? Her fraudulence? By the climax of the novel, Lucca has come to hate X; still, there is no cipher to help her understand who X was—or why she was so unkind. As so many of the historical figures mentioned in the novel appear in contact with X but also constitute the primary substance of X herself—a quote about Susan Sontag becomes a quote about X, Sontag’s writing becomes X’s writing, while Sontag also appears herself as a guest at X’s wedding—X emerges as an element of pure relationality, a corporealized bohemian scene. Like a mycelium network in sunglasses, she is everyone she knows and all the ways in which they know one another. At first, I thought her biography was choral, a single song made by many bodies, but by the end I started thinking of it as lip-synched, one body mouthing many songs.

In this way, Lacey’s project reminded me of a book called “ Self-Portrait ” by Carla Lonzi, who appears in “Biography of X” as another of X’s thwarted lovers. Originally published in 1969, the brilliantly translated English edition, by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, was released in 2021. Lonzi’s book consists of a collage of interviews with fourteen artists, thirteen of them men, cut and pasted together to seem like one long, wandering group conversation. One of the artists is Cy Twombly, who never responded to Lonzi’s questions; his silences are also included. Her young son also appears, blowing raspberries into the microphone. What is immediately notable about Lonzi’s “Self-Portrait” is how her outline as a woman is drawn through the male artists’ ways of interacting with her—their flirtations, interruptions, and condescension—which she elegantly indicts through nestling these men into her own creation. This act of self-assertion through self-effacement could be considered the germination of Lonzi’s feminist theory. As she wrote in 1972, “I had to find who I was, in the end, after accepting being something I didn’t know. This isn’t a creative process because what bothers me with the artist is that the role of protagonist requires a spectator.”

The widow, Lucca, who is also a journalist and a biographer, spectates, actively shaping the protagonist before her. Dispelling myths about X and creating them, her exploration disturbs the assumed passivity of the wife or amanuensis, as she collaborates in X’s work and legacy. Lucca’s own emotional needs and her long-standing, fervent idealization of her partner mean that, despite all that multiplicity, X is not a very complicated character. She never flinches and gets her lies tangled up, never levels with Lucca or reveals an unstaged vulnerability, never falters in her domination, until the day she drops dead of a heart attack in her home office. Downstairs, Lucca is making X a bowl of simple potato soup for lunch, just the way she likes it. After finding X’s body, Lucca “sat in the front yard staring at a pine tree—how impossible it seemed that this tree was still standing—and I know if she were here to read this scene, she’d cross it all out.” The soup is on the table, growing cold. Who has the power now?

At times, reading “Biography of X,” I felt baited into a protectiveness toward the dead, a desire to stand guard at the gates of their fixity. In reality, Lonzi died of uterine cancer in 1982, at fifty-one years old. Acker died of breast cancer in 1997, at fifty-three. In Lacey’s novel, Lonzi dies of breast cancer; Acker’s death is superimposed onto Lonzi’s body. Describing her version of Lonzi’s illness, Lacey half quotes Chris Kraus’s irreverent biography “ After Kathy Acker ,”writing, “She never spoke to a real doctor again. All her friends became enemies. She made enemies of everyone so that no one could talk to her.” Some part of me thought, Stop. Let them rest, dead in their own way. Let us not create Frankenstein’s monsters out of the corpses of feminist intellectuals. Another part of me thought, This novel is almost like a spiritualist document, an effortful séance that grows increasingly heartbreaking and garbled. Perhaps all biography is built from that kind of earnest ventriloquism, that kind of clouded remembering. Ghosts appear in our mouths, confused and out of time. The widows stand vigil: writing, writing, writing. ♦

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X-Vision Impact 150 Thermal Scope Review

By Andy Grossman

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In today’s article, Andy Grossman reviews the X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope. Thermal scopes are amazing tools for low-light conditions, especially for legal nighttime hunting. While good ones can be prohibitively expensive, affordable thermal sights sometimes can be inadequate. How does the X-Vision stack up? That’s what Grossman finds out during this review. X-Vision Optics loaned an Impact 150 to the author for this article.

X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope review

W ho doesn’t love a thermal optic? Even if you have never used it, I can pretty much guarantee you get a kick thinking about looking through a thermal scope. I know I still get a thrill, even after being blessed with numerous opportunities to look through and hunt with some of the best thermal scopes on the market.

X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope on Springfield Armory Model 2020 bolt action rifle

To say I am lucky is an understatement. But this is why a more budget-friendly thermal gets me so excited, as I recognize what an economic hurdle getting one can be for most shooters. This is especially true when that thermal is packed with features that normally you would only find on a thermal scope that’s double the price.

I present to you the X-Vision Impact 150.

First Impressions of the X-Vision Impact 150

At sub $3K, I was skeptical as to how good it was going to be. But after testing it out on my Springfield Waypoint and doing some coyote hunting, I am a true believer. Here is why.

The Impact 150 is a price-friendly 2.4 to 9.6x scope with a high-resolution 384 x 288 mission-ready thermal sensor.

The sensor is capable of detecting temperature differences as small as 0.05°F in an instant. This exceptional sensitivity means that nothing escapes your view, even on the darkest of nights.

One of the standout features of the Impact 150 is its long-range capabilities. It allows you to identify and track targets at distances up to 1,100 yards, and you can use the built-in range-finding capabilities by adding the X-Vision Impact 100 rangefinder to the side of the scope using the provided Picatinny rail. The Impact 100 Rangefinder connects via Bluetooth instantly with no setup and offers easy distance readings right on the screen of your scope instantly with the press of a button, so you always know the right distance for the shot.

You can choose from 10 different reticle patterns, six reticle colors and six different thermal colors. My favorite is always white hot, but the black hot on the X-Vision scopes is very nice as well in my opinion. You can customize the reticle and color palettes with ease, either through the easy-to-use internal menu or by downloading an app and wirelessly connecting the scope to your phone using Wi-Fi for even easier customization.

Honestly, the app might be the coolest part of the whole package. Once the scope is connected to your phone, you can view your screen in real-time and completely control many aspects of the hunt — except aiming your gun and pulling the trigger, obviously — right from your phone. The app will allow you to customize your settings and see the results, all on your phone while instantaneously changing the settings within the scope as well.

X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope review on the shooting range

The Impact 150 from X-Vision also features integrated photo and video recording capabilities to capture every moment of the hunt to share with your friends. You can start and stop the recordings with the simple press of a button on the housing or using your smartphone and the app. If you record using the housing button, it will be stored internally on the 32GB internal hard drive. If you start the recording from your phone in the app, you have instant access to your videos and photos right in your phone.

No matter what conditions you hunt in, the rugged casing is IP67 weather-resistant to ensure success and longevity for years of sustained use in the field. It comes with one rechargeable battery that charges quickly on the provided two-battery charger, and the battery boasts a life of about eight hours of continuous use. An extra battery can be purchased and carried in case you need to change it while out on the hunt.

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The scope comes standard with a Picatinny rail mount to easily mount to any platform. The Impact 150 has advanced features such as hotspot tracking, Picture-in-Picture (PIP), and range-finding technology to enhance your experience.

Hotspot tracking allows you to lock onto heat signatures and aids in tracking, ensuring that your target always remains in your sights. The picture-in-picture allows you to zoom in on your target without losing sight of the full picture. You can zoom in at different distances while seeing the full picture. The PIP window can be moved across the top of the screen to customize your view exactly how you want it.

X-Vision Impact 150 Specifications

Sensor: 384×288 thermal sensor
Magnification Range: 2.4 to 9.6x
Detection Range: 1,100 yards
Display Resolution: 1024 x 768 OLED
Battery Life: 8 hours
Photo & Video: Yes
Range Finding: Yes, with add on
Frame Rate: 50Hz
Field of View: 60ft @ 100 yd
App Compatible: Yes
Recognition Range: 475 yd
Pixel Size: 12μm
Objective Lens: 25mm
Eye Relief: 48mm
Hotspot Tracking: Yes
Picture-in-Picture: Yes
Internal Memory: 32 GB
Temperature Variation Detection: 0.05ᵒ F
Reticle Pattern: 10
Reticle Color: 6
Thermal Color Palettes: 6 color options
Power Supply: Rechargeable 18650 3.6v Lithium-Ion (1 incl.)
IP Rating: IP67
Mount: Picatinny
Dimensions: 7.95″ x 3.46″ x 2.59″
Weight: 1.2lb

On the range, it was very simple to zero the thermal optic using the on-screen zeroing feature. You choose the distance you are zeroing the rifle for and fire a shot at a contrasting target so you can see what you are doing. I used aluminum foil on a target with a square of duct tape in the center to give me a nice contrast. After three shots to establish a group, I went back into the menu to move the reticle to the center of my point of impact and set the spot. Firing three more shots, I was dead center on my target and ready to go.

testing the X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope

Everything about the Impact 150 is almost too easy when comparing to other thermals I have played with before. X-Vision did a fantastic job of keeping it simple, with only three buttons and a simple dial to control everything about this night vision optic.

X-Vision Impact 150 with Impact 100 Thermal Laser Rangefinder

I was able to go out one night recently and try to do some coyote hunting with the Waypoint set up with the thermal, but unfortunately, I didn’t have any luck. However, I was able to identify deer, a raccoon and a skunk through the thermal and could range all of them with ease in the middle of the night no matter how many yards away.

If you are looking to elevate your outdoor adventures as a hunter, enhance your tracking skills, gain an unprecedented advantage on your next hunt and see in the dark with a rifle scope, I highly recommend checking out the Impact 150 Thermal Scope from X-Vision.

When paired with the laser range finder you will be successfully night hunting the day you take the scope out of the box and mount it to your rifle. MSRP is $2,999.99.

Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out The Armory Life Forum, where you can comment about our daily articles, as well as just talk guns and gear. Click the “Go To Forum Thread” link below to jump in!

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X-Vision Optics Impact 150 Thermal Scope

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Related articles, x-vision flex 2 review — innovative thermal reflex sight, by scott conditt, #gear 08-08-24, armasight contractor 320 thermal optic review, #gear 06-21-23, iray rico micro thermal scope review, #gear 12-02-22.

Springfield Armory® recommends you seek qualified and competent training from a certified instructor prior to handling any firearm and be sure to read your owner’s manual. These articles and videos are considered to be suggestions and not recommendations from Springfield Armory. The views and opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Springfield Armory. Product prices mentioned in articles and videos are current as of the date of publication.

Andy is a content creator and photographer for a wide range of outdoor publications, including Athlon Outdoors. As a certified NRA Instructor since 2008, he has taught concealed weapons courses and firearms safety courses in Michigan. Through both photography and writing, Andy tests and reviews the latest guns and gear with the goal to bring an unbiased opinion to the reader on some of the industry’s most popular products.

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2024 Bridges Cup: Live Leaderboard

Why 2024 was a great year for drivers | Fully Equipped

It’s no secret that there are more great options for golf equipment than ever before.

So much so that when GOLF Fully Equipped co-hosts Kris McCormack and Wadeh Maroun were breaking down the clubs they play in their bags, they each have far more than just 14 to choose from.

“This year has probably been, in my mind, the best year for gear in a long time,” Maroun said. “In regards to like drivers for me, this is the first year where I’ve actually changed my driver.”

Kris McCormack and Wadeh Maroun, hosts of GOLF's Fully Equipped.

Meet the new hosts of GOLF’s Fully Equipped

Maroun said he’s gone from playing a four-year-old TaylorMade SIM to playing first a Ping G430 Max 10k and currently a Titleist GT3 .

Meanwhile, McCormack is gaming a Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke Triple Diamond Max , but also said the top of his bag is a “revolving door” that can change based on how his body feels.

“There is so much good gear out there this year,” he said. “Like, it’s crazy. It’s crazy how much everything is good in different ways, too. That’s the thing, it’s all in a different way.”

He mentioned how he loves the TaylorMade Qi10 because of how forgiving it is off of toe strikes and then he also pointed out the Titleist GT3, which had its center of gravity characteristics changed to get farther away from the GT2 model.

Titleist GT3 Custom Driver

“There was enough separation between those heads that they really performed drastically differently,” McCormack said of the TaylorMade Qi10 family. “And same thing can be said for the Callaway family, and then you get into the Ping family and the Titleist with the new GT line and GT2, 3 and 4, there’s enough separation between the heads that they really appeal to different demographics of players.”

Make sure to listen to or watch the full episode below to get to know McCormack and Maroun and get their full “what’s in the bag” breakdowns.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2024? Find a fitting location near you at True Spec Golf .

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I tried it: this luxe garment-bag duffel is a true weekend warrior, meet the new hosts of golf's fully equipped, rory mcilroy uses this training aid. here’s how it can help you, why callaway's fully forged clubheads matter | fully equipped.

Golf.com Editor

Jack Hirsh is the associate equipment editor at GOLF. A Pennsylvania native, Jack is a 2020 graduate of Penn State University, earning degrees in broadcast journalism and political science. He was captain of his high school golf team and recently returned to the program to serve as head coach. Jack also still *tries* to remain competitive in local amateurs. Before joining GOLF, Jack spent two years working at a TV station in Bend, Oregon, primarily as a Multimedia Journalist/reporter, but also producing, anchoring and even presenting the weather. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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How the taylormade p7cb and p770 blend together for combo sets, how much does cold weather affect your golf ball | fully equipped, fix your irons with 3 important gear adjustments | fully equipped, can content creators reshape the equipment industry | insidegolf, how 'zero-torque' became a red-hot gear trend | fully equipped, this should be your top priority during golf ball testing, infomercial golf clubs, warren buffett and bringing an idea to life | fully equipped.

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Biography of X review by Catherine Lacey: 'A stroke of genius'
Review: ‘Biography of X,’ by Catherine Lacey
'Biography of X' review: Catherine Lacey's genre-bending book keeps you
Book review: ‘Biography of X’ by Catherine Lacey| The Saturday Paper
‘Biography of X’ Review: Catherine Lacey’s Alternate America
Biography of X (2023) by Catherine Lacey

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COMMENTS

'Biography of X' review: Catherine Lacey's genre-bending book ...
In Catherine Lacey's new genre-bending novel, Biography of X, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist realizes her spouse — a fierce and narcissistic artist — was not who she believed.
Review: 'Biography of X,' by Catherine Lacey
The narrator of "Biography of X," the new Catherine Lacey novel, is a journalist named C.M. Lucca who worked for a Village Voice-like newspaper in New York City during the 1980s. C.M. has a ...
'Biography of X' Review: Catherine Lacey's Alternate America
A novel about a fake artist and a fake biographer in a fake America. The review praises Lacey's high-concept work, but criticizes its underdeveloped alternate history and its reliance on citations and quotations.
'Biography of X' is a brilliant novel that remixes art and history
Review by Chris Kraus. March 20, 2023 at 11:07 a.m. EDT. Catherine Lacey's brilliant, astonishing new novel, " Biography of X," is presented to the reader as a book by a fictional character ...
Biography of X
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.
Book review of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Biography of X is 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. It is also, in its own subtle way, a love letter to writing and writers. With the pacing of a thriller and the careful consideration of a definitive biography, this is ...
Reviews
Go to review page. 5.0. Following the death of the artistic genius known as X and the publication of an alleged biography, X's widow CM decides to dig in to discover what in her wife's past made her the mystery she was. Once Catherine Lacey introduces the alternate world X and CM live in, this novel takes off like a shot.
Summary and Reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
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.
Book Marks reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
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.
She Never Existed. Catherine Lacey Wrote Her Biography Anyway
This controversial, identity-eschewing artist is the subject of Catherine Lacey's new novel, " Biography of X," a sneaky book that purports to be a work of investigative nonfiction written ...
Fiction: 'Biography of X' by Catherine Lacey
March 17, 2023 11:05 amET. Share. Listen. (4 min) Here are just some of the personas inhabited by the artist-provocateur X in Catherine Lacey's blockbuster novel "Biography of X": a Montana ...
All Book Marks reviews for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
The narrator of Biography of X...has a cool tone and a lonely intelligence; she's a solitary spirit.Her voice is clear but worn, like beach glass. There's some early Renata Adler in it, and some Janet Malcolm...C.M.'s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined.
Biography of X
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 ...
Review of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
A journalist seeks the truth about her wife in this alternate history slow-burn thriller. Journalist CM Lucca, narrator of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X, is still grieving her recently deceased wife, a famous artist known primarily by the name X, when an unauthorized biography is released. The book claims to tell the true story of X's life ...
Reviews
Reviews Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. Only show reviews with written explanations. wormlibrary's review against another edition. Go to review page. ... Set in a dystopian America, a widow attempts to reconcile her grief by composing the biography of her recently deceased wife, X. X was an eccentric, and enigmatic shape shifter of an artist ...
Biography of X: A Novel Hardcover
At last, 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.
Book Review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Beginning with Catherine Lacey's audacious novel Biography of X, published in 2023, we need to invent a new label, along the lines of Fictional Non-Fiction. Right now, however, Biography of X occupies its own corner of the universe. The only precursors that come to mind are Nabokov's Pale Fire or possibly a few Borges short stories.
Book Club Discussion Questions for Biography of X by ...
In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Jessica Ferri writes, "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." What did you think of the worlds that Lacey created? How was she able ...
Biography of X: A Novel Kindle Edition
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 ...
Biography of X: A Novel|Paperback
When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, 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.
Catherine Lacey's Provocative Novel in Disguise
Catherine Lacey's Provocative Novel in Disguise. "Biography of X," a fictional account of a shape-shifting conceptual artist, is an experiment in authorial ambiguity. By Audrey Wollen. May 1 ...
X-Vision Impact 150 Thermal Scope Review
In today's article, Andy Grossman reviews the X-Vision Impact 150 thermal scope. Thermal scopes are amazing tools for low-light conditions, especially for legal nighttime hunting. While good ones can be prohibitively expensive, affordable thermal sights sometimes can be inadequate. How does the X-Vision stack up? That's what Grossman finds out during this review. X-Vision Optics Read More
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X-Vision Impact 150 Thermal Scope Review

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