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 The 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.

Biography of X is just stunning in places. Opinions of the book ranged from pretty good to exceptional, but no one could deny that Lacey had done something really interesting here. The novel is the research of C as she tries to investigate the truth about the background of her recently deceased wife, X, a world-famous performance artist and celebrity. The story is a series of journal-like observations C makes as she discusses her interviews and investigations into different figures, lovers, and fellows creatives. As she does, she explores with us the alternate reality that Lacey has created in which Emma Goldman (a famous anarchist theorist) became Secretary of Labor and a progressive North leads the South to separate and become a religious tyranny of North Korean surveillance proportions that has recently collapsed. We spent a lot of time talking about Lacey's choice to create that storyworld. It served a number of plot purposes in terms of giving X a reason to erase her first identity and to create an art world in which only women are seriously considered as artists. But it also seems like the nature of the religious South in terms of forcing everyone into extremely limited identities and the choice paralysis that women from the South faced after the wall fell is a resonant contrast with X's work wearing different identities and changing them over time. C as a narrator gives us a very good lens on the identity question -- C in her grief wants to own that grief in a more critical way that everyone else in X's life and her interview process leads her to encounter people who have deep knowledge or alternate versions of X that she documents and reacts to. The relationship between C and X becomes a constant reference point to the actions X told in her life as part of her journey from escape from the South to musician to New York socialite to artist and the view of this journey is constantly reverberating between the earnestness and dedication to a specific art project on self and the shameless and cold manipulation of others. We made a lot of how unlikeable X was, although we also noticed how unlikeable male geniuses could be historically and wondered if we would view a man in X's position differently. The genius of Lacey's novel lies in these questions. Was X friends with Oleg or just calculatedly using him for money and access? Was X actually a spy for the North or did she just disappear for times out of her own selfishness? Did she rip off another artist out of disregard or as a statement? Did she actually set up the violent protests against her and C? All of it seems possible either way or both and X's constant commentary that she wasn't acting when she played those roles makes all of this muddled in an amazingly complex way. At the center of this is X's betrayal of C, which is just too good for us to spoil here, but brings home the questions of the novel in a simply stunning conclusion. The book just does an amazing job depicting the cruelty and singlemindedness of the art world and of genius, and by making the narrator C, a character with her own sense of danger-baiting, interrogation, and obsession, we are left with a stunning look at creativity and its impact on relationships. NUBClubbers who thought less of the book mainly did because of dislike of the characters, and it's true there's basically no one in the book you can purely root for. But what a fascinating look at the different perspectives one can have on genius and how no one view of a single life is total no matter how it's constructed. When we read Lacey's previous work The Answers, we said it was a book with terrific potential that didn't quite hit its marks. In Biography of X, Lacey has soared past them. It's a brilliant work. Brava.