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

Maureen Corrigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Biography of X

Catherine lacey.

416 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

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

"The title of this book--as titles so often are--is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it."

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

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

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Biography of X

Author: Catherine Lacey

Award Winner

Lambda Literary Awards - Winner
Lambda Literary Award - Nominee
Amazon.com Best Books of the Year
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Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year
NPR Best Book of the Year
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Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year
PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee

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...

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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 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.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

9780374606176

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In the news.

"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

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.

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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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Biography of X: A Novel (Hardcover)

Biography of X: A Novel By Catherine Lacey Cover Image

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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 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 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner 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.

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Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century
Paperback (March 19th, 2024): $19.00

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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, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, the shining by stephen king, the road by cormac mccarthy, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, house of leaves by mark z. danielewski.

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Biography of X

Catherine lacey.

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The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain—and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk. With all the recent attacks, of course, security had tightened everywhere, and you had to have permission or an invitation to enter any building, and I never had such things, as I was no one in particular, uncalled for. One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them—the one person or the half person—but I never saw the one and I never saw the half, no matter how much I looked and waited, patiently, so patiently, and after some time I wondered if I could not find them because I was one of them, either the one or the half.

One evening, still alive at Penn Station to catch an upstate train, I asked a serious-looking man if he had the time. He had the time, he said, but not the place, as he’d been exiled from Istanbul years earlier but never had the nerve to change his watch, and looking into this stranger’s face I saw my own eyes staring back at me, as I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment. We parted immediately, but I have never forgotten him.

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. Who else might call to tell me something almost unfathomable? 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.

Or maybe what kept me alive was all the secretarial work I had to do, as I’d become X’s secretary by necessity—she kept firing the others. I sometimes found a strange energy to shuffle through her mail in the middle of the night—signing contracts I barely understood, reviewing the amendments made “in the event of the artist’s death,” filing away royalty statements in the manner that X had instructed, and shredding the aggravating amount of interview requests addressed to me, the widow. The Brennan Foundation had invited me to come receive the Lifetime Achievement Award on X’s behalf, not knowing that she’d planned to boycott the ceremony in resentment for how long it had taken them to recognize her. There was also an appeal from a museum that had been eagerly anticipating X’s contractual obligation to make one of her rare public appearances at the opening of her retrospective that spring; by overnighted letter, they asked whether I, as a representative of whatever was left of her, might fly over to London in her stead? I sent back my regrets— I am currently unable to explain how unable I am to undertake such a task.

Tom called, despite a thirty-year silence between us. He’d learned of my wife’s death in the papers and wanted to tell me that he had been thinking about me lately, about our strained and ugly childhood as siblings. His own wife, he said (it was news to me that he’d married), had been given another few months to live, maybe less. His daughter (also news to me) was fourteen now, and there was a part of him that wished she were younger, that believed she might be less damaged by grief if she were protected by the abstraction of early childhood. What an awful thing , he said, to wish my daughter could have known her mother for fewer years.

But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

When Tom was fourteen and I was seven we lived in a clapboard house on a dead-end with our mother and assorted others, and that summer as we were eating spaghetti in the kitchen Tom stopped moving, and sat there with his mouth open and the noodles unraveling from his poised fork as he stared into nothing, everything gone from his eyes, and he kept staring, unblinking and frozen as our mother shouted, Tom! Stop it! Tom! His eyes kept draining, nothing and nothing, then even less than nothing as Mother shouted for him to stop, to stop this horrible prank, until she finally slapped him hard in the face, which still did not bring him back but freed his fork from his hand and sent it into my lap. That night, slowly, he did start to come back, and later a neurologist was excited to diagnose him with a rare kind of epilepsy, which was treated with a huge pink pill, daily, and for months after my wife died I’d often find myself in some abject, frozen state—sitting naked in a hallway or leaning against a doorframe or standing in the garage, staring at the truck, unsure of how long I’d been there—and I wished someone could have brought me such a pill, something to prevent me from pouring out of myself, at odds with everything.

Tom and I were living in different griefs now—his imminent, mine entrenched—but I wondered if the treatment might still be the same, and I asked him if there was any kind of pill for this, some pill like that pill they used to give him all those years ago, but Tom felt sure there wasn’t, or if there was he didn’t know about it, and anyway, it probably wouldn’t work.

__________________________________

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BIOGRAPHY OF X

by Catherine Lacey ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023

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

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

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

Pub Date: March 21, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-374-60617-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Catherine Lacey

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Longlist for 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award Is Revealed

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

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

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

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

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

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

Film Adaptation of ‘The Women’ in the Works

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Bill Gates Shares His 2024 Summer Reading List

SEEN & HEARD

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Elin Hilderbrand

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Reading guide for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
1980s & '90s
Dealing with Loss
Physical & Mental Differences
Music and the Arts

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About this Book

Reading Guide

Reading Guide 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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This Novelist Is Pushing All the Buttons at the Same Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: Understanding your past won’t liberate you

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: She never meant to write a memoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is a daring reimagining of 20th century America where the Vietnam War never happened, Bernie Sanders was President, and an enigmatic multi-hyphenate artist named X was worthy of two biographies. The novel opens in 1997, one year after X dies, just as a book about her is released. X’s widow, an alt-weekly journalist named C.M. Lucca, is unnerved by the biography’s publication—it’s not factually accurate—so she takes matters into her own hands. C.M. sets out to write the definitive book on X’s life, much of which, she learns, she was not privy to. Lacey casts X as a Zelig-like figure who loosely resembles the real iconoclasts of the downtown New York art scene of the ’70s ( Patti Smith , Nan Goldin, Susan Sontag, to name a few) and worked with some of the biggest names from that era (David Bowie, Tom Waits, Annie Leibovitz). Lacey seamlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction, including frequent footnotes that cite real articles and fake ones by real journalists. The result is a kaleidoscopic exploration of art, love, and grief. — Shannon Carlin

Buy Now: Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

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There’s no crying in baseball, but there are plenty of great baseball books

Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitches during a game.

A new biography of Clayton Kershaw, a history of Chavez Ravine, a reevaluation of a Negro League star and more book recommendations for baseball fans.

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Good morning and welcome to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter.

I’m novelist and punk historian Jim Ruland, and this week we’re celebrating America’s pastime. We’re currently midway through the MLB season and the Dodgers are sending six players to next week’s All-Star Game — tied for most in all of baseball.

The Dodgers are currently in first place in the National League West and on pace to win the division title for the 11th time in 12 years. But as faithful fans know all too well, with the exception of the pandemic-shortened season when the Dodgers won it all , the postseason has typically been a house of horrors. Just look at the 2017 scandal-marred defeat by the Houston Astros, the 2019 collapse against the Washington Nationals, or the early first-round exits in 2022 and 2023 at the hands of division rivals San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks.

No one has taken the blame or felt the brunt of those losses more than star pitcher Clayton Kershaw . Despite his once-in-a-generation talent and Hall of Fame-worthy career, he has become synonymous with October failure and postseason meltdowns on the pitching mound.

This offseason, the Dodgers added Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández to a team filled with heavy hitting All-Stars like Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Will Smith. So while there’s reason to be hopeful this postseason, fans could be bracing for another disappointing October, as several key players are either injured or recovering.

To get a better sense of the Dodgers’ postseason outlook, I reached out to author Andy McCullough, a senior writer at the Athletic and former Dodgers beat writer for the L.A. Times. His outstanding new biography, “The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness,” is essential reading for Dodgers fans.

A photo of author Andy McCullough next to the cover of his biography of Clayton Kershaw.

How did you find the time to write this book while working full time?

I have a cat, and so the cat wakes me up most days, somewhere between 3 and 4 in the morning. I would wake up, have some coffee, eat breakfast and then I would work on the book. I would work until about 8 or so, and then start my actual job at the Athletic. So my advice to first-time authors is to get a cat.

You quote a line from “Moneyball”: Adapt or die. Some players come into the league having to change their approach virtually every season, but Kershaw resisted any kind of change for much of his career. Do you think that held him back?

To succeed in the majors, you have to be willing to change without losing sight of yourself, and I think that that’s something Kershaw, for a very long time, had a real iron grip on because what he did made him so successful. He was very resistant to change, especially in his younger days during the period from 2011 to 2015 or 2016. But look at the results during that time period. He was the best pitcher on the planet by orders of magnitude.

Kershaw’s stubbornness, competitiveness and drive are some of the same things that make him vulnerable in October, but these attributes are what allow him to bounce back from those huge disappointments. It’s a real catch-22.

I don’t know if it’s symmetrical enough to call it a paradox, but there’s certainly a double-edged sword there. I think that’s part of the challenge of managing a player like that. How do you say, “Hey, chill out” or “Don’t be so intense” when it’s those qualities that make him so special?

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While writing this book, was there anything that surprised you?

Looking at some of [Kershaw’s] starts in 2013 and 2014, it feels like another lifetime in terms of how bullpens are used and starters are deployed. And so there were a lot of times when I was thinking, “Well, in today’s era pitchers only pitch six innings, and teams don’t send their starters back out for the seventh inning, let alone the eighth.”

Kershaw wouldn’t have been put in those situations if he was starting today?

It was just a different time. He was the rare pitcher who was afforded that opportunity and responsibility. Those seasons felt almost like ancient history, in part, because the game has just evolved so much in the past 10 years.

So the million - dollar question is: W hat can we expect from Kershaw this fall?

That’s a great question. I think his shoulder is going to dictate it. The setback he had in late June feels like it’s not insignificant. I don’t think it’s ever insignificant when you’re coming off the first surgery of your career. This is not a minor procedure he had during the offseason. Two other much younger pitchers, Brandon Woodruff and Kyle Wright, had [similar injuries] and they’re not pitching in 2024. He’s pushing to get back because he doesn’t want to take a full season off, and so we’ll see. It feels dumb betting against him, given all the injuries he’s come back from in his career, but at the same time, it’s not a small thing.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

These baseball books are All-Stars

A family photographed in 1959 live in a trailer after their home was destroyed to build Dodger Stadium.

While writing his Kershaw biography, McCullough used Ian O’Connor’s “The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter ” as a model. “Iconic player, iconic market,” McCullough said. “This is the definitive story of this player’s time in the city, and that’s what I wanted to do with Kershaw in Los Angeles.”

In 2020, Nate Rogers talked to Eric Nusbaum regarding his book “Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between” about the displacement of the residents of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. “ Dodger Stadium should not exist ,” Nusbaum recalls a high school lecturer saying.

Now that MLB has added stats from the Negro League , you may want to read about one of its biggest stars , Leroy “Satchel” Paige, in “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend” by Larry Ty.

One of my favorite books about baseball is also one of the best books about Los Angeles. “Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates” by the late John Albert tells the story of how a group of recovering drug addicts, washed-up rockers and miscellaneous misfits found salvation in baseball.

The Week(s) in Books

This week the literary world was rocked by revelations made my Alice Munro’s daughter , Andrea Skinner, that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, and that her mother knew about it and chose to stay silent. In a commentary for The Times, author Rebecca Makkai writes, “The question, now, is whether Munro’s stories can ever again stand independent of what we now know about their author.”

Writing for The Times’ 1999 Project , Lauren Leblanc looks back at J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace.” “Rife with unspeakable violence and shocking impasses, every word of the book’s 220 pages is measured and necessary,” writes LeBlanc.

Lorena Oropeza reviews Stanford professor Albert M. Camarillo’s “Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equity” and discovers that “ his remarkable academic career as one of the founders and shapers of the field of Chicano history ” has its roots in Compton.

Laura van den Berg’s “State of Paradise” tops Bethanne Patrick’s “ 10 books to add to your reading list in July. ”

Thanks again for reading. I’ll be back in two weeks — just in time for Comic-Con 2024!

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

More From the Los Angeles Times

FILE- In this Wednesday, Oct, 8, 2014 file photo, a modern bronze statue of Alexander the Great stands under the cloudy sky of the northern port city of Thessaloniki, Greece. Officials in Greece and Macedonia say Tuesday, June 12, 2018, they are close to reaching a landmark deal on a long-standing name dispute, to protect Greece's region of Macedonia, birthplace of ancient warrior king Alexander the Great, but the Greek coalition partner has vowed to vote against the proposed agreement. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris, File)

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JFK Jr.'s Close Friends Share Intimate, Never-Before-Told Stories in Revealing Book Excerpt (Exclusive)

In 'JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography,' we hear about the life and tragic death of John F. Kennedy's only son, who died at age 38

Liz McNeil is an Editor at Large at PEOPLE, where she's worked for over 30 years.

On Nov. 25, 1963, three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluted his assassinated father’s casket in a televised funeral procession. That heartbreaking image came to symbolize the nation's loss.

The world never stopped watching as the little boy grew into a movie-star-handsome magazine editor, married Carolyn Bessette and then died at age 38 on July 16, 1999, when the plane he was piloting crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, also killing Carolyn, 33, and her sister Lauren, 34.

For more on JFK Jr., pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here .

Simon & Schuster

Before her husband’s funeral, Mrs. Kennedy asked military personnel to teach John how to salute his casket.

Philip M. Hannan, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington

"I saw John Jr. salute [that day]. I was standing by him. I thought, This is the picture that will live. I saw the reaction of the people across the street. It was an instantaneous reaction; they broke down, especially the women ... I had heard Mrs. Kennedy say, 'John, salute.' I knew then that this was probably the most poignant picture of the century."

John grew up in New York City, where his mom moved with him and Caroline in 1964. She enrolled him at the private Collegiate School.

David Clarke, schoolmate

"He had this big mop of hair. You’d see him wandering around the halls, shirttails hanging out, his tie ripped off to one side, his hair a mess. He was known for losing blazers."

He transferred to elite Andover in 1976 and had to repeat his senior year when he failed math before starting at Brown University in 1979. He was easily distractable but his name and charm brought advantages — and fun.

William Cohan, schoolmate

"One weekend, he invites me down to [the family’s apartment at] 1040 Fifth Avenue. I walk in and it’s mind-boggling. And his mother’s there. And then John goes into his room and decides he wants to get high, takes out the bong, smokes a bowl, pours the bong water out onto Fifth Avenue from his bathroom."

Gary Ginsberg, college friend

"I met John in the second-to-last row of a history class. One day ... neither of us had any clue what was really going on. John had to give an answer, and it was so inane. But after he finished his two-minute response, the professor’s nodding vigorously. 'John, that was so insightful.' That’s when I realized it was what John always referred to as 'the JK Factor.'

"There’s no table in a restaurant? Then one appears. He’d always look at me with that sh---eating grin and go, 'JK Factor.' "

Anne Marie Fox

He got his law degree from NYU in 1989 and passed the bar exam on his third try. He dated actress Daryl Hannah off and on but met and fell for Calvin Klein publicist Carolyn Bessette in 1992 before formally ending things with Hannah.

Robbie Littell, best friend

"[Carolyn] intrigued him more than anyone he’d ever met. A force of nature. He said he wanted to marry her. He was adamant."

They wed on Sept 21, 1996 on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

George Kyriakos, wedding guest and Carolyn’s hairdresser

"John slept in my then-wife Jackie’s and my room the night before the wedding. Which is crazy — there was this huge mansion where everybody had rooms, and John was sleeping on a cot in our room. It was the whole don’t-sleep-with-the-bride-the-night-before-the-wedding thing."

Gogo Ferguson, who hosted their wedding

"We lit the church with all the candles and flashlights we had because by the time we got her in her dress and I drove her down the road in my truck, it was getting dark. There was no electricity. John and Carolyn stayed at our house that night. Someone had the great idea of putting rose petals all the way up our driveway and into our bedroom, which ended up a complete mess. That was gonna be the honeymoon suite."

The press attention intensified — and while John was used to it, Carolyn was overwhelmed.

Sasha Chermayeff, college friend

"She genuinely felt she was in danger. The paranoia set in when she kind of let her mind spin off: 'What if somebody wants to kidnap me?' After they got married, it just escalated and escalated and escalated. John was five years older. And being followed, it’s very different for a 200-lb. man than for a woman alone. By then she was thinking, 'They’re spying on me. They’re stalking me. Now my life is being afraid.' "

John got his pilot’s license in 1998 and found an escape in the skies.

Robbie Littell

"That was some of the happiest times he ever had. Floating around with the buzzards in his Buckeye [plane]. It was the freedom. But most of all, it was getting away. Flying made him super happy. Free spirit, in control, doing something, you know ... a James Bondian endeavor. Playing James Bond."

Gary Ginsberg

"He said, 'It’s the only place I can go where no one is bothering me. I have complete silence, and no one can get to me except the air traffic controllers.' Maybe that gives you insight into what he was really dealing with on the ground."

RoseMarie Terenzio, friend and assistant

"When he got his plane, the Cessna, you have to have a tail number, and he wanted 529 because that was his dad’s birthday — May 29. When he went to reserve that number to register it with the FAA, that one was taken. He ended up buying the number from the person who had it. The tail number on both of John’s planes was N529JK."

John was trying to keep George magazine afloat, fighting with Carolyn and worried about the looming death from cancer of his cousin Anthony Radziwill. In May 1999, he broke his ankle paragliding. John and Carolyn’s relationship hit a low point the week of July 12. Though accounts vary, John spent at least one night at the Stanhope Hotel.

Sasha Chermayeff

"They were spiting each other. Maybe Carolyn was trying to make him worry [by not coming home]. So then he did it the next night. He was not with her those last two nights. The Stanhope thing was tricky. I think he went there to meet [former girlfriend] Julie Baker. Everybody always asks me, 'What do I think would’ve happened?' Anything was possible."

Julie Baker

"I spoke to John for the last time the night before he passed. There is a rumor going around that I was with him at the Stanhope [that night]. This is not true. He was at a baseball game and wanted me to meet up with him and his friend after to grab a drink. I was away, so I couldn’t. I did however grab a quick lunch with him (which we often did) at the Stanhope a few days before the accident."

On July 16, he spent the day at the office. The plan was to fly to Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Carolyn’s sister Lauren, 34, and then fly to Hyannis, Mass., for his cousin Rory Kennedy’s wedding. But they ended up leaving later than planned.

RoseMarie Terenzio

"I got to John and Carolyn’s apartment, where I was staying until my air conditioning got fixed, at 9:30 or 10:00. They had two phones — one in the kitchen, and then a fax machine. Only three or four people had that number. I picked up the fax phone and it was Carole [Radziwill, Anthony’s wife]. She said, 'Oh thank God you’re there.' I said, 'Carole? It’s Rose.' She said, 'Where are they? They didn’t land in the Vineyard.' No one knew where John was. [RoseMarie spoke to John’s flight instructor Bob Marena.] He said the flight took off at 8:39. That’s when I panicked.

"Then Ann Freeman, Carolyn and Lauren’s mom, called . . . She was panic-stricken. She said something like, 'I told him never to take two of my girls up at the same time.' She was angry. Crying. It was panic, shock. Disbelief."

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the cause of the accident as the “pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze and the dark night."

Jeff Guzzetti, NTSB investigator, Office of Aviation Safety

"His flight path into the water is consistent with what is known as a graveyard spiral. The airplane makes a spiral nose-down . . . kind of like going down a drain. The plane went into one final turn and it stayed in that turn pretty much all the way down to the ocean. He went in seven miles from Martha’s Vineyard.

"I don’t think the passengers knew what was happening to them. They might’ve felt a little G-force pushing them down in their seats, like, 'This feels a little bit weird.' You would’ve heard the rush of air over the fuselage accelerate or get louder, during the final fatal plunge. Perhaps feel yourself accelerating a little bit. And then they hit the surface of the water and it’s over. Now, the pilot is different. I would expect that the pilot would be very confused and perhaps a little frightened because the instruments may have not been matching up with how he was feeling. The impact forces were tremendous."

"A week later, I got a big brown box from the mail room. I think it was from the NTSB. There was his wallet. It was all water-damaged and warped. And one crutch. I sent it to [John’s sister] Caroline [Kennedy]. I just cried."

On July 22, the USS Briscoe brought members of the Kennedy and Bessette families to scatter the ashes for a burial at sea.

Barry C. Black, Navy chaplain

"Caroline clutched the urn . . . I calmed her, and we went down. Contorted with grief is not even an adequate description. She put the ashes in. As the ashes were pouring, she reached her hand into the water to put some water back on her [as if she thought], 'I’m not going to let go of his hand.' They dropped flowers as the ship was sailing. They embraced one another as if that human closeness would somehow mitigate the ache.

Robbie Littell

"I’ve heard they cut a tree down in Irish culture when someone dies young because they only lived half of their life. And I like to say, here’s a guy who lived twice as hard as anyone else. Twice as well as anyone else . . . I think of the loss, not so much my loss, but his loss — of not being able to experience life which he loved so much. The loss was going to come when the stories faded — and I didn’t want to lose the stories."

From JFK JR.: An Intimate Oral Biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil. Copyright © 2024 by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC

JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil is on sale July 16, and available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

The Miz Gets Candid on ‘Biography: WWE Legends’ & John Cena’s Retirement

Mike Mizanin , better known as The Miz, was not made to last a year in WWE , Let alone 20. He came from MTV’s The Real World and had an innate ability to get under people’s skins. A heat magnet. Veterans in the locker room viewed him as a reality star just looking to extend his 15 minutes of fame. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Detractors found out this lifelong pro wrestling fan brought an unwavering drive and work ethic, which translated into success.

Miz has built a Hall of Fame caliber career paved with championship gold and even a main event victory over John Cena at WrestleMania . The all-around entertainer earned the respect of his peers and fans in the process, so much so that those outside the business took notice. The 43-year-old has hosted shows, been on Dancing with the Stars , starred in his own reality show alongside his family including his wife Maryse, and headlined movies within The Marine franchise.

His journey from the loudmouth with big dreams from Parma, Ohio to legend is told through A&E’s latest Biography: WWE Legends doc. Ahead of the premiere, Miz opens up about what he overcame to reach the top of WWE.

What is it like for you to finally be getting those proverbial flowers through the release of this Biography ?

The Miz: Is this my flowers? If it is, I’m very thankful for it. When I was first asked to do this documentary, I was like, “Man, I can’t believe they want to do a documentary on me.” I’d done one before, and I couldn’t believe they wanted to do that one, too. I thought about how they would make this one different. They were not only able to make it different but man, did they exceed my expectations in all facets. From moments I forgot about to moments that are still near and dear to my heart to moments where I literally lost it. Sometimes I get very angry. To be able to talk about what I was feeling and things people really remember, they dove into my story… It’s a long story, but it’s pretty incredible. And it’s my life, so it’s cool.

What did you take from those who sat down and spoke about you for the doc?

It meant a lot to have those people sit down for interviews. I’ve done a bunch of those and know the time it takes. I know the schedules that our superstars have. For them to sit down and talk about my career, it meant a lot. When John Cena says, “He is not just one of the most underrated. He is the most underrated WWE superstar of all time.” That means a lot. John Cena is one of the biggest movie stars out there. He is Peacemaker. He doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, but he made time for my documentary. He is like that. He has always made time.

Whether it’s me asking, “What do you think about this match? What could I have done better? How do you set yourself apart from others?” not only does he have an answer, but an answer that just blows your mind. It’s cool to have him sit down and talk about me. It’s cool to see my childhood friends. Justin, I’ve known since kindergarten. My buddy Scotty I’ve known since junior high, so it’s crazy to see them on TV talking about me and getting their perspective. It’s cool to hear my dad, my wife, my family. That’s what sets this doc apart for me.

You mentioned John Cena. What were your thoughts when you heard about his retirement announcement?

It’s crazy, right? Never did I think he would say he would retire, that WrestleMania 41 will be his last WrestleMania . Then he’ll have some matches after. That’s just like John Cena, right? He is like, “I’m not just going to do WrestleMania . I’m going to do all these events.” I think it’s so great for the younger generation who will hopefully get to work with him. I selfishly would like to work with him one more time.

Everyone wants to be John Cena’s last match. Everyone wants to be part of it, especially when you think about what he has done for the business and WWE. Not only in the ring but outside as well. How many Make-A-Wish wishes has he granted? The example he has set for superstars like myself. You need to be the hardest working in the room to be at the top. Now you look at who is at the top. It’s Cody Rhodes, and he is doing his own version of it. He is taking what he was taught by John Cena and taking it to his level.

WWE/Getty Images

You look like you’re having so much fun with R-Truth . You’re actually being cheered now.

I’m having a blast. If you had told me I’d be getting cheered two years ago, I would have laughed in your face. I would have told you there was no way because people just loved to hate me. I could never be a babyface or a good guy. Then you get paired with R-Truth, and people can’t help but love R-Truth. If you’re around him, you’re going to get cheered. I’m loving every second because as much as John Cena says I’m the most underrated, I think Truth is very underrated. It is very difficult to be taken seriously as well as being able to joke around and do comedy. I think he does a great job doing that. He can be a champion or a person that makes you laugh. He always creates moments each and every time he is on that screen. He has been doing it longer than everybody else. It’s unbelievable being with him.

We’re in an exciting time in WWE with Triple H at the head of creative. What’s the vibe like there for you?

Triple H is one of the best minds this business has ever seen. The way he is able to not only do what he is doing right now, but he is there as a resource… If I need to know what we are looking for in a match, he would be able to tell me in-depth what he is looking for and how we can get the crowd to gravitate toward the storyline. The energy in the locker room is unbelievable because wrestling has never been so hot. If you look at it, think of all the top stars right now. I love what we’re doing with these PLEs (Premium Live Events) where we’re having five to six matches.

There are longer matches with storylines that have been built and are ready for a PLE. You look at SummerSlam now. It’s at the Cleveland Browns stadium. I don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s in my hometown. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I don’t think we will ever go back to that stadium because they might get a new stadium. This stadium that I have grown up watching the Cleveland Browns games in, I don’t know if I have a match. You look at the storylines right now, and it’s insane how good they are… It’s very tough to get on a PLE now. You have to be on the top of your game. I understand more than anyone because I’ve been here for 20 years.

Mike 'The Miz' Mizanin and Maryse Mizanin

Nicole Weingart/USA Network

What I respect about you is that no matter what is going on in your life, you maintain the utmost professionalism. I heard about all these health issues Maryse has endured and you still somehow kept working without anyone realizing what your family was dealing with at home.

My job as a WWE superstar is to entertain an audience that paid money they earned to see a show. It’s my job to give them a moment. If a father and son or mother and daughter come to a show, I help them have that conversation 10 years later where they say, “Remember that time?” We can’t let stuff that is happening at home come out on TV unless it’s for an amazing storyline. This was real. This was something unexpected. Look at Maryse, she looks incredible. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life, inside and out. How driven she is. How she is with our daughters. Then to hear, yeah, she had borderline tumors. We were like, “What does that mean?” We were told it could turn into cancer. They told us they were very dangerous and had to get them out.

Then she had to get all her reproductive organs out. All these different doctors are telling you all these things. I’m thinking about my wife and what is going on in her head, considering what I’m going through. It’s hard for me. Imagine how she feels. She is so strong. We’re very fortunate that we had really great doctors on our side. We’re not out of it yet. She has to get checkups moving forward to make sure the things we got out aren’t coming back or coming back worse. When the doctor came in and said, “I just saved your life.”…That says a lot. I felt like I was at the hospital every day with her as much as I possibly could.

WWE: Lyra Valkyria on Bonding With Becky Lynch, Women's Division Rivals & More

How is she now?

She is good now. She is in a good state of mind. We’re excited because we have a lot of things coming up in this next year that we can’t talk about too much. You’re probably going to see both of us somewhere very soon. I think people will be very pleased and happy and excited.

With the doc coming out, how does it get you to think about your career moving forward?

Moving forward, I’m always looking to evolve. I’m always looking to be the best I can be, not only myself but the WWE superstars. Whether it’s teaching people in the ring or doing high-level main event caliber matches, I’m for all of it. I’m the ultimate utility player. Whatever WWE needs, I’m there and do it to the best of my ability because I enjoy the job I have. I enjoy being a WWE superstar. There is nothing quite like it. When you can make someone happy or laugh or feel something that they didn’t feel before, it’s pretty great.

Biography: WWE Legends: The Miz , Premiere, Sunday, July 14, 8/7c, A&E

Biography: WWE Legends where to stream

WWE Raw where to stream

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Biography: WWE Legends

Wwe smackdown, wwe summerslam.

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Trump rally shooter Thomas Crooks identified: What we know

A 20-year-old man from Pennsylvania fired multiple shots at former President Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday evening.

A bullet grazed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's upper right ear , leaving him bloodied but not seriously injured. Secret Service agents swarmed and ushered Trump off stage, while he raised his fist in the air.

The agents shot and killed the man moments after he opened fire. One rally attendee was killed in the gunfire and two others were "critically injured," the Secret Service said.

Here's what we know:

Who is the shooter at the rally?

The FBI identified Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, as the person behind the assassination attempt. Agency officials released little additional information, saying its investigation remains active and ongoing. They did not indicate what Crooks' motive might have been.

What is Crooks' background?

Crooks is registered to vote as a Republican in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, according to county voter records. His voter registration status has been active since 2021.

Born Sept. 20, 2003, Crooks does not have a criminal record in Pennsylvania, nor has he been sued there, according to state court records. There is no record of him in federal court databases, either.

Crooks' home address is listed in Bethel Park, a suburb in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, voter records show. That three-bedroom brick house has been owned since 1998 by Matthew and Mary Crooks, who appear to be his parents. Telephone calls to the couple were not returned overnight.

A Thomas Crooks graduated two years ago from Bethel Park High School, according to an online video of the ceremony, and was included in a 2022 local news article about recipients of a National Math & Science Initiative Star Award at the public high school, which enrolls about 1,300 students.

Bethel Park is about 42 miles south of Butler, where the Trump rally was held. The leafy suburban street was alive with law enforcement overnight amid a multi-agency response to the shooting. A member of the Allegheny County bomb squad told reporters his team was headed into the house around midnight, but did not say why.

For hours afterward, the scene remained quiet, with deer passing under the police tape and an occasional neighbor stepping out of their house to see what was happening.

John Wolf, a local construction superintendent who lives down the road, said he’d talked with several worried neighbors.

“People are scared,” Wolf said.

How did Crooks shoot Trump?

Crooks had been positioned on a rooftop more than 100 yards from the rally site, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said. Law enforcement recovered an AR-style rifle from the scene.

Law enforcement is following up on a “number of suspicious occurrences,” said Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police, including accounts from witnesses who said they tried to flag police about the activity of a person outside the rally moments before the shooting.

The FBI said in a news release that the situation “remains an active and ongoing investigation, and anyone with information that may assist with the investigation is encouraged to submit photos or videos online at FBI.gov/butler or call 1-800-CALL-FBI.”

Jaron 'Boots' Ennis: Biography, record, fights and more

Jaron "Boots" Ennis is the current IBF welterweight champion and is ranked No. 3 in ESPN's welterweight rankings. In January 2023, Ennis won the interim welterweight title by defeating Karen Chukhadzhian by unanimous decision in a 12-round bout. Ennis would successfully defend his interim title for the first time in a 10th-round knockout victory over Roiman Villa. Before turning professional, Ennis won a silver and gold medal at the United States National Golden Gloves Championships in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Next fight: July 13 vs. David Avanesyan

Record: 31-0 1 NC, 28 KOs DOB: Jun. 26, 1997 Age: 26 Stance: Orthodox Reach: 74 inches Height: 5-foot-10

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Biography of X Kindle Edition

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

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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." ―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." ―Chris Kraus, The Washington Post "Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." ―Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic "In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." ―Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times "Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." ―Marcel Theroux, The Guardian "Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive―at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness―fiction can be." ―Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic "A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." ―Jude Cook, TLS "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

About the Author

Product details.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNML8PM8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Granta Books (March 23, 2023)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 23, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8588 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 468 pages
#365 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books)
#844 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
#1,287 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Catherine lacey.

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

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Customers find the writing style brilliant, but opinions are mixed on the content. Some find it interesting, while others say it's not captivating.

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IMAGES

'Biography of X' review: Catherine Lacey's genre-bending book keeps you
Review: ‘Biography of X,’ by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey, Author of Biography of X: Interview
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Biography of X: 100 Must-Read Books of 2023
Biography of X review by Catherine Lacey: 'A stroke of genius'

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COMMENTS

Biography of X
Biography of X is a 2023 alternative history novel by American writer Catherine Lacey published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux . The novel purports to be a 2005 biography of the musician and artist X, written by her widow, C.M. Lucca, as a response to an unauthorized and apparently inaccurate biography of her wife written after her death.
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.
'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.
Biography of X: A Novel
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.
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.
Biography of X
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.
Biography of X: A Novel Kindle Edition
Biography of X: A Novel - Kindle edition by Lacey, Catherine. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Biography of X: A Novel.
Biography of X: A Novel
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 ...
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.
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.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
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.
Biography of X: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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.
Reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in ...
Biography of X
The following is from Catherine Lacey's Biography of X. Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts ...
BIOGRAPHY OF X
A widow sets out to uncover the truth about her late wife, a mercurial artist who adopted many personas, in this audacious intellectual history of an alternate America.
Reading guide for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
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?
The Many Pieces of Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey invents the ultimate fun-house novel for her exploration of biography and art. y favorite work by the artist X, An Account of My Abduction, depicts a kidnapping. For part of the 87 ...
Biography of X: Lacey, Catherine: 9781250321688: Amazon.com: Books
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 brilliant 'Biography of X' remixes art and history
Catherine Lacey's new novel is presented as a book written by a fictional journalist who is investigating the life of her wife, a renowned and notorious artist.
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey's Biography of X is a daring reimagining of 20th century America where the Vietnam War never happened, Bernie Sanders was President, and an…
A Clayton Kershaw biography and more baseball book recommendations
A new biography of Clayton Kershaw, a history of Chavez Ravine, a reevaluation of a Negro League star and more book recommendations for baseball fans.
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Biography of X
Biography of X - Kindle edition by Lacey, Catherine. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Biography of X.

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There’s no crying in baseball, but there are plenty of great baseball books

A new biography of Clayton Kershaw, a history of Chavez Ravine, a reevaluation of a Negro League star and more book recommendations for baseball fans.

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