A review by jdscott50
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Author Catherine Lacey made a name for herself with the breakout hit No One Is Ever Missing, which would become a New Yorker's Best Books of 2014. Her new fiction book, Biography of X, chronicles the mysterious life of X. An Author, An artist, and a creator who mesmerized the American public for 25 years until her death. When a biography is written about her life, X's wife finds it flat and sets out to write her own biography. However, she finds the ever-elusive X is a mystery even to herself.
A biography within this fiction book, C. M. Luca, the author and wife, sets up to find the true story of X. Whether this act is out of love, grief, or her own need to know is irrelevant. She finds X's true birthplace in the South (or Southern Territory), a timeline where the South succeeded again after World War II and created a Christofascist state.) She finds Xs real name and that she escaped by faking her own death. This is just the beginning of her crisscrossing the territories and around the world. Each place had a different identity and a different art movement. She's a writer, an actor, and a painter; the changing identities become art in and of itself. Finally, going by X, she claims that one's entire identity is drag. Ultimately, is the wife unknowingly part of the act? Or is the final act one of love?
A fun journey through contemporary art movements with some creative license for a more feminist world.
Favorite Passages:
Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.
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.
“The circumstance of someone’s birth should have no bearing on their life, and any insistence on the importance of those accidental facts is violence, ignorance. A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*”
The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.
This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.
“How close I felt to him, close against my will. Despite every trouble she caused me, and despite all the falsehoods I was left to untangle, and despite the rage I sometimes feel these days toward her, I wanted then and still want now to be singular in X’s life. Was that all this was? An attempt to prove myself to be irreplaceable, the victor, the most crucial and true love in her life? I didn’t know that trying to prove this fantasy would so certainly undo it.”
That’s a real story, Gioia said. A real story from a real life. It’s never a kidnapping, a deathbed confession. It’s always much simpler—letters thrown out. That’s a real story.
A biography within this fiction book, C. M. Luca, the author and wife, sets up to find the true story of X. Whether this act is out of love, grief, or her own need to know is irrelevant. She finds X's true birthplace in the South (or Southern Territory), a timeline where the South succeeded again after World War II and created a Christofascist state.) She finds Xs real name and that she escaped by faking her own death. This is just the beginning of her crisscrossing the territories and around the world. Each place had a different identity and a different art movement. She's a writer, an actor, and a painter; the changing identities become art in and of itself. Finally, going by X, she claims that one's entire identity is drag. Ultimately, is the wife unknowingly part of the act? Or is the final act one of love?
A fun journey through contemporary art movements with some creative license for a more feminist world.
Favorite Passages:
Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.
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.
“The circumstance of someone’s birth should have no bearing on their life, and any insistence on the importance of those accidental facts is violence, ignorance. A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*”
The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.
This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.
“How close I felt to him, close against my will. Despite every trouble she caused me, and despite all the falsehoods I was left to untangle, and despite the rage I sometimes feel these days toward her, I wanted then and still want now to be singular in X’s life. Was that all this was? An attempt to prove myself to be irreplaceable, the victor, the most crucial and true love in her life? I didn’t know that trying to prove this fantasy would so certainly undo it.”
That’s a real story, Gioia said. A real story from a real life. It’s never a kidnapping, a deathbed confession. It’s always much simpler—letters thrown out. That’s a real story.