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Open Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X and you will find a fictional book called Biography of X—though its writer, CM Lucca, admits early on that the title is a lie.
Lucca’s wife, X, a multidisciplinary artist with a career full of controversy, has died and an unauthorized biography has been published. Lucca is determined to set the record straight, and we follow her through a series of interviews with people who knew—or thought they knew—X.
The story takes place in a world where the southern U.S. seceded in 1945 and became a fascist theocracy, with Lucca’s research taking her into the newly reunified Southern Territory. But to describe the novel first as an alternate history of the United States feels reductive; though that’s certainly part of its premise, Lacey’s intellectual project is more ambitious and asks more wide-ranging questions: What is an artist, and what is art? What is marriage for, when each of us is fundamentally unknowable? What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to be a person? And, yes, there are many questions about this country—who we are and how we got here—and ultimately all of these questions reveal themselves to be interconnected.
Lacey freely pilfers quotations from the biographies and letters and journals of cultural icons—Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Kathy Acker, Jean Rhys, Fleur Jaeggy, Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and on and on—sometimes attributing the words to their originators but often putting them in the mouth of her enigmatic artist, with names, genders, words, and details changed to suit the story. If X feels larger than life, it is because she is made from the stuff of hundreds of lives. To comb through Lacey’s endnotes is to understand the lifetime of reading that went into this novel.
Biography of X shares characteristics with Catherine Lacey’s earlier works. Like Pew, it turns a critical eye on the machinery of organized Christianity. As in The Answers, characters shed their names and try on new identities. And like nearly every Lacey work, someone important disappears. But the scope of X is grander, epic even.
I spoke with Lacey about the novel in early March.
Shayne Terry
Your novel made me think of another novel in which Emma Goldman appears as herself: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Have you read it?
Catherine Lacey
I haven’t, but when I was a kid, I saw the musical. I grew up in a very musical theater family and all my friends were in musical theater, so I saw Ragtime in person. I think it was 1997 and Amazon.com had just started, and I got an account on Amazon so that I could buy a CD of the musical recording.
Shayne Terry
I also saw the musical, in 1999, and it led me to the book. There are a lot of parallels with Biography of X. Both feature writer-narrators, both animate historical figures, both take on the history of racism and sexism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. Your Emma Goldman becomes the socialist governor of Illinois and then the chief of staff to FDR and manages to work into the New Deal same-sex marriage, prison abolition, and immigrant rights bills before she is assassinated. Doctorow brings together Goldman and model-actress Evelyn Nesbit in what I think is one of the sexiest scenes in all of literature. What drew you to Goldman?
Catherine Lacey
When I’m reading history, I always think, “It didn’t have to go this way, did it?” What if Emma Goldman had had more of a place in American politics? I was reading about the Haymarket affair, which was a big demonstration for workers’ rights in Chicago in 1886. The cops incited violence and several people died, and it was covered nationally and became a real turning point. Before that, there was more support for unions—it wasn’t radical to support a worker’s union, it was actually kind of conservative. And I wondered, what if the cops hadn’t incited violence? Maybe that could have created an America that was prepared to accept and transform some of Goldman’s ideas into the mainstream, instead of her being deported.
I don’t remember which came first, thinking about Emma Goldman and her position in American politics or the fact that I wanted to write a book about two women in the twentieth century without having to justify a lesbian being a lesbian, and in order to do that I had to have a different America. I wanted to be able to carry forward a queer narrative that wasn’t at all about their oppression, at least not on the basis of their sexuality.
Shayne Terry
Formally, you took the fiction of the book so far—there are fictional citations, a fictional author’s note, and my advance copy even came with a fictional publicist’s letter. Then you have these really detailed endnotes. Did you create the endnotes as you went along or after the fact?
Catherine Lacey
Mainly as I went along. I learn things by doing, but in the process of learning by doing, I have to get things wrong. And so I was kind of keeping track of my research because I knew that the endnotes had to be there, and I didn’t want to have a huge problem at the end. (Though I still had a huge problem at the end.) I’m used to writing the kind of book that takes place in a week or is from one person’s perspective, and I like those books. But I kind of backed myself into writing a totally different type of book, which demanded that I keep a lot of timelines and characters straight.
Shayne Terry
What tools did you use? Did you have a bunch of index cards or a spreadsheet?
Catherine Lacey
Just a very disorganized document. I’m definitely not the person to give advice about how to organize something like that. I got an MFA in creative nonfiction and one of my teachers was the biographer Patty O’Toole, who’s an amazing teacher and very inspiring. She did a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and she had this extremely organized and precise graphing system for keeping track of the storylines and who was mentioned on what page. I was very impressed by that, but it’s not my natural way of being creative. When I write, I almost black out and dissociate. It’s a fun dissociation, but it’s not the best mental state to also keep endnotes that are in proper MLA format. FSG had an army of copy editors who did me so many favors, really combing through the notes and doing all the work of a real nonfiction book on a novel. I am in debt and very appreciative of them.
Shayne Terry
I love the way you play with history—Frank O’Hara survives his 1966 Fire Island accident and his extended life, of course, intersects with that of X; there was a brief conflict in Vietnam, de-escalated before it became a war. You also insert contemporary writers into the decades before they were born. Hermione Hoby profiles a friend of X’s for Time in 1967, Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew’s Black Futures anthology comes out in 1998, not 2020. You even quote your “favorite negative reader review” of your first novel, attributing it to X’s editor describing a manuscript X wrote under one of her pseudonyms. How did you license yourself to play like this?
Catherine Lacey
Once you start moving one thing, it becomes easy to move anything. Connie Converse is a real musician who disappeared, I think in 1972. I was listening to her music and really loving it, and then I read that she had gone missing and I had a really emotional reaction to it because I had been connecting with her music so much. I really just wanted it to be different, so I extended her life.
All the living people, people who I either know or I know their writing, I didn’t make them characters. But I needed all these names of journalists, I needed book titles and authors and headlines, so I made these sort of homages to writers that I admire.
Shayne Terry
The novel includes photographs of both people and objects, some of which were commissioned. Tell me about these collaborations.
Catherine Lacey
The original idea was more complicated. I was going to Cindy Sherman myself into all these different costumes and make myself seem like all these different versions of X. I was going to fabricate a lot of things and burn through a bunch of money that I didn’t have. Then I realized that some of the things I wanted to do were so complicated that I would need an entirely new set of skills to be able to do them by myself, so I had to narrow it down. I tend to do this in writing—the first draft is bigger and more complicated, and then it’s about figuring out: what’s the simpler thing that’s inside of here, that’s going to be stronger? I ended up hiring a professional, Alex Merto, to do things that nobody else could do. And then I commissioned the writer Maryse Meijer to type something up because she has a good typewriter, and my friend Rebecca went to this grave that I couldn’t get to and did the grave rubbing.
Shayne Terry
One of the things you created was this fan t-shirt for one of X’s personas and, in a move that seemed to me like something X would do if she had Instagram, you posted a photo of it to your grid with the caption “Japanese fan T-shirt for the elusive 1970s author Cindy O. Her work is no longer in print in the US. The text at top of the shirt seems to read ‘sad American woman.’”
Catherine Lacey
I made a couple of those shirts and that was the one I liked best. Those I designed myself and sent to the t-shirt printer. Then I posted it without any explanation that it was part of the novel that I was writing and it’s still up.
Shayne Terry
I love that someone commented, “what’s she written Cindy O. seems too elusive even for google lol.” That Instagram post feels like a supplemental work of art, part of the performance of this novel. Were there other times you let the fiction from the book merge with your real world?
Catherine Lacey
CM has the same initials as me and X has the same birthday, but 40 years earlier. I have to kind of implicate myself in pretty much everything I write. There’s always some description or detail that either is as it was in real life or is adjacent in a way that is a joke with myself, and the structure of this one made it possible to put in so many.
You’re allowed to do whatever you want. It’s fiction. Literary fiction supposedly has to be so serious with capital “S,” but I don’t live my life in some kind of deadly serious asceticism, so I don’t know why a literary novel should be full of only serious things. I want books to be sincere and direct, but also playful, too.
Shayne Terry
On your Bookshop.org profile, you’ve got a Bibliography of X and some of the books are no surprise—Vivian Gornick’s Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, for example. Some I had not read and others I had never heard of, and I have the feeling that I could spend the next few years reading only from this list and uncovering more and more depth in your novel. You call it “incomplete” though—what’s missing?
Catherine Lacey
It’s incomplete just because I haven’t tried to complete it, but I think it may have to stay that way because I would never say that it was complete. There’s probably something that influenced me that I’m not thinking of.
At some point in the early lockdowns, I started doing more stuff like that. When you’re working on visual art, there’s usually a way that you can see the whole thing that you’re working on, but you can’t do that with a book. I printed out the whole book, only with 16 pages per PDF page, so I could see the way the text moved and the way the images were moving in it. This was before it was properly laid out when it was just a Word document on my computer. I liked having that all up on the wall and being able to see the entire book, even though I couldn’t read it. There was something about doing these little things and letting the book bleed out into the world.
FICTION
by Catherine Lacey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published on March 21, 2023
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