an intriguing premise and ambitious scope, but unfortunately, it often feels bogged down by its own complexity. Catherine Lacey’s experimental The novel’s structure and prose, while clever, felt more cerebral than emotionally engaging, making it difficult to connect with the characters or their journey. While some readers may appreciate its intellectual ambition, I found it overly dense.

I think the best thing about this book is how immersive it feels. It's called Biography of X, and with all the files and citations in this book, that's exactly the impression someone will get when reading. This is my first Catherine Lacey, and I'm afraid I wasn't enthralled by the writing or where the story went. Sure, yes, the alternate history was interesting and I was keen to learn more about the societal set up, but did I really care about X's story? Not really. All in all, it was enjoyable, but the type of book that has run away from me almost as soon as I closed it.

It’s probably way to early to call my book of the year for 2024, but I would imagine that Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X will make my books of the year. The novel is framed as a biography by a journalist named CM Lucca about her now dead wife, a performance artist, musician and writer, known only as X. As Lucca explores the life of her wife, can she learn more about their complicated relationship? Blending an alternative history of the United States (the Vietnam War never happened and Bernie Saunders has been President) with real life figures (Tom Waits, David Bowie, Connie Converse) and a compelling portrait of an enigmatic polymath, Lacey has created an absorbing, intelligent and masterfully constructed and realised novel about how we create and understand our sense of self. I loved it.

This novel blends genres, merging fake biography, with alternate history and slightly dystopian feeling worldbuilding - an ambitious undertaking, and one it largely succeeds in. It truly felt like a real biography, complete with citations, footnotes and pictures (though the frequency of the citations did feel like it interrupted the flow a little reading on Kindle, as I was often hoping out of the text and back in again). We’re drip-fed the world building for the first few chapters, until a big chunk of exposition is dropped a little way in. This becomes necessary for the following section, but it did feel a tiny bit clunky and slowed the text down for this whole portion; I’d far preferred it when things were slowly revealed to us. The narrator's voice was strong, and my favourite parts were when her research revealed more about her, and her relationships - I found her a little more interesting than X, in all honesty, and found myself wishing she’d reveal more about herself, more often. As the story unraveled the narrator questions if she even liked X, and I felt the same, finding her to be pretentious and brittle, and X often comes across as a little unbelievably impressive and over skilled (ie, when she writes a best selling novel in 4 days or writes several of David Bowie's famous hits). I wanted to know why the narrator loved her, aside from the almost superhuman magnetism she’s stated to possess. Occasionally the book touches on moments in X’s life that sound fascinating - but refuses to elaborate, as these are stated in the ‘duller’ rival biography this one is disputing, and I did find myself wishing we’d had some of those moments too. Admittedly I’m not someone who would generally pick up a real biography, so whilst I admired how well crafted this was as a faux-biography, at times I did find it a little dry. The pacing sagged in the middle, slowing down almost painfully at times, due in part to the biography-format. The descriptions of X’s art and novels were very clearly and vividly drawn, and the side characters are also well fleshed out. As the story moved into X and the narrator's turbulent marriage, and the narrator became more present, I found myself engaged again - though this was quite late in the novel. These chapters are filled with a simmering undercurrent of dread that builds towards the novel's climax, and does pay off.

I think I wanted to like this book more than I did in practise - it’s ambitious, skillfully written, well constructed, but I also found myself racing through it to get to the revelations we’re promised early on, often speculating on what they could be. By the time I reached the ‘twist’, I hadn’t accurately guessed it - so it was effective and surprising, a powerful - and almost horrifying - moment. The passage almost directly after this is beautiful too - and I did feel I understood the narrator's love for X in that moment, and the final few chapters are also a striking exploration of grief, though the book ends rather abruptly. Overall this was a middling read for me for what had been a highly anticipated novel - an interesting concept and execution with strong chapters at the beginning and towards the end, dragged down by a bloated, sluggish middle.

Looooooved this novel. Very ambitious, lots to say - the dystopian states described feel not that far off - and the snippets of real life figures mixed in was fascinating. I'm looking for more novels by this author now, I thought this was so clever, so brutal, so interesting - as someone who is not a particular art lover, the art world I find intriguing now...

Biography of X, and its narrator, constantly duck and dive as they slip out of our fingers.

Trying to grieve, process, and understand, her wife's death, our narrator seeks to tell her story, but soon realises just how complex that can be. Her wife, a performance artist, star and recluse, cannot be pinned down. Her name is only given as X, although her wife soon finds other names, lives and stories she lived in over her life.

For me, apart from the incredibly singular and captivating voice of our narrator- the mourning and driven widowed wife- the book is startling for the way it buries fiction within fiction, and makes it feel like non-fiction- an investigative report and memoir made out of stories that may not even be real to begin with.

As the book unfurls, our own sense of reality, and that of the narrator, becomes increasingly opaque, and I think it is the skill of the author to hang together so many conflicting and complicating stories in a way that feels revelatory and like we are working it out with our beleaguered narrator, as she slowly slides further and further away from truth and from fiction.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Catherine Lacey's Biography of X has already attracted a lot of attention and it's easy to see why. The book is a fictional biography of the artist, musician and provocateur, X, written/narrated by her widow CM Lucca, that's also a powerful alternative history of an America that was (literally) politically and culturally divided during the mid 20th century. As such, it's hugely impressive in the detail with which Lacy creates her worlds, using photographs, description of X's and others' art and music which often mirror artefacts from our world, and references to X's interactions with cultural figures such as Susan Sontag, David Bowie, and Kathy Acker, which are always witty and sometimes laugh out loud funny. As such, it's an impressive progression from her rather ascetic previous novel, Pew. Where there are similarities are in the difficulties we (and Lucca) have in getting a grip on the elusive X, who is as resistant of definition as the novel is. While this elusiveness is written into the novel, it can make it difficult to engage with the book at times. For me, this made it more a book to admire than to love but there is an awful lot to admire.

I liked the premise of Biography of X, but for me the execution was underwhelming and far too long. Neither X nor her wife/biographer are very interesting characters and the fictional biography doesn't give any sense of their relationship. Even the potential extra layer - that the author/narrator is both undermining and reinforcing the mythology - doesn't rescue it for me.

The division of the United States into three territories, with the south a Handmaid's Tale-esque theocracy, was intriguing but didn't seem to be followed through. X is in the orbit of real-life stars in New York such as David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. Surely if one thing changes, everything does? Without the United States, there's no post-war boom, no Cold War superpower, no Vietnam. Without the music of the South how would rock and pop have evolved? And yet all the people who are famous for these things are still famous? Is this the great man/woman view of art?

There's also the promise of a big reveal but all we really seem to learn is that narcissistic myth-makers aren't always honest or nice. Some of the ideas in Biography of X are thought-provoking, and in presenting it as a real biography - complete with photos and footnotes - it questions how readers are both complicit and deceived by the authority of the form, but as a novel it left me cold.

Biography of X is unlike anything I've ever read. An exploration of life, love, art, activism, politics wrapped up in a dystopian thriller that is hugely ambitious in scope. There is so much going on in this book - fact is blended with fiction in wild and wonderful ways - its metafictional elements are mind-bending, containing as they do some real-life people, events, quotes, letters, photographs and songs. Lacey writes an alternative history of the USA that is simultaneously strangely recognisable and vaguely terrifying.

X is a famous artist, filmmaker and songwriter, about whom much is spoken but little is truly known. In the aftermath of X's death, X's grieving widow CM Lucca begins to examine if she knew who X really was. Was the enigmatic X a creative genius, an unstable sociopath, a con artist, a spy? Was she all of these things? SM sets out to write a definitive biography of X to set the record straight.

CM's voyage of discovery brings her to the Southern Territory, consisting of much of the southern United States which in Lacey's version of history, seceded from the rest of the USA after the Second World War. At this point in the novel, a whole new layer of the novel is unpeeled and we are given a potted history of the right-wing theocracy of the Southern Territory, which has shades of The Handmaid's Tale's Gilead.

I agree with a reviewer who described this book as more admirable than enjoyable. It's such an impressive work, notably the interweaving of fact and fiction and the nods to real-life figures (Tom Waits, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, Bernie Sanders and more) and fictional characters from real-life novels (Cassandra Edwards from Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker was one I spotted, there are others Easter-egged in there). However, it is a slog at times and does feel longer than its 416 pages - there are lots of footnotes that add to the authenticity of the metafictional book but don't add a lot to the story itself.

The author's imagination and intelligence are awe-inspiring though and while this certainly not a book for everyone - there are few likeable characters and a lot of detail - but if you love a serious, weighty, intellectual, mind-bending novel that will make your brain hurt at times, this could be the right fit for you. 4/5 stars

Biography of X is a fascinating faux-biographical expose of the dark secrets and indiscretions of X, written by her grieving widow as she travels across the country in search of the truth about her deceased wife.

X was a celebrity and public figure, an indiscernable character whom the reader is led to dislike more and more as the novel progresses. The various personas that X has inhabited over the years all left indelible marks on the people who loved her and, by tracing these people to the roots of their relationships with her wife, our protagonist uncovers terrible and devastating reality which will forever alter her perception of her lost love.

This is an exceptionally written novel and, whilst set in an alternate (but worryingly believable) USA, it reads like a real biography. The reader feels truly sorry for X's widow as she so blindly describes their incredibly toxic and unequal relationship without seeming to see the problems. Despite this, the depth of her love and devotion to X remains intact, despite all that she learns, (it seems a common theme throughout her story, X seems to demand forgiveness and acceptance, unapologetic in every way).

Overall this was a thrilling read and I really struggled to put it down! Wholeheartedly would recommend this to my following, thank you to Granta and Netgalley for the early access!

I loved this, but it does ask something of a reader, and, it also refuses any easy answers. Don't expect a clear and definitive answer to any of the questions it raises or you'll be disappointed. Much like the UK cover, this narrative is a kaleidoscope offering a world similar to ours but with key differences, a larger than life artist who rubs shoulders with a lot of real people from our world some with changed names and some with the names we recognise them by. Like a kaleidoscope, the images repeat and come into focus and then with a twist they're dispelled. Told through interviews and recorded conversations the story becomes a palimpsest of meaning upon meaning, identity upon identity. What is the truth of X? Is this question actually the point, who is anyone once stripped of a past? Of life? My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. Definitely a lot of food for thought in this one

Biography of X is a fictional biography of artist X’s many selves written by her widow and journalist C M Lucca, woven with an alternate history of the reunification of the states.

If it sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. If it sounds absolutely bananas, that’s because it is. I am in disbelief at how immersive, convincing and compelling this novel is.

I was unsure about reading this based on the premise but a review from Who Weekly podcaster, Bobby Finger, prompted me to request it. Grateful for Bobby!

The writing is gorgeous, insightful, contemplative, maddening.

I think this would be best enjoyed by picking up the physical book (rather than audio or kindle), because there are endnotes and photos etc that you will want to flick back and forth between.

Pick up this book up if: you want to experience a triumph of the imagination.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I had read a couple of chapters before I realised X, an artist, writer, music producer and queen of personas and smoke and mirrors, is a fictional character. This biography is a combination of fantasy (a dystopian, totalitarian, fascist society in the south of America, some made-up artists and celebrities) and real people and facts (Bowie, Sontag...) or echoes of them (the German wall, re-unifications...).

Not only is it a biography of X, it is also a biography of C.M. Lucca, her widow, and their (unhealthy) relationship. When X dies, she doesn't know much about her wife, and she starts researching her after a biography about X with loads of mistakes is published. Lucca doesn't know that X was born in the Southern Territories eg. or what she did during her time in Europe. She doesn't know how complicated X's relationships with all her other partners were.

Is it possible to know someone. Is it possible to know yourself? How does your environment influence you? Why do people flee in relationships with people they don't know? What is creativity? These are all questions that come up in this mock biography.

I just love how this one read as a real art biography, with footnotes, interview snippets, photos... Slowly you start to realise Lucca is one of those unreliable narrators and that makes it even more interesting. Especially because she seems uncapable of drawing the right conclusions somehow.

Thank you NetGalley and Granta for the ARC!

Another truly excellent novel from Lacey; layered, inventive, fascinating. Exploring an alternate version of America and one of its foremost women artists through the eyes of her increasingly disenchanted wife. An author to keep your eye on.

Full review to come on my channels in a few weeks.

Catherine Lacey’s multi-layered novel presents a biography by a woman C. M. Lucca writing about her wife, a now-dead, controversial artist widely known as X. Lucca considers it necessary to correct numerous misconceptions published in an earlier biography of X. But Lucca’s attempt to construct a definitive life of X is complicated by X’s past, particularly her phase as a conceptual artist operating under an array of aliases, each accompanied by its own, carefully-staged physical persona. Masks and personas are fundamental to Lacey’s narrative, not purely as themes but concretised by the incorporation of a separate title and copyright page attributing it to C. M. Lucca, although the conceit’s equally undermined by an earlier title page under Lacey’s name.

Lacey seems to be building on a history of playing with identity in various cultural and artistic fields, a history rife with instances of reinvention and mis-direction from authors like George Eliot and Fernanda Pessoa to DJs in electronic music to artists like Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun. A history which often openly calls into question notions of a stable or fixed identity. Lacey carries this further by making the character of X a composite of shards of existing figures in the art world. X stages performances that are clearly based on those of artists like Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle. Aspects of the concept driving Lacey’s novel echo Calle’s “L’homme au Carnet” and Lacey invokes Calle’s famous stalking project “Suite Venitienne” but makes Calle its object rather than its subject with X as Calle’s pursuer. Sometimes this mirroring operates as a series of in-jokes but it also points to deeper concerns around authorship, originality and authenticity as well as issues of knowledge and attribution. Concerns that deliberately invoke Borges’s fiction – directly referenced in Lacey’s text – particularly his stories “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” and “Borges and I.”

Notions of authenticity and knowledge are central to Lucca’s perception of her attempts to piece together the fragments of her X’s past, although what Lucca thinks she’s doing and what she actually does are gradually revealed to be at odds. Lucca’s a former investigative journalist who uses her skills to uncover “truths” about X, whose origins have been deliberately obscured. She’s also a classic, unreliable narrator, far too personally invested in her subject, at one point too distracted by jealousy at X’s happiness with a former lover to pay attention to potentially crucial information about X’s activities – although as the story unfolds Lacey casts doubt on any possibility of objectivity when it comes to representing others. Even Lucca’s use of endnotes seems like a ploy to shore up her claims that her account of X is authoritative.

Lucca’s unreliability also extends to self-knowledge. In interviews Lacey’s claimed her novel’s primarily an exploration of grief and love, but Lucca’s experiences are not those found in conventionally tragic tales of lost love. There’s no sense of any real intimacy in Lucca’s description of X or of their time together, their bond seems more dependent on a fateful combination of X’s forceful charisma and Lucca’s wilful self-delusion. A love grounded as much in projection and obsession as it is desire or affection, with X cast as the embodiment of Rebecca Solnit's mythical, female art monster.

Another thread that emerges via Lacey’s portrayal of Lucca’s research is a critique of biography as an interpretive form. Lucca relies on interviews with X’s former lovers, colleagues and acquaintances but these often serve to create an impression of X as an object that can be viewed from a variety of angles. Features of the commercial biography Lucca’s ostensibly attempting to debunk recall Benjamin Moser’s widely-criticised biography of Susan Sontag – here also part of X’s circle. Moreover, X’s connections to the real-life writer Kathy Acker reminded me of Chris Kraus’s book about Acker, and the uneasiness stirred by the revelation that Acker was the former lover of Kraus’s partner.

A key feature is the location of X and Lucca’s story, a version of America separated into North, South and West, with South as a closed-off, fascistic theocracy. It’s an alternative history that’s fairly obviously indebted to Margaret Atwood and Philip Roth. But it’s also quite an intriguing one - I relished specifics like the rewriting of the lives of iconic figures like Emma Goldman’s. Like X, Lacey’s setting plays with reality, for instance the revolutionary factions in the South that conjure countercultural groups like The Weathermen. Yet I wasn’t always convinced by Lacey’s imagined America or clear about its relevance. Lacey has said she simply wanted a backdrop against which X and Lucca as a lesbian couple wouldn’t stand out, living as they did in a North in which homophobia has long since ceased to exist. But the world-building involved seems far too elaborate, and frequently far too distracting, for its stated function.

There were times when this felt slightly dry and stretched out – though it’s not clear if that reflects Lucca’s shortcomings or Lacey’s. I’m also not sure the interplay between Lucca’s reflections, X’s past and the more speculative features is entirely coherent. The ending too was a little predictable. But I still found this a fascinating, provocative piece, an impressive collage and commentary on cultural and artistic movements and their histories.

Immediately, the concept of reading a fictionalised biography sounded very appealing to me. Lacey does a brilliant job in creating a story of a person that is well rounded and feels well researched. In a way, this book feels very similar to Trust by Hernan Diaz and I found that both of these books had a similar problem- that it dragged in the middle. There is so much more that is created, for one the reimagining of America. I just didn’t think it added much to the story, especially for how long the part about the Souther territory were explored. It his book would have been more enjoyable to me had it been shorter.

really loved this—a maddening, confusing, intriguing assemblage of overlapping desires/obsessions/selves (the biographer, the lover, the artist), made more fun by my e-ARC’s formatting which meant i couldn’t read the endnotes as i went along. highly recommended! less depressing than the bell jar!

Oh this was AMAZING. Books about the lives of complicated artists are frankly one of my favorites. Biography of X does such a great job of mixing fiction with lots of nonfiction and keeping it both fresh and so intriguing. X's wife, CM, feels like such a real character, a real person obscured by her famous, difficult spouse. I loved this, loved the photos and the interviews, everything.

The Biography of X is a fictional biography about an artist, writer and cultural figure named X by her surviving widow. At the beginning of the book we discover that an unauthorised biography of X is in the works and the widow embarks on a wild goose chase of interviews, stories and collecting photographs in order to compile a text which shows to the world who her late wife really was.

What I thought was really unique about this book it’s that it’s actually an alternate history novel set in a US which is fractured into various territories. I found it a little confusing to grasp and there was a sort of info dump of the history at the beginning of the book which I didn’t like, but once the author began to discover X’s real birth parents and divulge the cultural/political wars between the territories it got interesting. I wish there had been more of it because it felt more like a backdrop which I guess is due to X being the centre of the book.

I was super gripped by this novel at first but found it waning around the middle. The last 20-30% however I really enjoyed and found the final ‘reveal’ moment at the end breathtaking. It’s so fun to have a character in the novel be the person that has actually written the words you are reading - we can see how X has pretty much ruined the authors life and turned her into a submissive shell of what she used to be, but the author is blinded by her devotion and it really comes through between the lines of the text.

The ideas around artistry and identity were also really cool. X plays around with different identities and personas through her life and I can’t help but wonder if the whole book has just been written by one of X’s identities as the author talks about her families history with identity dissociation and hallucinations and so the way this was implied was really clever.

Giving it four stars because the biography format got a bit boring sometimes but I loved the idea of this book and what it explored. Catherine Lacey has really impressed me with this so will want to read her other work.

My head is a bit of a mass of contradicting thoughts as I reflect on this book. Lacey’s book is presented to us as a biography written by C M Lucca about her wife, the eponymous X. But what starts out as Lucca’s attempt to correct a false biography of X published by someone else turns into a much darker journey as she learns more and more that she never even suspected about the woman to whom she was married. And comes to realise more about their relationship.

And all of this is set in an alternative version of the USA where the country is split into territories. The section where this is explained is one of the parts of the book that leaves me with contradicting thoughts. We learn that the Southern Territory was created in 1945 at the end of WWII when the USA split into 3 parts (South, West and North). The Southern Territory literally walled itself off from the rest of the country and we see the south as a repressive, right wing, religiously led area and the North is a much more atheistic democracy into which people from the south sometimes try to escape.

This territorial divide of the country plays an important part in X’s history as Lucca uncovers it, but the whole exposition of the set up feels a bit forced and all the political stuff that is discussed is then dropped for large parts of the book.

I don’t think we are intended to find X’s life story believable. She lived her life by becoming a long series of different characters, sometimes several at the same time. It’s very impressive and a lot of fun to read as Lacey brings in lots of real life events or quotes but ones where she deliberately adapts them or gives them new owners in the alternate society she has created. Similarly, she includes a lot of photographs some of which were created especially for the book but others are images she found from our “real” world but works into her story set in a modified world. But X’s life is never realistic because the reader can’t help but be aware that no one could actually fit that much into one life. And, in fact, one of the things that struck me as I read was that large parts of the novel have a similar feel: I haven’t actually drawn up a timeline and I am sure this isn’t actually the case, but it often feels like we are dropping back to a previous time and squeezing yet more into a period that was already full.

It’s probably more a failing of me as a reader than of the book, but there are so many different things going on (I haven’t even talked about the sections that explore the development of art which I found really interesting probably partly because I am midway through a re-read of all Siri Hustvedt’s books and that is an area she writes really well about) that I failed to connect it all together as a coherent whole. Maybe that would come on a re-read but I am not sure when I would get to that.