Biography of X: A Novel

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1), Vulture, and Publishers Weekly, and one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, Lit Hub, and Amazon.

National Bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

“A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and of 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 Fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago, Illinois.

ISBN: 9781250321688
Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Publisher: Picador
Published: March 19, 2024

"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