Biography of X

National Bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a best book of March by Apple Books and Amazon, and a most anticipated book by The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian, Time, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Chicago Review of Books

"A major novel, and a notably audacious one." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"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

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.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 03/21/2023
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.31lbs
Size: 9.29h x 6.33w x 1.31d
ISBN: 9780374606176


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2022 pg. 3
Library Journal 12/01/2022 pg. 96
Publishers Weekly 01/30/2023
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2023
Booklist 03/01/2023 pg. 22
Shelf Awareness 03/31/2023
BookPage 04/01/2023

About the Author
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.