Professor Catherine Lacey's Highly Anticipated 'Biography of X' Is Out Now
Biography of X, the highly anticipated new novel by Adjunct Assistant Professor and Writing alumna Catherine Lacey ’10, is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel’s protagonist is CM, the recent widow of X, a brilliant and unknowable artist. After X’s sudden passing, her widow sets out to construct a biography she feels will be worthy of X’s talent and worth, but through the process of writing, CM discovers things about her wife she never wanted to know.
In an interview with The Guardian, Lacey was asked about the origins of the alternate history that her novel takes place in. “I liked the idea of writing a fake biography and the biographies I like best are usually written by someone with some kind of compromised perspective,” she said. “I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America where this female artist could exist and this couple could exist without having to justify themselves, I just need a totally different America.”
Praise for Biography of X began before its publication date, with the novel appearing on “Most Anticipated” lists from The New York Times, Esquire, The Guardian, TIME, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, Lit Hub and Chicago Review of Books. It was then named a Best Book of March by Apple Books and Amazon.
The novel has received piles of praise, with stunning blurbs from writers Garth Greenwell, Torrey Peters, Writing alumna Sara Noviç ’14, and more. Reviews have been no less complimentary. Dwight Garner, in a glowing report for The New York Times, calls Biography of X "A major novel, and a notably audacious one."
Biography of X is available for purchase here. As part of her book tour, Lacey will appear alongside Miriam Toews as part of the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series at the 92NY on May 11. Virtual and in-person tickets for the event are available here.
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and 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.