Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Esquire, The Guardian, Electric Literature, Lit Hub and Chicago Review of Books "The most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby ...

Biography of X is just stunning in places. Opinions of the book ranged from pretty good to exceptional, but no one could deny that Lacey had done something really interesting here. The novel is the research of C as she tries to investigate the truth about the background of her recently deceased wife, X, a world-famous performance artist and celebrity. The story is a series of journal-like observations C makes as she discusses her interviews and investigations into different figures, lovers, and fellows creatives. As she does, she explores with us the alternate reality that Lacey has created in which Emma Goldman (a famous anarchist theorist) became Secretary of Labor and a progressive North leads the South to separate and become a religious tyranny of North Korean surveillance proportions that has recently collapsed. We spent a lot of time talking about Lacey's choice to create that storyworld. It served a number of plot purposes in terms of giving X a reason to erase her first identity and to create an art world in which only women are seriously considered as artists. But it also seems like the nature of the religious South in terms of forcing everyone into extremely limited identities and the choice paralysis that women from the South faced after the wall fell is a resonant contrast with X's work wearing different identities and changing them over time. C as a narrator gives us a very good lens on the identity question -- C in her grief wants to own that grief in a more critical way that everyone else in X's life and her interview process leads her to encounter people who have deep knowledge or alternate versions of X that she documents and reacts to. The relationship between C and X becomes a constant reference point to the actions X told in her life as part of her journey from escape from the South to musician to New York socialite to artist and the view of this journey is constantly reverberating between the earnestness and dedication to a specific art project on self and the shameless and cold manipulation of others. We made a lot of how unlikeable X was, although we also noticed how unlikeable male geniuses could be historically and wondered if we would view a man in X's position differently. The genius of Lacey's novel lies in these questions. Was X friends with Oleg or just calculatedly using him for money and access? Was X actually a spy for the North or did she just disappear for times out of her own selfishness? Did she rip off another artist out of disregard or as a statement? Did she actually set up the violent protests against her and C? All of it seems possible either way or both and X's constant commentary that she wasn't acting when she played those roles makes all of this muddled in an amazingly complex way. At the center of this is X's betrayal of C, which is just too good for us to spoil here, but brings home the questions of the novel in a simply stunning conclusion. The book just does an amazing job depicting the cruelty and singlemindedness of the art world and of genius, and by making the narrator C, a character with her own sense of danger-baiting, interrogation, and obsession, we are left with a stunning look at creativity and its impact on relationships. NUBClubbers who thought less of the book mainly did because of dislike of the characters, and it's true there's basically no one in the book you can purely root for. But what a fascinating look at the different perspectives one can have on genius and how no one view of a single life is total no matter how it's constructed. When we read Lacey's previous work The Answers, we said it was a book with terrific potential that didn't quite hit its marks. In Biography of X, Lacey has soared past them. It's a brilliant work. Brava.