Unraveling the Mystery of Catherine Lacey's "Biography of X"
Catherine Lacey's latest novel, Biography of X, is a postmodern work of experimental fiction that tells the story of a grieving widow who discovers that everything she thought she knew about her late wife, a fierce female artist who called herself "X," was false. The fragmented biography of X that the widow slowly assembles is shored up by footnotes and photographs, and includes real-life figures such as Patti Smith and Frank O'Hara. The novel is also a work of alternate history, in which post-World War II America divided into three sections. Despite its experimental genre-bending, the novel is structured in an old-fashioned way, via a Scheherazade-like sequence of stories.