'Biography of X': a story of hidden secrets and false identities

We are all strangers to one another. We all hide parts of our past; we deny what burns within us; we keep secrets, sometimes unconfessable ones. In the impossibility of being known and of knowing lies the mystery of human relationships, increasingly mediated and adulterated, certainly, but complex since the dawn of time.

The American Catherine Lacey (Tupelo, Mississippi, 1985) is an author with a successful career—well-deserved—who arrives for the first time in English with Biography of X, an ambitious novel in which she delves into the personality of a singular artist who has had more lives than a cat because she has incessantly changed her identity, like a Houdini constantly fleeing from everything that binds her. “X is my name and it has always been, and even if X was not the name they gave me when I was born, I always understood, before understanding anything else, that I was X, that I had no other name, that the rest of the names they imposed on me were false.” A genius or “a narcissistic maniac who didn't care what she destroyed in the process of creating her works”?

Sudden infatuation presides over this novel, which when it was released, Time magazine considered the best of the year. “From the moment we met, in April 1989, there was an indescribable feeling between us, a feeling that arrived so suddenly that there wasn't even time to question it.” During her relationship with X, her wife (C) knows that she hides more questions than answers. But only when she dies does she realize that the questions are far more than she imagined and hide revelations that lead her from surprise to surprise. “What I didn't know is that having embarked on this search I had condemned myself in a thousand different ways, that once the box was opened there would be no way to close it.”

The explanation for all of this, for the mystery surrounding X, lies at the origin, specifically in the place where she was born, which through uchronia the author turns into a hyper-surveilled theocracy from which it is almost impossible to escape. But it is evident that X can escape from everything. Thus, when in the early 70s she lands in the New York of Warhol and company—then the kingdom of freedom—her upward path to success begins, making her a kind of total multidisciplinary artist, always with provocation as a constant.

From what C finds out through trips and interviews with various people, X used a lot of pseudonyms and, likewise, entered and left many circles without giving explanations. To the point of deserving a retrospective at MoMA, which we can consider the pinnacle of artistic triumph. Skillfully, the author makes her interact with people like Tom Waits, Susan Sarandon, David Bowie, Sophie Calle, or Wim Wenders. While a handful of photographs that also skillfully fit the narrative provide it with plausibility. Reality and fiction wisely woven.

One can sense a questioning of the mechanisms of contemporary art creation, which brings it closer to The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt. And, likewise, it plays with metaliterature as, for example, Enrique Vila-Matas does. Lacey has articulated a powerful narrative artifact where homosexual relationships are more than normalized and there is no need to claim them, so she saves herself from doing so. If the novel sins of anything, it is of a certain coldness, very typical of North American narrative. And faced with this coldness – intelligent, witty, but coldness – the realization that we can love someone about whom we know nothing does not free us from the feeling that Biography of X could be called X-Ray of X.