Hello all! As always, thank you for stopping by this space. I appreciate your time. This publication remains free, so please recommend to others and, if you haven’t already yourself…
Where were you on this manic Monday when our Constitution ceased to exist? I used to write a lot about politics, especially in Wisconsin, which served as your lab for proving that terrible is scalable. But I can’t do that anymore, as the impact feels nonexistent and a million smart people will write a million smart and urgent things; they’ve got it covered.
Maybe the best messages arrive in new(ish) packaging, and for writing this might mean an unexpected genre with which to engage with the moment. In that spirit, this is essentially a book review heavily informed by recency bias—a few days ago I finished Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, and it’s been bouncing around in my head. Without providing any spoilers, I highly recommend Lacey’s novel. It’s a book that accounts not only for our present moment (it was published in 2023), but one we might look back on to help understand ourselves and what we became. It’s an “alternate present” story that, given our trajectory, masterfully blends the tools of biography and fiction to capture the nature of our identity and why that identity is so elusive.
If you’ve read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, then Biography of X has a family resemblance, just without the science fiction. As the book jacket will tell you, Lacey’s America is one where the American South seceded from the US in 1945 and became an authoritarian theocracy, complete with a wall to keep everyone both in and out. (There’s also a “Western Territory,” so the nation has essentially broken into three parts.)
What’s been bouncing around in my head is “Why this plot element?” It’s often essential to moving the action forward, but I also imagined how Lacey might have written the novel without an alternate history (fun details emerge with numerous pop-culture icons, such as David Bowie). Given the most recent action taken by our Supreme Court, now I get it. What Lacey offers to us as a biography written by X’s widow, known as C.M., also doubles as a biography of us, the democracy-loving folks who live in the US.
C.M.’s exploration of her dead wife’s past, which she knew almost nothing about, proves to be a deeply challenging experience for her. It will move you, as a reader, to ask questions about identity, how much you can truly know someone, how much you know yourself, and whether someone else’s life and biography can overwhelm and erase your own. Isn’t that something we have thought about? Can your devotion to someone else’s life lead to a level of personal erasure or invisibility? How do individuals balance relationships so they can still pursue their desires while participating in the larger whole?
Let’s play the juxtaposition game for a moment:
C.M., now widowed, is consumed with writing the “correct” biography of her spouse, X. (An unauthorized biography has enraged her; she wants to set the record straight.) Digging into the past proves unpleasant and much is revealed that turns C.M.’s world into a slowly tilting planet.
***
What have we been doing in the recent past but struggling with each other over our history, our biography as a nation? The 1619 Project leads to the 1776 Project. Statues are removed and young white men march on a Virginia college campus with torches. We can watch Jordan Peele’s Nope, which is then followed by a flood of Kevin Costner’s visions of the American West. We tug back and forth on the absolutist rope of what pasts we should be ashamed of versus those of which we should be proud. We accumulate swatches of reality that we measure against an ideal. I imagine this as the predicament of all biographers, their own version of the Heisenberg principle.
In Lacey’s novel, the independent South is named “The Southern Territory.” It is not presented as cartoonish. Many of the citizens embrace the life they have chosen and are fully committed to its strict rules. They are people who desire the authoritative voice who provides absolute structure and behavioral demarcations—this is right, this is wrong, and once you know that you will be held accountable (severely).
***
We’ve witnessed Roe fall. We’ve watched states pass absolutist laws that take no account of the many complications and permutations an individual woman might experience with health and pregnancy. All national polling shows that most Americans support a woman’s right to choose. Yet, like in Lacey’s novel, what happens when you attempt to write a biography of the word or concept we know as “majority”? Are we currently struggling to account for the actions of bad individuals? Or is the system itself in disrepair for allowing itself to be coerced so easily?
C.M, the “biographer” in Biography of X, is thrown into deep and challenging stretches of self-reflection. Now that X is gone, what is left of C.M.? Was there ever a C.M. that we could identify and discuss separately from her larger-than-life partner? (X is a world-renowned artist.) Does C.M. control her own life, or has she always been a character in someone else’s story?
***
As an American, I have often thought of my life in comparison to others—the institutions I have been able to access, my relative quality of life, the freedom to express myself on platforms such as this, and the endless list of moments of personal and social liberty I could detail. It has all been a great privilege, but I’ve always known it could end. I’ve always known that my nation, like X, could at some point die. I imagine a fictional version of myself setting out on the task C.M. has set for herself. How do I respond when I learn that there are still men in orange suits in Guantanamo Bay who, after decades of detainment, have yet to be charged? Am I indifferent? Am I a different self than I was twenty years ago? Do I think it could only happen to them and not to me or someone I know?
When you learn more about X (or at least what we think we know), you see a portrait of someone who has deliberately left pieces of her past behind to pursue her own goals and interests. X takes no responsibility for these decisions or the pain they may have caused. I don’t write this as a judgment, as I feel many of us carry familiar regret: a memory, often painful, of something we could have done differently. At this, Lacey is a master—using C.M. and X to cast us, as readers, simultaneously as subjects and objects of observation.
***
Would we ever do that as a nation? Recklessly leave people and ideals behind in exchange for the brief “wins” of the present? Wouldn’t we regret abandoning the birth and implementation of ideas that, ironically, have invested someone with enough freedom, privilege, and wealth to casually say “burn it all down”?
Separate from the above, I do recommend Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. It’s a unique book. It’s not the “page turner” that often signals quality, but more of the “slow burn” that Netflix seems to think is my favorite category.
I’ll add that I read to learn, to experience, to empathize and understand (and of course for pleasure). The book’s main characters are women who are/were in a same-sex marriage. That dynamic alone, down to the levels of domestic conflict, challenged me as a reader in terms of what I could call familiar and what I would call undiscovered country (it definitely obliterates that expression about who stands behind great men). In the end, like most good biographies, my conclusions were a bit blurry, but it was the experience of learning about people (and how people learn about people and themselves) that I carry forward. Maybe, if you can look at your own life and see various “selves” or say, “I was a different person at that time,” then self-reflection is indeed a form of biography.
And if you want to read something other than editorials in order to engage with this moment, consider the biography already written.