Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

I would like to believe that I’m less of a fool now, that in the course of this research I’ve come to a better understanding of my overlapping significance and insignificance in her life. But I know now a

person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely.

People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately t...

that even the body is drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all.

She had this intensity, and I couldn’t tell if it was the intensity of faith or anger—they look the same sometimes.

when his butler informed him a decade

later that poor Aunt Eloise had suffered a heart attack in a dressing room at Macy’s and was pronounced dead on the scene, Oleg immediately replied, Don’t be silly. She didn’t have a heart.