Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

I am not even appalled by his depiction of me—unflattering to be sure, but I have no interest in the flattery of a fool.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X’s life had to accept this hazard—she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role.

“A biography,” she wrote in a letter to her first wife, “would be an insult to the way I have chosen to live. It’s not that I am a private person; I am not a person at all.”*

“It only seems to be a simple question—Where are you from? It can never be sufficiently answered.”†

Early on, I sometimes asked about her past, but I soon accepted she would be both the center of my life and its central mystery, excused from standard expectations.

Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.*

I must have believed love was something that arrived in your life and told you what to do with it.

I had to abandon that safe inertia in order for my life to become recognizable as my life.

We did not know how to belong to each other. But there’s no point in trying to write an autopsy of a marriage, as either side would be insulated with falsehood.

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 trying, to compact a life into pages.

Though I’d been unsettled by my afternoon with X, I did not yet believe I was in love with her. I only felt that I had been changed—though being changed by a person is far more dangerous than simply loving them.

But he didn’t know me anymore, as the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

people will say the most heinous things when they’re trying to justify their own failures and madness.

Nothing had yet occurred, but in that nothing, everything had occurred.

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

X often repeated a line from RuPaul (one of the few artists she openly admired), “You’re born naked and the rest is drag,” but she pushed the thought further—that even the body is drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all.

With a name nothing is ever clear, on the contrary, everything becomes more opaque.”

“You have to get through—how to put it?—shame, essentially, yes that’s it—the shame and boredom of talking about yourself.” She later added, “Shifting between so many names, between selves—it must have relieved some of that shame.”‡‡

“Imagine all that trouble of being pregnant only to have a baby this ugly handed to you. Even the midwife cried,” she said.

ANGELA: Oh, you would say that. It’s not in a person’s nature to just be one thing, you know. No one ever faulted you for being more than a father, did they? LEON: It works different for mothers. I’m not alone in thinking that. ANGELA: Because that’s what men think, men who don’t know anything but how to ruin the world—

“Revolutions do not follow precedents nor furnish them,” she wrote to Ted Gold years later. “I do not want pity. I transfer to others the hate in my humiliated heart.”*

“I was angry,” he said, “and I’m still angry, but you can’t really be angry with a place unless you love it. You have to love it to wish it could be better, to wish it could be different.

How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away.

A grown man unable to pour himself a glass of milk, I thought. This is the sort of person an authoritarian theocracy produces.

I told her I didn’t think she did anything wrong, and for a moment that seemed to calm her, or maybe she was just shocked. It seems no one had ever said such a thing to Bree Morton.

They don’t know how to change, Nancy said, with an unusual nervousness. They don’t want to. It’s human, of course, to want to keep things familiar.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”*

(One night shortly after I’d first met X, she told me that when she thought back to people in her life who had abandoned her, it seemed to her they were dead, and when she thought of the people she had abandoned, she sometimes felt she had killed them. I told her this seemed to indicate that she rated her own company rather highly—that to be denied her presence was death itself.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

It’s not that the people of the ST who were oppressed for their gender, poverty, or race were duped—as so many in the North seem intent on believing—but rather that their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again.

“art is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves,”

Is it possible that the best thing to happen in your life could also be the worst?

I’d become someone, I know now, who also wasn’t quite worth the trouble.

It’s a common hope of the young—for later acclaim to redeem the insignificance of earlier years—though most twenty-three-year-olds haven’t just carried out an act of terrorism against a despotic government.

‘Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying too often.’

“Paul says we have to choose our battles, by which he means to choose no battles,” she wrote after the incident, later adding, “Isn’t this the fate of women? Even in the Bible, even there—we are asked to be alone, to go faithfully into solitude, to ease into misunderstanding, to inhabit it, to make it warm and beautiful.”

Dying is a remarkable thing, the only remarkable thing—but there’s nothing remarkable about fucking. That’s what’s so nice about it. Nothing to say. Nothing to it.

The price of having an identity is the inability to transform it.

we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.

the more pointless life seemed, the more she wanted to know about the world’s cruelties.

“Is life in the small things, in songs or stories, or is it in the large things, in the country, its laws, in the liberty and safety of others? I feel it cannot be in both.

“I only know that I have to create a powerful monster, since I am such a weak one,”

It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage.

But that was just how we went about things—not having to explain ourselves.*

“We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.”

I wonder now if X had always been a thousand years older than anyone, that everyone she ever loved was always a child to her, always something to be molded, to control. Or perhaps it’s all much simpler than that: we cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

The new girlfriend, X sometimes said, winking. I didn’t like that word, new, as it placed me in a passing parade of new girlfriends and old girlfriends, past girlfriends and future girlfriends.

People don’t change, Oleg said over the phone that day, his voice full of resignation. They try to change, they act like they change, but they don’t. They never do.