Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

She seemed to me to have the face of someone who had been given up by her mother and had spent the rest of her life refusing that initial refusal, as if her own mother should have been able to recognize the enormous capacities that burned inside that soft infant, and now the whole world would be punished for it.

The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. 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.

Immediately, I blurted out that I loved him, because I wasn’t sure, in that moment, if I did.

On my way out the door, I delivered a few panicked and false justifications about how broken and doomed we were, but people will say the most heinous things when they’re trying to justify their own failures and madness.

I was still romanced by grief, and stupidly hopeful that reconstructing her life might resurrect her, but I hid in the costume of an objective, detached reporter.

What may have seemed like a coup from the outside was actually a slow mutation of a conservative democratic state into a country overtaken by an invasive delirium—the fear of God—and ruled by whoever could most convincingly claim to know His Divine Laws.

“The more cultivated elements of theocratic fascism,” Adler wrote, “have evolved their own schizophrenic logic—a seamless garment of nonviolence in the one hand and a blood-soaked rag hidden in the other.”†

“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. If I didn’t love Byhalia, I would have been able to forget about it, to stay in the North, to give up.”

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.

“Because it was either one or the other,” Mr. Vine said. “All good or all evil. We were so sure of that—I don’t know how or why. Why couldn’t it have been a little good, a little bad? Most things, you come to realize later, are some of both, but at that age, I didn’t see it that way.

And maybe she was the sort of woman who needed to be changed a few times over to be satisfied with life.

Knowing all this, I listened to Mr. Vine go on about how the ST was a better place for women than anyone realized, how his wife (my wife) had simply mistaken the simplicity of her life as a form of oppression. 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 was a reminder of the enormous paradoxes in a religious worldview that holds as much dazed and romantic hope as it does fatalism—the possibility of heaven for some, and the certainty of hell for others.

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.

A violent history and a romantic belief in a divine, all-encompassing love sit closely together in the place she was raised. And she—a woman born the same year as the wall, perpetually discomfited, restless, at war with herself—she could have been from nowhere else.

Her primary thesis was that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves,”

Of all of his work, the most well-known was his 1980 installation, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, in which Jafa went undercover into the Southern Territory, and covertly replaced every Bible in ten Mississippi Delta churches with decoy Bibles in which the statement “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death” was printed at intervals into the text.† Upon discovery, each of these churches burned the errant Bibles in a public ceremony, events that Jafa, still embedded and disguised, photographed: religious extremists burning what appears to be their own text.

“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.”

The letter is an onslaught of apology, of self-pity, of an inward-facing debasement common to those swept up in revolution or religion.

In the margin, she immediately berates herself for her fixation on him, upset that she’s still carrying that marital poison, still obsessed by what the church told her was her worth.

it is ludicrous in the exact same way that your life is ludicrous—you who have convinced yourself, just as nearly all people do, of the intractable limits of your life, you who have, in all likelihood, mushed yourself into the most miserly allotment of what a life can be, you who have taken yourself captive and called it living. You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen.

How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent? You may believe, as it is convenient for you to believe, that there is no escaping that confinement, and you may be right.

Is there anything more tragic than seeing an empty theater before the performance begins? The stage is so clearly a lie when naked, but when the actors, the performers, the dancers suspend their disbelief, then we, the audience, will pick up the bill. Rarely do we all get deluded together.

I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.

unbearably hungry and walked into the first trattoria I found. It was still early for dinner; only one couple was inside—a man and a woman, both very short and old, dressed in tweed suits that seemed to match, each gracefully eating their spaghetti with fork and spoon. The sight of this pair gave me a feeling I often had when traveling abroad—a feeling that our country had gotten so much wrong, almost everything, all of it, wrong, and perhaps I had, too, that I was entrenched in my wrongness, that I had somehow committed myself to it and no longer knew the way out.

After all, what was time but a series of afternoons, evenings, seasons—something to sprawl over and enjoy, something to possess?

In real life, dying isn’t the time for confession. Dying is a full-time thing.

The office contained no papers, no books—there wasn’t even a computer visible—as if Ginny never did a moment’s work, just sat in there, breathing. Maybe this is why fiction about real people so often feels forced—we live in the clunkiest metaphors.

Then she said this one thing I’ve thought of many times since—‘You have to know what you’re leaving out in order for it not to be there. Otherwise, it’s not an absence, it’s just nothing.’ And immediately I had a better understanding of all those void artists back then—there were so many of them.

Whether this financial shift merely coincided with or caused the increasing unrest of ignored male artists is a topic of robust debate. Larry Rivers, a struggling middle-aged American painter and truck driver, and his friend Yves Klein staged a guerrilla show of their work outside the Guggenheim Museum in 1972 to protest the fact that it had been over a decade since the museum had exhibited any work of art by a man.

In 1980, the critic and scholar Richard Cusk published an essay about this conflict that encapsulated the issue. “Can a male artist—however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined—ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of his own malehood?” Cusk asked. “Must the politics of masculinity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or by deliberately confronting them?

I recognized my own old hopes in that unattainable plan—to both carry a child and immediately cease to be a body that had carried the child, to be completely entrenched then completely excused from the process. To be, in short, a father.

because I was complaining about not liking who I am. He said—‘To write you have to allow yourself to be the person you don’t want to be (of all the people you are).’

Marguerite is looking at a photograph of herself as a child, but then what does that mean? A photograph of yourself as a child? Because it isn’t you at all, not anymore

WALTERS: What’s odd? X: The way … the way that people try to escape their pasts. And it’s a way through characters, it’s always through inhabiting characters that a person moves forward … or tries. And for some reason, I’m working out all of those characters in public and having to answer questions about them. But don’t you see that the choices I’ve made are no different from the choices you’ve made?

could she both disdain the state of this country’s culture as a whole and still reasonably desire or accept its approval?

nearby clinic: The clinic Connie goes to is a total New America fantasy—a well-staffed free clinic with a psychiatrist in-house at all hours. Imagine not going broke because you get pink eye while you can’t afford health insurance. Imagine being in distress and getting free mental-health attention at a walk-in clinic. What is it that stops us from building such things?

“More depressing than The Bell Jar”: This is my favorite negative reader review for my novel Nobody Is Ever Missing.