Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

I fear I am the sort of person who needs to feel some measure of fear in order to love someone.

she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role.

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.

Is anyone ever sufficiently admonished by admonitory tales, or are such myths simply maps of inevitabilities?

New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands.

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

Waking up, the first and the last privilege, waking up once more.Ӡ

How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent?

I justified my behavior by believing that a woman is the most interesting version of herself when she’s enraptured, but that’s not true. Romance is a closed circuit. Nothing makes a person less comprehensible to others than being in love.

“There is another world,” X often said. “I’m not satisfied with this world. And that’s why I’m onstage. To be nearer to the other world.”†

“I can’t understand why I made this trip, except in the hope that there is something good in being so unhappy—as if I might use up my large portion of unhappiness + have only joy left.”†

Please remember that no one will ever love you passionately for being nice.‡‡

Time takes those sensations away and without them the story seems simpler and we hold that simplicity up and call it clarity.