Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

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.

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.

Many people believed God to be speaking to them, though it was later determined that bacteria in the water supply had caused widespread hallucinations.

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.