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.

Like my wife was a lamp that had always been on—and in that light I could see certain things, and now that it’s gone I can’t see anything. That’s what it felt like, still does, like I’m sitting in a living room with no lights on, just sitting.”

“Another crisis center,” she noted in a journal. “It’s beginning to seem I may be having one.”*