Catherine Lacey, 37, is the author of three previous novels, including The Answers, currently being adapted for television by Darren Aronofsky, and Pew (2020), about a nameless amnesiac of ambiguous race and gender. Her new novel, Biography of X, set in a parallel America, follows a widow untangling the life story of her wife, an avant-garde artist known as X. The New York Times has called it “sprawling and ambitious… strange and dystopian”. Lacey, one of Granta’s best young American novelists in 2017, was speaking from her home in Brooklyn.
Which part of the book came first: the alternate history or the fake biography?
I liked the idea of writing a fake biography and the biographies I like best are usually written by someone with some kind of compromised perspective. I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America where this female artist could exist and this couple could exist without having to justify themselves, I just need a totally different America.
As a workaround, it hardly cut corners.
I liked that! I started the novel in 2016 at the same time that I was writing Pew, which takes place in a week and was so spare. I’d decided to make myself write Pew quickly to see what would happen; I found that I can do it, I just prefer not to. Biography of X was more a kind of collecting project that I knew would take longer.
Where do the various photographs of X come from?
A lot of them I found in junk shops; for the images of her books, I commissioned jackets from a book designer.
Why did you include real names from the art and book world?
I saw it as another tool to make the novel as much like a biography as possible. There’s a quote [used in the book] from the New Yorker critic Merve Emre that is actually something she wrote about a Susan Sontag biography. There are a lot of names in there. A lot of them I made up.
