Biography of X tells the story of a woman named X, who has recently died. Her distraught wife is irate when someone else puts up a biography of X, despite X having always protested against anyone writing her life story. The irate wife complains, but no one takes any notice. She reads the biography and understands how much this picture of X is falsified. Convinced to reclaim the truth, she also decides to write her version to reflect on the actual life of the woman she loved.
Throughout, we are learning more and more about the life of X, discovering things about her that even her closest partner did not know. The woman we ourselves and her wife thought we knew at the end is completely different from the one who appears at the opening of the novel.
In Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, there is a different United States. A nation torn in two after a southern coup that establishes a theocratic, totalitarian government. The North and South come together later, but politics, relationships, and ordinary life are seared with the scars of disunion.
Having lived in Germany, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels in the history of East and West Germany. Even decades post-unification, many, particularly the older generation, still have the perception that the country is split.
But I am not German. I’m an Iranian immigrant. So my identification with Lacey’s universe arises not from the vision of national split and unification, but from the repressive, religious despotism that she observes in the South. Her accounts of a theocracy controlling every detail of daily life sound achingly familiar. Forced piety, the absence of individual freedom, and the state’s intrusion into people’s most private lives, these are what my fellow Iranians and I have seen.
To a European reader, they will look like dystopian fiction; to me, they are memories—agonizingly vivid ones.
However, this is not a text on Lacey’s political imagination. What I want to write about here is the similarity that occurred to me between Biography of X and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Whether this similarity is coincidental or not, as much of a fan as I am of Infinite Jest, I could not help but see it.
1. Imagined Nations
I’m not sure this tendency has a name, but I’m drawn to novels set in entirely invented worlds. Places that resemble our own yet operate by their own rules. It’s a strange affection, even to me.
In Infinite Jest, Wallace gives us an America remapped geographically and politically. The surrounding nations have odd relationships; wars and alliances are about absurd, contrived conflicts. Even in this new America, the Enfield Tennis Academy has its own strange system of rules and customs.
Lacey does the same. Her America, also, is divided, reformed, and reshaped. A country half-governed by a totalitarian state, followed by a half-hearted reunion. The social, political, and economic circumstances which she creates are all imaginary.
Both of these writers build worlds that never have been and nonetheless feel utterly real. In my opinion, that is one of the most wonderful things about literary art.
2. Identity and the Elusive Self
In Biography of X, the titular character is born in the theocratic South, gets married, gives birth to a child, and appears to live a normal life. She actually leads an underground existence as part of a resistance and destroys a weapons factory. Everyone believes that she perishes in the explosion, but she flees north with two individuals and completely remakes herself.
Since that moment, X exists in a string of new lives: name-changing, appearance-changing, and even language-changing. She becomes so adept at transformation that even best friends cannot recognize her. She seems to have no stable “self” whatsoever—constantly fleeing from one self and hiding in another. As a reader, I never came to the point where I could say, this is who she is.
The same dismantled sense of self permeates Infinite Jest. Such a state of existential dislocation is the condition of most of Wallace’s characters.
Hal Incandenza, the hyperarticulated wise kid tennis sensation, can’t quite connect to anyone authentically; his towering intellect isolates him from the world, and within himself, he is consumed by uncertainty and fear. His father, James O. Incandenza, the filmmaker and founder of the Academy, literally incinerates himself in a microwave oven, his death itself a vile exercise of self-annihilation.
Hal’s brothers, all in their own ways, wrestle with meaning and self-definition, performance, memory, and obsession are what form them into fluid selves but not whole ones. And their mother, Avril Incandenza, with her controlling compulsion and perfectionism, appears to cover up her own emotional emptiness by a depth of surface.
Through all of this, Joelle van Dyne (her on-air moniker “Madame Psychosis”) remains shrouded and unfathomable, concealing her warped face, perhaps even from the very notion of visibility.
There is the same resistance to fixed identity in Biography of X. When questioned in an interview who she “really” is given all her reinventions, X responds: “What does ‘self’ even mean?”
Both Wallace’s and Lacey’s characters inhabit this same void: The absence of a knowable, permanent self. By the end, we’re left wondering whether any authentic identity can exist at all, or if it’s all performance, camouflage, survival.
3. Footnotes, Documents, and the Texture of Reality
Both books draw on ancillary material: appendices, footnotes, and fake documents, to construct their worlds.
Infinite Jest famously has large footnotes, most of which are crucial to being able to read the novel. Without them, it would be incomplete.
In Biography of X, Lacey includes documents, letters, and photographs in the text, so it feels like a genuine biography. These documents make the fiction become real. As if the writer is providing proof to legitimize her account.
Both times, the use of such “extra” material draws readers more deeply into the make-believe world and blurs the line between reality and imagination.
For all of these reasons, I found Biography of X to be an undeniable cousin of Infinite Jest. Both books circle broken selves and the desire to interpret them. And since Infinite Jest is a book that I’ve always loved, it’s not surprising at all that Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is now one of my favorites.
Finally, among all the thematic concepts I observe being replicated in present-day literature (love, art, loneliness), identity means the most to me. And due to this very reason, these two books struck so close to home, probably. Their topic, and their most frequent similarity, is this very one of “Who am I?”, a question that disturbs not just their characters, but the reader too, in quiet after the book’s been closed.
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