Biography of X: An Unintentional Nonbinary Manifesto
How much of our identities do we own and how much belongs to the people we share our lives with?
Back in 2016, I picked up Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing. It was my day off, and I wanted to binge a book in a single day, all the time I had for my hobbies and personal enrichment. I grabbed it for its novella length and its lyrical prose.
I’m a different person than I was when I read it, ten full years ago, so I might feel differently now if I read it again, but at the time, I thought the book should have been called Nothing Is Ever Happening. Additionally, the lyrical prose grew long-winded, meaning that every other sentence ran on for the sake of Evoking a Feeling, which lost its effectiveness about one-third of the way through the novel.
Lacey has come quite a long way since Nobody Is Ever Missing.
In Biography of X, Lacey’s fifth novel, the reader views X through the eyes of her spurned widow, who found out about more than a few marks of dishonesty in their relationship after her wife’s passing. Beyond the literal infidelity lies the felt betrayal of withheld truths, truths that society says we should know about our partners. The “author” of the book within the book, the main character, the widow, is left feeling like a fool for not knowing these important aspects of her wife’s life—like her birth name and origin story—which she withheld from the world, not just from her.
On the surface, the book seems a commentary on artists and fame, illustrated particularly in how X does not have one medium through which she creates—she’s a songwriter and a painter and a novelist and a found-media artist as well as a performance artist, and her obsessive fans fan out in an array of fandoms.
Much has been written about Biography of X, namely the rewriting of modern-day celebrities and important figures into a speculative past, where key southern states seceded into the theocracy the far right are praying for in our real-world timeline. Audrey Wollen smartly writes in her piece in The New Yorker, “Names, Lacey proposes, are merely vessels, as X so brazenly demonstrates, and anything can be poured inside,” later saying that changing the author of certain real quotes through “plagiarism and authorial ambiguity” left her to question “the given material’s true source,” which I believe is one of Lacey’s intentions in writing Biography of X.
Some borrowed, or stolen, quotes (depending on how you look at it) are not fully attributed, including one from Sula by Toni Morrison. A review in Cleveland Review of Books also claims that Lacey’s thesis in Biography of X is “the inaccuracy of writing a biography,” as “any telling of a story betrays much more about the narrator than the subject.”
I would say the same is true for a reader: Their experience in reading says much more about them than the book. Barely a few pages into Biography of X, I started frantically underlining X’s definitions of personhood, why she insists she is not a person, let alone someone who can be contained in a biography. From where I sit, Biography of X is an unintentional nonbinary manifesto, a cry to be seen as more than the box society wants to squeeze her in, least of all because her name is the gender marker I’m not legally allowed to get on my driver’s license in Texas.
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A quick note: For the sake of simplicity, I’ll be using “nonbinary” in place of “agender,” much like many people, including myself, use “bisexual” in place of “pansexual” or “gay” in place of “queer” and vice versa, though they technically have different meanings.
To me, someone who identifies as nonbinary, “nonbinary” and “agender” refer to a deep-seated feeling that one’s gender expression does not align with the binary options presented by society at large, leading to gender presentations that break the norm, whether intentionally through experimentation or inadvertently as a result of apathy or ambivalence.
This discussion on gender identity in Biography of Xgoes beyond pronouns to cover personhood and presentation (though this piece in The New Yorkerhas an interesting introduction about the use of pronouns, or lack thereof, in the novel). Although I’m speculating that X has an underlying gender identity not fully realized in the text, I’ll be honoring the book’s use of “she/her” pronouns.
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X speaks about personhood as a thought exercise, a concept rather than something that applies to her. She doesn’t see herself as even a person, let alone a woman, and I think there’s something to be said about that: how, in gender, we are personified. The only appropriate time to refer to a person as “it,” for example, is on an “It’s a Girl!” balloon.
In the chapter “Caroline,” in which X’s grieving widow, C.M. Lucca, interviews X’s first husband, Paul Vine says, “…maybe she was the sort of woman who needed to be changed a few times over to be satisfied with life” (102). He said this about having children, how having children changes a woman, but indeed, X changes herself several times over, sometimes donning several aliases in a single year. If you have ever spent time with trans youth, you’ll see that they have a freedom like X’s, changing their names and pronouns in experimentation, frequently and often, until they find something that suits them. And shouldn’t they have that freedom? Is our only argument against it that the changes are too difficult for us to track, as adults in our fixed mindsets?
Paul Vine’s comment comes on the heels of the shock that X had a child at all. Lucca never knew. Of the one conversation she and X had before her passing, Lucca says, “…though there was one night early in our relationship that I told her I was not interested in parenthood, she’d only replied, It’s a question of existence or nonexistence, which means it’s not a question” (110-111).
What does it mean to be alive to someone like X who constantly suffers under her own scalpel-like scrutiny?
It’s sweaty business, I can tell you that, from my own experience.
Her proximity to queerness and the fluidity of her personas further supports my point: “…X often repeated a line from RuPaul (one of the few artists she openly admired), ‘You’re born naked and the rest is drag,’ but she pushed the thought further—that even the body is drag, all our names are drag, and memory was the most profound drag of all” (39).
In the chapter “Downtown,” Lucca writes of X’s “time spent in drag as a man,” when she wrote The Reason I’m Lost under the pseudonym Clyde Hill, then she quotes someone who is dispelling X’s original biographer: “‘Smith portrays X’s life as an unwinnable battle between her public self and her private self; to this end, he traffics in the crudest of oppositions: appearance versus character, mind versus body, intellectualism versus eroticism, persona versus private self,’ Emre writes. ‘Anyone who has paid any attention at all to X’s work or interviews can see it plainly—she recognized no such borders and lived a fully boundless life’” (172).
Lucca also writes about X’s views on feminine presentation, saying that X described a woman as “‘obscured with feminine costume bordering on the childish: bright jewelry, hair ribbons, pink blush… She courts underestimation, she plates and eats it with a dash of salt’” (216). X, it seems, equates femininity with infantalization—not womanhood, but the presentation of being a woman. Another way she refused to be viewed (though we cannot control how others view us) was as someone incapable.
Her gender notwithstanding, X was completely against having a biography written about her at all.
“A biography,” she wrote in a letter to her first wife, “would be an insult to the way I have chosen to live. It’s not that I am a private person; I am not a person.”
Biography of X, page 18
Despite this, she kept an archive of all her work, a string of past personas and the evidence of their existence that led to her present. She called it “‘Putting everything in order,’” “a task X sometimes brought up in a grave mood, on the darker edge of dusk, often after enduring some perceived affront to her work—after being passed over for an award, or feeling snubbed by an invitation lost or never sent, or after reading a bad or even tepid review she might later claim to have never seen. No one’s opinion mattered to her, yet everyone’s opinion mattered to her” (180-181).
X wanted her art to speak for itself and not define who she is. She didn’t want her actions to define her—for her name or her history or where she came from to define her. She did not define herself by her sexuality, her activism, or her actions.
X was so vulnerable with her work and yet did not want to be seen. Maybe, through her art, she was trying to make sense of herself.
The chapter “The Human Subject” shows X’s new willingness to identify with her past selves, to archive them as past parts of her, and maybe she could look at them more easily when she could view them as “art,” as separate from her. She could judge them from a distance.
In the Disclosure for “The Human Subject,” the subject herself wrote, “My name is X and my name has always been X, and though X was not the name I was given at birth, I always understood, before I understood anything else, that I was X, that I had no other name, that all other names put upon me were lies” (174). Later in the Disclosure, she added, “If this sounds ludicrous, that’s because it is ludicrous; it is ludicrous in the exact same way that your life is ludicrous—you who have convinced yourself, just as nearly all people do, of the intractable limits of your life, you who have, in all likelihood, mushed yourself into the most miserly allotment of what a life can be, you who have taken yourself captive and called it a living” (174-175).
However inspiring, X does rebel against her personhood by employing tactics that harm the people around her. Hurt people hurt people, after all, and wasn’t X hurt by a childhood in the Southern Territory, a Christian fascist state that didn’t recognize her existence as a queer person or honor her experience as a woman? In our own real timeline, we have seen a mass exodus from Christianity, and I speculate that is due at least in part to the trauma caused by these rigid beliefs and their insistence against the existence of queer or sexually liberated identities. For more support on that speculation, see ex-Christian criticisms of fundamentalism in hashtags like #exfundie, #exvangelical, and #deconstruction.
X’s past experiences, however harrowing, do not excuse her abuse. (Though, there is something to be said about that—so rarely do villains in stories get to be queer-identifying as a single characteristic and not the defining evil factor. For more on the subject, consider reading Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, her memoir on the domestic violence she experienced in a same-sex relationship.)
With this in mind, we have to consider other possible reasons for X’s flexible identity:
Con Artist
When X changed her identity, she changed her whole self, rewriting her own history. There’s inherent dishonesty in this, which is very different from coming out as nonbinary or another identity under the trans umbrella.
“Much has been made of the fact that X spent the majority of the 1970s using a dozen pseudonyms, slipping into and out of certain corners of New York, faking expertise, using accents, claiming various fictional histories.”
Biography of X, page 172
In the chapter “Gioia,” the namesake character became suspicious that X’s alias Martina was not who she claimed, and upon learning her later identity, Gioia exclaimed, “A woman named X! Only an American would think escaping your own name was possible” (200). This speaks to culture’s roles in our identities, how a name communicates more than a gender but also nationality and history, which cannot be rewritten.
Still later, Gioia says, “‘So I always felt, well, even if this woman—this Martina—even if she was lying […] that might be okay, since patriarchy is a fiction too, or that’s how I felt then’” (207). So flippantly she addresses the ephemeral nature of gender and who holds the power in a society!
But even later, of their feminist movement, Gioia says, “We wanted to free women from dominance, but we couldn’t dominate them out of being dominated… The agenda eats its own tail.” This is foreshadowing: In X’s insistence that she was above societal norms, she broke social contracts with the people in her life, forcing them to play along with her fractured view of the world, or of herself.
In response to criticism from Carla Lonzi, real-life feminist and one of X’s fictional ex lovers, “X, as Martina” said, “‘Only men and governments ever demanded total transparency,’” (210), which is true and also beside the point of her transgression. This is one of the first examples of her willingness to rewrite a narrative, to circle a point, effectively gaslighting the recipient and reader into seeing the world her way, which is not the way the world is.
Indeed, this is what Lacey does in her novel by rewriting our country’s history into an alternate timeline. The question, as we view X through a gender-free lens, becomes:
What is cultural gaslighting and what is an insistence of personal existence?
“Martina” is the pretend-Italian, real-founder of Knife Fight, a feminist press, and Lucca writes: “‘Subliminal cruelty is our enemy,’ the first press release for Knife Fight read, ‘and by giving a platform to nonconforming, contentious, or otherwise “unlikeable” women’s voices, we will contribute to the erosion of sexist limitations on what is and what is not considered “female.” Our books will injure you—as they should’” (217).
Is it possible that X gave more through her identities, by subverting restrictive and harmful gender expectations, than she ever took? With that, might we consider that her personas served to protect her more than they meant to hoodwink others?
“Schizophrenic”
Schizophrenia is referenced three times in Biography of X: once to talk about the incongruous nature of the Southern Territory, passive and yet violent to those who didn’t follow the regime. Later, the hypothetical diagnosis is used to discredit a source from the coroner’s office that examined X’s body. It is used once about X, but I think it’s an important single inclusion.
In “The Human Subject,” X showcases a series of letters between two of her personas, Yarrow Hall and Vera, “so intricate that they aroused theories that X may have been schizophrenic, a theory that X often encouraged” (273). The word “schizophrenic” is used erroneously here, as it commonly is in life. Those with schizophrenia hear voices or have hallucinations that may involve unreal people, but what people speculate here is that X had other personalities, that she had DID, or dissociative identity disorder.
This is a possible explanation, though X’s encouragement of the theory makes me believe that it is not true. If X suffered a mental illness, especially one of this severity, she may not have known herself enough to make art with those intentionally blurred lines. Those with DID do not always know about the goings-on of their alters, especially not as intimately as X knew hers. If she had received a formal diagnosis, she might have corrected the public on its name, though in Lacey’s alternate timeline, it might not have been called DID but perhaps “multiple personality disorder” or even something else entirely. Given the social misgivings about schizophrenia, she might not have been as flippant about the label if it truly applied to her, but with X, who knows?
Undercover FBI Agent
Because X was eventually forthcoming about past identities she held—and even hindsight honesty is not the best attribute for a professional spy—I think the explanation that she is an undercover FBI agent is the least likely but still worth exploring.
In the chapter “Disappearing,” Lucca interviews retired FBI agent Fred Holton. Lucca is interested in exploring this theory because X often disappeared for days on end without offering an explanation for her whereabouts. In fact, X told Lucca early in their relationship that these disappearances would take place and that Lucca would simply have to accept them. Although in practice, they were quite upsetting, Lucca endured them mostly without comment.
“‘I believe we called her Agent Hip,’” Holton told Lucca of X, whom he believed was a secret agent he worked alongside during his career (258). Holton shows Lucca a picture of Agent Hip, and, “Though [Lucca] knew X was accomplished with facial prosthetics and makeup and wigs, [she] knew her face well enough to find it even when it had been purposefully hidden. The fact that there was none of her here seemed to end it…” (261-262). However, shortly after, Lucca learns that “the letter ‘X’ was used in internal FBI documents as a stand-in for agents’ real names,” but then again, “‘X’ was often used in such a way, a placeholder for people or things discarded, hidden, or unknown” (262).
There is more conspiracy in labeling X an FBI agent than in her being one.
Narcissistic Abuser
In X’s marriage to Lucca, X shows no personal responsibility to her partner. She convinces Lucca to leave her job in journalism and stay home, and then later tells her that she has no life outside of their relationship. She cheats on her habitually. She slaps her. X even pretends on more than one occasion to be dead, lets her wife find her ruse-rigored body, and maintains the prank even after being confronted. She does this so often that when her wife does find her dead, Lucca believes at first that it is a joke.
In the chapter “Ginny Green,” we learn that X even changed her wife’s name, calling her “C,” using a nickname for her that a frenemy invented, creating her wife in her own image.
X has a history of abuse with her past wives, Marion and Shelley. X’s actions are not some one-off anomaly. They are a pattern of abuse.
Lucca discovers after X’s passing that X investigated her personhood, the main character’s, in an art installation as she did herself in “The Human Subject,” making graphs on Lucca’s intelligence, both mental and emotional, and more. Through this display, we see how cruel this level of awareness and judgment is when directed as someone else.
Am I cruel for looking at X and trying to find myself in her? Am I as cruel as she was when she measured her wife’s worth and showcased all her perceived shortcomings in graphs?
I’ll try to answer that question by telling you a quick story: I once got into a brief disagreement with a coworker during lunch. I confided in her that, when I first joined my organization full-time, I thought that most people who worked at my nonprofit job were gay, or rather I hoped they were: My organization got its start in HIV/AIDS advocacy, prevention, and treatment, and I saw evidence of my theory, erroneously, everywhere. My coworker told me defensively that she didn’t assume other people’s sexual orientations. And I told her that my misinterpretation was not rude but a hope of finding other people like me where I worked, a hope of entering into a community of people who were safe and cared about what I cared about. I continued and said that by not assuming someone’s sexual orientation, she was assuming it after all: She was defaulting to straight; “innocent until proven guilty.” Not assuming was not the kindness she believed it was.
Perhaps calling X a woman, despite her rebellion against the label in more ways than one, would be the error here.
Through Lucca’s investigation of her deceased wife, she learned society’s opinions of the artist, labeling her with the same words the far right uses against nonbinary or trans people: Con artist. “Schizophrenic.” Spy. Narcissist.
This is my most compassionate interpretation of X and her actions: Self-consciousness is not the same as self-awareness or emotional intelligence.
Maybe X wasn’t a bad person. But she lacked empathy and compassion for others. She saw the people in her life as decoration in her environment. Viewing herself as “not a person” had consequences, namely that she viewed others without personhood too, which bled empathy from her actions.
We are our own people, but we have to live with each other. We do owe some semblance of honesty and consistency to each other to ensure emotional well-being. When we believe we are not beholden to others, we wind up hurting them, as illustrated by X’s grieving and bewildered widow.
Perhaps it is cruel to insist that one’s own personhood fall outside of the neat parameters of binary gender in a political climate that cannot recognize humanity not labeled “she” or “he.” Then again, we have seen, again and again, how the parameters of gender harbor their own cruelty.
Maybe our best hope at love, at honest and true love, exists beyond our current definitions of what it means to be human.
Catherine Lacey, Biography of X (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).