‘Biography of X’ by Catherine Lacey   (2023) – 389 pages

C.M. Lucca wrote this meticulously researched and documented second biography of the deceased woman X after Lucca read and was extremely dissatisfied with the first biography. After all, Lucca left her husband to become the wife of X, so she should know a thing or two about the life of X. Besides, in that first biography Lucca was referred to as a “mousy little nobody”. Lucca herself admits that others often see her as plain and glamourless, whereas X is an avant-garde celebrity, a media monster. Meanwhile Lucca has a score to settle with her dead lover X.

“However many of her performances, paintings, and sculptures seem a little heartless to me now, designed not to evoke real feeling, but to get a reaction or a check.”

Our new biographer C.M. Lucca knows very little about the early life of X, so she travels to the Southern Territory to Mississippi where X was born as Caroline Luanna Walker in 1945. You see, the Christian Coup of the Southern Territory had built a wall and broken off from the rest of the United States in 1945 when Emma Goldman became President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff. This was the Great Disunion. Instead of a United States we had a Northern Territory, a Southern Territory which was a violent theocratic dictatorship, and later a Western Territory.

After “an act of terrorism against a despotic government” known as the Revelation Rifle Affair in 1968, Caroline had to leave the Southern Territory in a hurry and she had to assume a different identity. After that she assumed several different identities until she finally became just X in 1982. At various times she was Dorothy Eagle, the singer/songwriter Bee Converse, the writer Clyde Hill, Martina Riggio, the writers Cindy O. and Cassandra Edwards, the artists Yarrow Hall and Vera, She has been influenced by Andy Warhol and much of what she does is performance art.

“There are never any conclusions with people, he said, are there ?”

X becomes famous in the bohemian scene in New York City Along the way, a number of renowned real-life people show up in X’s life. These include the writers Dennis Johnson and Kathy Acker and musicians David Bowie, Patti Smith, Connie Converse, and Tom Waits.

In this highly detailed fake biographical work, I suspect there are many “in” jokes which I mainly missed, not being conversant with the New York art scene. And was it really necessary to rewrite United States history in order to tell X’s story?

This fictional biography is steady and workmanlike, but for me it lacked that definite spark of style or enthusiasm that would have put it over the top. Part of the problem for me was that the colorful story of X requires a more flamboyant outrageous telling than this mousy little nobody C.M. Lucca is capable of.

Grade:   B