Biography of X

May 30, 2023May 30, 2023

Catherine Lacey discusses her new book, which complicates and recontextualises the act of biography

Early in Janet Malcolm’s seminal biography of biographies, The Silent Woman, she quotes a letter from Ted Hughes refuting those commenting on his decision to burn the final diaries of his late wife, Sylvia Plath. “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” he wrote. Malcolm is unconvinced: “Of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not “own” the facts of our lives at all… Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.” This fact must be concealed from the reader, who needs to believe that the biography is an objective portal to a richer, fuller understanding, rather than an inherently flawed, inherently fictional exercise. In Catherine Lacey’s novel Biography of X, these delusions are spotlighted. The subject is X, iconoclastic artist, author and musician; the biographer, CM, her widow. Biography, love letter, ghost story – Biography of X is the narrative of CM’s realisation that the more she learns of her wife, the less she knows her. It is a document of the decay that comes from trying to capture someone fast: ink fading in the sunlight, cassette tape bleeding into the machine. A face that lingers just past the border of memory. In biography, we try to reverse the impossible, to reanimate the dead.

Over Zoom, Lacey tells me that the original idea for the book “was a proper biography. I like reading biographies. I’m interested in the impossible task of biography. But I was encouraged not to, as the subject that I had in mind is still alive.” But something stuck. “There’s something about that urge of wanting to do something and being told not to; it led me to this idea of who is the wrong person to write a biography about, or who would be the wrong person to write a biography. You know, a book that is inherently kind of doomed or fucked from the beginning.” In Biography of X, our narrator, CM, is a promising journalist whose life and career, whose entire self, is devoured by the black hole of X’s genius. Our narrator’s project – although ostensibly written to correct an unauthorised, gossip-heavy biography – is fuelled in equal and fluctuating parts by a desire for understanding, for control, for affirmation. It’s this messy, contradictory perspective that inspired Lacey: “I thought the worst person to write a biography of someone who was dead would be a resentful spouse, right? Or a spouse with complicated feelings – and all spouses are going to have complicated feelings.”

CM simultaneously loves and hates X, with her many identities, affairs and histories, her fame and her mystery and her utter unknowability (throughout their relationship, CM does not know the barest biographical facts of X’s life). Lacey writes X as a female art monster – an “art cunt”, as she’s memorably described – brilliant, awful, dazzling. It’s small wonder that the author turned to two artist biographies in particular: Joshua Rivkin’s Cy Twombly biography, Chalk, and Chris Kraus’ After Kathy Acker. Rather than perpetuate the fiction of detachment outlined by Malcolm, both books offer up their biographers, with all their messy subjectivity, throughout the text; they become impossible to avoid. Lacey was drawn to the way Chalk transformed from an authorised biography to something much stranger: “the estate decided they didn’t like Rivkin or his angle, so they turned against him in the middle of writing it. And he was ten years or so into that project. There was just no way he could be like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I’m done.’ And it just became this bonkers kind of detective story. It’s a really interesting book; it reads like a thriller.” After Kathy Acker inspires due to Kraus’ proximity to her subject. She’s both “the perfect biographer of Kathy Acker because she was there, part of the world that Acker was moving in, but also, she’s a little compromised – her partner was an ex of Acker’s. There’s a sort of competitive spirit that I think is really interesting. And she’s a really good writer, so I feel like she overcomes that compromisation.” The book ends up being quoted often in Biography of X.

Reappropriated, rewritten, reattributed quotes appear throughout the book, a decision that allows Lacey to both unpick the idea of artistic truth, and, on a more practical level, enables the author to have a little fun with the sweat-slicked, coke-nail charm of the 1970s New York art scene. There’s a told-slant aspect to X’s life – a timeline in which she performs at sex shows in Manhattan with Kathy Acker, pisses off Patti Smith, writes songs with Bowie, holidays on Fire Island with a still-alive Frank O’Hara. She’s interviewed by Robert Storr, eulogised by Lynne Tillman (“I just think she’s so cool”, Lacey tells me).

But that isn’t the only way in which Lacey recontextualises. Biography of X is set in a trifurcated United States, where the ultra-religious southern states seceded after WWII to create a fascist theocratic dictatorship named the Southern Territory. In comparison, the soft democratic-socialism of the Northern Territory has long allowed same-sex marriages and full reproductive rights, while the Western Territory has adopted a libertarian stance. For Lacey, who grew up with the homogenous religiosity of small-town Mississippi of the 1980s and 90s (“I don’t think there are many writers alive now who have had to grapple with the Bible as much as I have”, she jokes), there’s a meta-textual biographical aspect to this. The Southern Territory functions as a representation of the depression-era south in which her grandfather came of age. “Even when I was a teenager, I saw that he knew nothing was even remotely the way that it was when he was growing up. He never left, apart from to go to war. And that’s it. He never travelled; he had no interest. He died in the house where he was born.” In its understanding of who owns the facts, then, Biography of X seems to offer up biography as a site of exchange: both biography as fiction and fiction as biography.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta Books, out now

This article is taken from Port issue 32. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

April 5, 2018

Transcending the barriers between literature, art, music and fashion, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the foremost intellectual voices in the United States today. In this excerpt from issue 22, she speaks to Catherine Lacey about pop, politics and the 45th President.

The restaurant is nearly empty. It’s an emptiness that exposes a sense of dread lurking in an otherwise bright spring day. People in suits, tunics, athleisure and burkas are streaming through the adjoining hotel lobby but here the only movement is of a member of staff, diligently preparing for an absent crowd. It is 2018 and this is the capital of the US. Even when ordering lunch, it is impossible to forget how close we are to a ceaseless squall of depravity and impending doom.

The omelette, we are told, cannot be altered. So be it. Apologetic and star-struck, the waiter beams at the renowned novelist and public intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and cannot help but gush, “You look wonderful today.” Indeed, Adichie looks wonderful because she always looks wonderful. A commanding presence, she is one of those rare writers with a refined style both on and off the page.

Adichie is certainly the only person to both win the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) and serve as the face of a make-up campaign – No 7. She is absolutely the only writer whose speech has been sampled in a Beyoncé single. Every aspect of her comportment is magnetic, a magnetism that is exceedingly rare among accomplished writers, who are often better read than seen.

To encounter a person of grace and eloquence in this particular era, in this particular city, only heightens her effect. Yet Adichie also has an unfettered, ebullient charm – she curses freely, laughs with abandon and has a sly, infectious grin. “The past month,” she confesses, “I was in Nigeria eating and laughing and not doing anything useful with my time.” She has the cheery disposition of someone who just returned from a holiday, but I recognise a distant introversion in her eyes, the novelist longing for another world. “I rationalise this by saying I’m absorbing material.”

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was set in postcolonial Nigeria and dealt directly with her home country’s turbulent political history, while her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, tackled the Biafran War. Each won awards and acclaim; Chinua Achebe declared Adichie to be “endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers”. Then, in 2007, on her 30th birthday, she got a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation.

“I was in Lagos. I was just about to go out with friends who were taking me to dinner, and I got the call. I was like, ‘My life is made!’” She pauses, and stares out the window a moment. “Did I actually even know…?” In fact, she had to google the specifics of her new ‘genius grant’: a half-million-dollar prize and a crowning validation from the American intellectual elite.

Checked cotton shirt and floral lace dress MIU MIU

After earning her bachelor’s degree in Connecticut in 2001, Adichie went to Johns Hopkins for her Fiction MFA, even though she had already completed her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. “I wasn’t necessarily a good member of the workshop… I hardly went to class because I couldn’t wait to get back – I had created this thing in my little studio apartment.” This little thing turned out to be Half of a Yellow Sun. “It was so emotionally draining. I cried… Days would pass and I wouldn’t shower. I wouldn’t pick up my phone.”

With two acclaimed novels under her belt, she was named a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and then made the unlikely choice to earn a second master’s degree in African Studies at Yale. Why? “I went because I wanted to learn. It was really very simple. I remember thinking there’s so much I want to know about precolonial Africa. And I didn’t just want to read books, because I’m lazy.” Eyes widen at what seems to be self-effacing hyperbole, but she insists it’s true. “I felt like I needed some guidance. I needed to know what books will illuminate this part of my history.”

Checked cotton shirt and leather coat MIU MIU

One of these books, in fact, was her second novel. “I had to sit there in class and try not to roll my eyes at their… analysis.” Outside of class she was struggling to find time to write her third novel, Americanah. “I kind of thought I would be able to write as well but it turned out to be disastrous for my writing. I was quite miserable.” Eventually she did find time to work, and, satisfied that Half of a Yellow Sun was “a book that I really felt my ancestors wanted me to write”, she felt free to loosen up as a writer. “I was no longer feeling this sense of being the dutiful daughter of literature and that I wanted to follow the rules. You know what? I felt I had earned the right to write a terrible book.”

Adichie, a self-avowed perfectionist and child of a “proper Igbo” household, seems to accomplish everything she sets out to do, but she failed, at least, to write that “terrible book”. Published in 2013, Americanah is an irreverent and biting commentary on race in the United States, but also a love story that spans decades and continents. It’s both serious and sexy, hilarious and profoundly sad. Adichie has called it her “fuck you” book, and it said “fuck you” all the way up that year’s bestseller and Top 10 lists, awards in tow.

This is an extract from issue 22 of Port, which hits newsstands on 19th April. To subscribe or pre-order, click here.

Photography Mamadi Doumbouya Styling Dora Fung Stylings editor Sabina Vanegas Makeup Mali Magic Hair Alaina Stevens

Port Issue 22

April 4, 2018April 25, 2018

The Spring/Summer 2018 issue of Port – featuring writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf and David Hallberg, the greatest male dancer of his generation – is out now

Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the foremost intellectual voices in the United States today. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus and Americanah – as well as of one of the most-viewed Ted talks ever, sampled by Beyoncé, no less – Adichie transcends the barriers between literature, art and music. For the cover story of Port issue 22, she met Catherine Lacey in Washington DC to discuss her extraordinary books, the complexity of recent gender movements and to give a hint at a next big project.

Elsewhere in the magazine, we speak to 6a – the most exciting architecture practice in London; discuss Netflix and race with the director of Mudbound, Dee Rees; and travel to rural Netherlands to meet the pioneering Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. Also featured: The photographer Christopher Payne visits one of the largest flag factories in the US, and we uncover the secrets and beauty of space with astronaut Nicole Stott.

In the fashion section, celebrated photographer Kalpesh Lathigra and Port‘s fashion director Dan May travel to Mumbai to shoot a 40-page story around the sprawling, seaside city; Scott Stephenson styles this season’s collections and Pari Dukovic shoots the greatest male dancer in the world, David Hallberg, wearing Saint Laurent.

Commentary pieces come courtesy of Will Self, Lisa Halliday and Jesse Ball, as well as Samuel Beckett‘s seminal Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Highlights from the Porter include Tilda Swinton remembering her friend John Berger; an interview with the British artist Gavin Turk; foraging with chef Nicholas Balfe; and ex-director of the Tate Modern, Vicente Todolí, on his passion for citrus fruits.

To buy Port issue 22, click here.