The unbearable weight of knowing

Catherine Lacey's Biography of X. Also: Wuthering Heights, Margaret Atwood, & the cold, clear light of February

Before we begin…

How did you feel when you discovered something new in a person you thought you knew? What was lost, what was gained? Is it possible to truly know another person? Do we need to know them to love them?

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To love is not necessarily to know

A Celastic mask from Needles in a Candleflame (1983) at the Horse + Bamboo Theater. Written and designed by Bob Frith; BobFrith, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This week’s “Before we begin” questions have been pecking at my consciousness for a few weeks now. They emerged when I celebrated my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary earlier this month. They hovered over me as I read Catherine Lacey ’s Biography of X, a demanding and absorbing novel that explores identity and truth as well as the human needs that drive us into certain relationships or belief systems.

If you’d asked me when I married my husband twenty-five years ago if I knew him, I’d have said yes — with qualifications. After all, we’d both lived decades without each other before falling in love and merging our futures. I’d have been forced to acknowledge that there remained plenty of opportunity for surprises. I believed, however, that what I knew or felt then was enough to take the risk. I loved him. I knew he loved me.

Twenty-five years later, the surprises keep coming. We’re not talking secret families, children who show up at our door with DNA results that link us, or secret lives of crime. We are talking about the moments we glimpse one another as we would a stranger. A story we’ve never heard before pops out. A reaction we never anticipated shocks one or both of us. My husband and I have talked a lot about the people or certain events who shape our lives, but there are some from our past that we’ve never mentioned. These small moments drive home for me that we could live our entire lives together and never know everything there is to know. This is probably for the best.

Until I read Lacey’s novel, I had forgotten how I once believed that loving someone meant knowing everything about them. I found myself looking back on my teenage-to-twenty-something self who asked too many questions. I accumulated observations and other people’s insights as though they would help me solve the puzzle of another person. People, however, are not meant to be solved. To love and live with another person means accepting that they – all people – are essentially unknowable. This can lead to misery, occasional bemusement, or enormous relief. Over the course of my life, I’ve experienced all three.

As I read Biography of X, I recalled an earlier relationship in which I knew my partner was sleeping regularly with other women. He would, in front of me and other people, analyze or criticize me in great “objective” detail. He was a decade older. He was one of those rising-star, magnet people who was never at peace with himself and could be devastatingly, unpredictably cruel and occasionally violent when he was at a low point. Others saw him as special and it was important to me to “succeed” in this relationship, prove something to him, his friends, and his colleagues. As long as the infidelities weren’t thrust in front of me, I lived as though there were a border between the world I had at home and the one he lived in outside of it. When he went dark at home, I practiced a powerful form of denial that kept me from having to confront myself. I managed to do this for seven years, an experience I recalled with both understanding and shame as I read Lacey’s novel. I confess, this may be coloring my view of the story which was about much more than the marriage at the center of it.

My much-marked-up copy of The Biography of X by Catherine Lacy

CM, the narrator of Biography of X, is the widow of a mysterious and renowned artist who lived under many names, in many places, and who had deliberately withheld the truth of her past from her public, her lovers, and her wife. X donned personas and discarded them when they no longer served her. She was a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist and refused to be bound by the expectations or assumptions of others even as she craved recognition. She told her wife, CM, to kill any attempt to capture her in a biography. When an unauthorized biography about her becomes a bestseller, though, CM is spurred by her grief and anger to write her own.

CM’s search for the missing details of her wife’s history forms the structure for this ambitious novel set in an America that is both familiar and foreign. This America is still emerging from a period of “disunification” following the secession in 1945 of the South which quickly evolved into a punitive theocracy. The Southerners view Northerners as “naively and dangerously radical.” The West becomes a kind of “all other.” One step at a time, CM uncovers her wife’s birth name and learns that she was born the day that the Southern Territories seceded entirely and began to behave as a sovereign territory. To leave meant the risk of death. When X disappeared as a young woman, her family believed her dead. Instead, she escaped to begin adopting and shedding characters in pursuit of her safety, art, and to escape categorization and, perhaps, herself. She seduces CM not so much with sex as with the power of her persona. Within weeks, CM leaves her husband for X.

As CM conducts interview after interview and discovers unpublished letters or art that no one has seen, she is forced to look more deeply at the woman she married than she had ever chosen to do while X was alive. She reports her findings, complete with footnotes and photographs which provide the illusion of fact. This only underscores some of the questions raised by this novel: What defines identity? Is it who we are or a construct we use to escape or navigate our lives? How important are facts when they will always be subject to interpretation? In the face of these complexities, is it simply a human impulse that drives some to seek out the harsh safety of an autocracy at the societal level, or to cede power to a spouse in more intimate relationships? And is it possible to separate the artist from her work?

These, however, are not the questions that kept me up at night after finishing Lacey’s novel. I am haunted by the idea that CM lived with X for years knowing so little about her. She trusted instead the “visceral” sense of belonging. She knew X’s needs well enough to anticipate them. She knew her food preferences, idiosyncrasies, and that she could expect X to disappear for days at a time only to reappear without explanation. Over time, she allowed herself to be absorbed completely into X’s life. C’s own work falls away along with friends or interests of her own. At one point she writes, “I had no life to risk anymore. She had my life. I didn’t know how she had it or what she was doing with it, but that’s what it felt like – she had my life and I had a home.” We discover that, in fact, X was using C and their life together as material for her art.

In this novel, borders are never solid. Geographical borders are crossed. Reality merges with fiction or art. The self can vanish into other selves or be eroded by our own desires and needs. The book itself is peppered with references to public figures we recognize – David Bowie, Emma Goldman, or Bernie Sanders – and events that actually happened but merge now with the fiction Lacey has created for them in her novel.

When CM ignores her wife’s wishes and decides to write the biography, she crosses a boundary set by X. She is driven by desires that become clearer to her as she goes deeper into her research. Ultimately, she wants evidence that, “I hadn’t imagined all those years, her company, our life, the home we had in each other.” As she learns more and more about X – and herself – she is forced to let go of one illusion after another. She both acknowledges and resists where her search is leading her. Either way, she keeps going until the pivotal moment when she comes face to face with the last project her wife was working on and must grapple with all it implies.

Although X is the focus of CM’s project, CM herself is the more absorbing mystery. We glimpse bits of her backstory here and there that I found myself seizing upon with enormous interest. A daughter of abusive parents. A sibling to two brothers. A journalist who prefers that the publication she works for is more known than she is. A woman whose own name evolves based on what others prefer to call her. A woman who chose her husband, then X, based on a sense of shared intimacy that is never truly expressed in words. What would make an intelligent woman, a journalist who wins a Pulitzer for her investigative work, turn her life over so completely to X? How is it that others could see how X was operating in their relationship and she couldn’t? Why was she more comfortable being invisible? Is it possible to call any of this love? How well did CM know herself or care to know herself?

I could ask the woman I was in my twenties many of the same questions. She wouldn’t answer. She might not even have known the answers and I can’t say I am sure all these years later what was happening and why. I’d like to say I know myself so much better now — and to some degree it’s true. My strong reaction to a fictional character, though, tells me some things are still working themselves out underneath the surface. There are pieces to my own puzzle that I still haven’t found. I can — must— live with that.

Obviously, I’m still processing this novel. If you’ve read it, or any of Catherine Lacey ’s other novels, I’d love to read your thoughts.

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ICYMI: Rona Maynard finds the right book at the right time

“I was grappling with a fresh wave of age-related aches and hungry for inspiration to see me through the years ahead.” - Rona Maynard

In case you missed it, Rona Maynard is the most recent writer to share the book that found her at the right time in the new feature The Right Book at the Right Time. I’ve loved reading these short interviews as they come in — they are so personal yet so easy to relate to.

Bookish folks from all over weigh in on a special book that found them at exactly the right moment. These “micro-interviews” take only a minute to read but may lead you to a book that you or someone you know can use right now.

If you already subscribe to Spark, you will receive these automatically. Look for a new voice and a new book to arrive in your inbox every other week between the regular editions of Spark. If you missed any, you can check them all out here: The Right Book at the Right Time.

Next up in the series will be Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro Memoirs. She had me at the title for reasons I will explain in the next regular issue of Spark on March 7. I’ll be picking up my copy of The Irish Goodbye along with Tyari Jones’ Kin at my local bookstore, La Playa Books on Tuesday the 24th when both are officially launched. You will be hearing more about each of them in future issues.

My next reads: the Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly and Kin by Tyari Jones.

My path to Biography of X

I did not know of Catherine Lacey or her work until I read a small post on Substack notes from Jami Attenberg. I found myself reading a few of Lacey’s Substack posts and then went online, read the opening paragraphs of her books, and ordered them. Biography of X, was the first to arrive. I read no reviews before picking up the book. I did check out her website which, like her novel, is startling, interesting, and made me work a bit.

Was Biography of X, the book I needed to read right now? While I was reading, it wasn’t sure but now I will say yes, it was. For several months I’d gone into a reading drought. I would pick up short pieces or books I’ve read before. I stared into space a lot as I thought about the novel I’m revising now. I felt a kind of resistance to reading that I can’t explain. Biography of X, though, almost commanded me to read it. The opening pages drew a portrait of a grief so real, it woke up all those feelings in me. I went in slowly and proceeded slowly. I fell back into the practice of reading, thinking, and giving myself over to a writer just to see where she takes me. I admired the way Lacey takes chances. I can’t say I loved everything about this novel but I’m still thinking about it. It woke me up and I am grateful.

Here’s an essay from Catherine Lacey’s 144-word essay project over on her Substack that acknowledges the mystery of marriage.

Wuthering Heights: Yes or No?

I’m weighing whether or not to re-read Wuthering Heights based on this post by Leigh Stein. I remember throwing my copy across the room the first time I read it many years ago. I’m no longer sure why. What say you? Have you read it? Would you read it again? Should I try to suspend my intolerance of men and women who, if they were real, would suck all the oxygen out of the room?

Atwood: definitely

After months of anticipation, and only a few days after finishing Biography of X, I received my copy of Margaret Atwood’s memoir. Lacey and Atwood are both fiercely intelligent writers in full command of their powers who write with a confidence that gives me hope and makes me despair. Interestingly, Atwood’s opening chapters pick up where the many characters of X leaves off.

In Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, Atwood introduces the idea that she possesses more than one self, the one that writes and the one that talks about it. Then there are the characters she creates — don’t they also reflect something of her? And what about the competing astrological signs, the person who changes as she moves through life? I’m dizzy as I contemplate how characters work in our lives — as selves, as tools for our art, as masks for operating in society a la Erving Goffman.

I would buy this book for the cover alone. That photo!

I will be reading Book of Lives in installments because it is too big a book to rush through and I want to know everything Margaret Atwood has to tell me. I am thinking about reading or rereading some of her other novels at intervals as I make my way through it, along with books by other writers. It’s a new way to read for me. We will see how it works.

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P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…the light of late winter

“The sun was setting as we arrived, and everything was bathed in that uncompromising light of late winter, that which seems to promise so much and so seriously.” - Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

Photo by John G. , New Hampshire

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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