Details:
- author: Catherine Lacey
- full title: Biography of X
- narrator: Cassandra Campbell
- genre: literary fiction
- topics: #biography, #marriage, #lgbt, #alternativehistory
- publisher: Recorded Books
- publish date: 21 Mar 2023
- timing: 14:06:00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙.5
- narration: 💙💙💙💙💙
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| Goodreads |
»The happiest years are the shortest, we only notice them after they're gone,« X wrote in 'The Reason I'm Lost'.
Excerpt from the Book:
It wasn't a will to live that kept me alive then, but rather a curiosity about who else might come forward with a story about my wife. Who else might call to tell me something almost unfathomable? And might I—despite how much I had deified and worshipped X and believed her to be pure genius—might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her.
My Thoughts:
C.M. Lucca is writing a biography of X, a woman without history, her late wife. The more she researches her life, the more she realizes she didn’t know her. What began as an attempt to correct an existing biography by Theodore Smith slowly became an obsession for CM to find out about the history of her wife and who she was.
The novel is heavily quoted from various books, articles, journals, and interview transcripts, therefore, it reads like an actual nonfiction biography. The author also mentions many people, places, and works from the real world. Some of them are well known.
Events are set in some alternative history, where, at some point, the US was divided into Southern and Northern Territory. Southern Territory is under a strict theocracy, and the regime sometimes resembles former communist ones, while the Northern part is more liberal.
Overall, Biography of X is an interesting novel, and it is, without a doubt, a very ambitious piece of work. I can appreciate that. On the other hand, it is pretty long. The writing can get very dry because of all the facts, data, and quotations. Therefore, the reader could lose interest. Even though Biography of X is an impressive work, it can lose its original meaning because of length and style. Also, it definitely is not a lightweight read.
For most literary fiction, I like to read book or ebook, but this novel is one of those when I’m really glad I had an audio format of the book. I’m not sure I would finish it otherwise, or it would take me a lot of time to read it. I think the narrator did a wonderful job here and read the book the best way anyone could.
This was my first Catherine Lacey novel, and I will keep reading her other works.
About the Author:
Catherine Lacey is the author of three novels— Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew. She has published fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, and in her collection Certain American States. The recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award for 2021. Her fifth book is forthcoming in 2023.
About the Narrator:
As Cassandra Campbell has said, "A good audiobook narrator is somebody who can get out of the way and let the story be the primary thing." And no one embodies this more than Campbell herself, who has hundreds of audiobooks credits to her name and delivers each one with refreshing clarity and honesty. For her efforts, she’s been decorated with multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, the prestigious Odyssey Award, among numerous other honors.
