Biography of X

Set in an alternate history of the United States, the novel takes the form of a biography written by C. M. Lucca, a journalist who goes by CM, about her late wife, an artist known only as X who lived through a series of elaborate personas. The narrative unfolds in a world where the American South seceded in 1945 to form a theocratic dictatorship called the Southern Territory, walled off from the rest of the country for over 50 years.

The story opens after X's death on November 11, 1996, with CM wandering New York in a suicidal haze, kept alive by curiosity about her wife's secrets and the labor of managing X's estate. When Theodore Smith, a biographer CM once warned away at X's request, publishes A Woman Without a History, CM is enraged by its errors. Though X had explicitly opposed any biography, believing it would necessarily be false, CM begins writing her own account.

CM first recounts her marriage to Henry Surner, a sculptor she met in 1984. CM felt an inexplicable certainty she would marry Henry and began writing letters to "Henry of the Future." They married in 1986, but the union settled into mutual infidelity and emotional distance. Henry introduced CM to X's novel The Reason I'm Lost, published under a pseudonym. At a gallery opening in 1989, CM meets X, who slips a note into her pocket. The next day CM climbs a rope ladder to the abandoned elevated tracks above Tenth Avenue, where X is waiting, and the two walk for hours. Over the following weeks, X wages an insistent courtship, leaving letters on CM's desk and appearing unexpectedly throughout the city. CM leaves Henry and moves into X's loft, realizing the letters she wrote to "Henry of the Future" were about X all along.

CM's research into X's past begins in Missoula, Montana, where Dave Moser, a courthouse clerk, reveals he forged identity documents for "Dorothy Eagle" after X arrived in 1968. He tells CM X's real name: Caroline Luanna Walker Vine, born in Byhalia, Mississippi, in 1945, the year the wall went up.

CM provides historical context. On Thanksgiving Day 1945, an insurgent theocratic government sealed off the Deep South, making church attendance mandatory and shooting anyone who tried to cross the border. The secession was fueled by resentment of Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist turned socialist governor of Illinois and later chief of staff to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose progressive policies enraged conservative Southerners. A citizen-informant network called the Guardians of Morality policed daily life, and up to 45 percent of the population was imprisoned at some point. The territory collapsed in November 1996 when the North invaded and demolished the wall.

In 1999, CM travels to the Former Southern Territory and interviews X's parents, Angela and Leon Walker. They describe their daughter, Carrie Lu, as obstinate and lonely. She became pregnant at 15, married Paul Vine at her mother's insistence, and both parents believe she died in an explosion at the Revelation Rifle factory on New Year's Day 1968. CM interviews Paul at the Greenwood Men's Facility; he describes their courtship as nighttime walks in total darkness and reveals that on the night X fled, she tied him to the bed and stabbed him in the leg. CM also briefly meets Zebulon Vine, X's son, whose existence X never disclosed.

The historian Jill Charlet fills in the escape. On January 1, 1968, seven young dissidents attempted to bomb the Revelation Rifle factory. A premature detonation killed four of them. X and fellow dissidents Ted Gold and Kathy Boudin escaped through a border checkpoint with the help of a sympathetic guard, then scattered. X fled alone, hitchhiking westward under assumed names. Ted, who turned himself in to the FBI and was granted asylum, later gives CM X's diary and letters documenting her disillusionment, the personas she invented while drifting, and drafts of songs she would later record with David Bowie. In 2003, a militant re-secessionist group assassinates Ted at Schiphol Airport.

X's path to New York runs through Connie Converse, a folk singer 21 years her senior whom she meets at a soup kitchen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1971. X discovers Connie's abandoned recordings and draws her back into music. In New York, X also cultivates a friendship with Oleg Hall, a wealthy orphan whom CM discovers X targeted after reading a magazine profile. Oleg purchases an apartment for X and brings her into high society.

From 1972 to 1981, X lives as multiple people simultaneously. She infiltrates the downtown art scene working as "Clydelle" at a dive bar, writes The Reason I'm Lost in four days under the pseudonym "Clyde Hill," founds a feminist press called Knife Fight as "Martina Riggio," and publishes novels under additional pseudonyms. She produces David Bowie's Berlin albums, contributing songs including "Heroes," which CM reads as a retelling of X's escape. In Italy, she has an intense relationship with the feminist activist Carla Lonzi, which collapses over competing claims of art and love. Connie drifts in and out of X's life until her death from a heart attack in late 1981.

Connie's death and press exposés precipitate the retirement of all X's identities. In spring 1982, X debuts The Human Subject, a landmark exhibition at Quarry gallery documenting her decade of living as multiple people through glass display cases of artifacts. X takes the name X permanently and explains that from 1971 to 1981 she "suspended the use of myself" and lived as an audience to the fictions her body performed.

CM interviews Marion Parker, X's first wife in the Northern Territory (the United States outside the walled-off South), whom X married in late 1983 after a two-month courtship. The marriage deteriorated into mutual paranoia and ended after X pushed Marion hard enough to break a bone. X fell into depression, and a subsequent relationship with neuroscientist Alfred Schuster ended when he left for Belgium without explanation.

CM's own life with X, beginning in 1989, is governed by X's terms: CM must tolerate sudden, unexplained disappearances and never ask where X has been. They marry in May 1990 during a chaotic year in which X, using cocaine, makes incendiary public statements advocating fascism, then publicly apologizes. When stalkers accumulate around their building, the couple retreats to a cabin in upstate New York. The cabin years are mostly peaceful but marked by disturbing revelations. In early 1995, Olivia, X's secret second wife from a brief 1988 marriage, reveals that a woman who had previously confronted CM to accuse X of "rape by deception" was an actress X herself had hired. When CM raises the subject, X slashes her own cheek with a paring knife. During the 1994 holidays, X pointed a loaded gun at CM.

In 1996, X's MoMA retrospective, The Place to Be, brings unprecedented acclaim, but X remains privately dissatisfied. After X's death, CM avoids her wife's office for nearly eight years. When she finally enters, she finds a half-written note reading "Forgive me for" and addresses in New Mexico. In 2005, CM meets Shelley Carlos, a young ceramicist in Santa Fe with whom X had an affair. Shelley leads CM to X's final, unfinished installation, called The Second Human Subject: It documents CM's life through photographs, graphs measuring her "progress," urns of stolen personal objects, and a filmed scene in which Shelley plays CM being told she is leaving and never coming back. CM flees in devastation, recognizing that she was X's final human subject.

The book closes with CM's account of finding X's body on the office floor, initially believing it was one of X's pranks of playing dead. The coroner determines the cause was heart failure from a deformed valve. In the years since, CM has spoken to X constantly, refusing to believe she will never hear her voice again. The book ends with CM's confession that she cannot explain her wife or herself, and that she feels "well-earned shame" for having tried.