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‘Biography of X’ Rewrites a Life Story and an American Century

Catherine Lacey’s new novel follows a polarizing artist through a fractured country.

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BIOGRAPHY OF X, by Catherine Lacey

The narrator of “Biography of X,” the new Catherine Lacey novel, is a journalist named C.M. Lucca who worked for a Village Voice-like newspaper in New York City during the 1980s. C.M. has a cool tone and a lonely intelligence; she’s a solitary spirit. Her voice is clear but worn, like beach glass. There’s some early Renata Adler in it, and some Janet Malcolm.

C.M. was married, when young, to a sculptor named Henry. “Never love an artist,” Patricia Highsmith reports being told. “When it comes time for them to work, they’ll look at you as though they didn’t know you, and kick you out into the cold.” Henry never kicked C.M. into the cold, literally or metaphorically. But when C.M. leaves him and marries X — a polarizing, multi-hyphenate female performance artist — the heartbreak and indignities mount.

C.M.’s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined. “Biography of X” reimagines the American century while tapping into our evergreen fascination with the downtown art world between 1970 and 1995. It’s a hard book to get a handle on.

Let’s begin by calling it a novel about warring biographies. X did not want a biography written after her death, but it was inevitable one would appear. She was almost comically dexterous and plugged in, a Zelig-like combination of Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Edie Sedgwick, Laurie Anderson and Nan Goldin, most of whom appear in this book.

X had a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; she wrote seminal novels under various pseudonyms; one of her scripts was filmed by Wim Wenders; she produced records for Tom Waits and David Bowie (and wrote the lyrics to “Heroes”). She discovered and recorded a singer who resembles Karen Dalton. She corresponded with Denis Johnson and was photographed by Annie Leibovitz; she crashed Andy Warhol’s parties and spurned Warren Beatty’s advances. She was everything everywhere all at once. She would never use a door if a window were available.

By late 1996, X is dead. The biography that emerges a year later, by a man named Theodore Smith, infuriates C.M. It’s lightweight and literal, and it’s a joy to watch C.M. attack it. She calls it “radiant with inanity.” She says it reads as if Smith “has mixed up a palette of pastels and given himself permission to brighten a Rembrandt.” She notes that he gets crucial facts wrong.

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Everything she knew about her wife was false — a faux biography finds the 'truth'

Maureen Corrigan

To those readers who prize "relatability," Catherine Lacey's latest novel may as well come wrapped in a barbed wire book jacket. There is almost nothing about Biography of X , as this novel is called, that welcomes a reader in — least of all, its enigmatic central character, a fierce female artist who died in 1996 and who called herself "X," as well as a slew of other names. Think Cate Blanchett as Tár, except more narcicisstic and less chummy.

When the novel opens, X's biography is in the early stages of being researched by her grieving widow, a woman called CM, who comes to realize that pretty much everything she thought she knew about her late wife was false. The fragmented biography of X that CM slowly assembles is shored up by footnotes and photographs, included here.

Real-life figures also trespass onto the pages of this biography to interact with X — who, I must remind you, is a made-up character. Among X's friends are Patti Smith , the former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin , and the beloved New York School poet, Frank O'Hara .

As if this narrative weren't splintered enough, Lacey's novel is also a work of alternate history, in which we learn that post-World War II America divided into three sections: The liberal Northern Territory where Emma Goldman served as FDR's chief of staff (don't let the dates trip you up); the Southern Territory, labeled a "tyrannical theocracy," and the off-the-grid "Western Territory." A violent "Reunification" of the Northern and Southern Territories has taken place, but relations remain hostile.

Feeling put off by all this experimental genre-bending? Don't be. For as much as Lacey has written a postmodern miasma of a novel about deception and the relationship of the artist to their work, she's also structured that novel in an old-fashioned way: via a Scheherazade -like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating in its calculated brutality.

But let's return to the beginning. In what CM calls the "boneless days" in the aftermath of of X's death, she tells us that:

"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. ... 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."

I hesitate to mention any of revelations CM stumbles upon in the course of her research into X — a person CM says, "lived in a play without intermission in which she cast herself in every role." Watching those bizarre costume changes take place on these pages is part of the pleasure of reading this novel. It's not giving much away, though, to say that one of the earliest shockers here is that X, who arrived in New York in the 1970s ready to create experimental music with David Bowie and pricey conceptual art out of boulders, actually was born Carrie Lu Walker into the repressive Handmaid's Tale world of the Southern Territory.

Hiding her own identity as X's widow, CM travels to the Southern Territory to interview X's parents — a risky move in a land where women who deviate from the repressive norm are still stoned to death. During this research trip and the many that follow, CM also investigates the mystery of her own metamorphosis: namely, how did she — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — allow herself to be drawn into what Emily Dickinson called the "soft Eclipse" of being a wife, the very same kind of wife the folks in the Southern Territory would approve of? X may not be relatable, but, as we come to know her, the duped CM certainly is.

"The trouble with knowing people," CM says at one point, "is how the target keeps moving." The same could be said of Lacey's brilliant, destabilizing novel. Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper.

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Book details

Biography of X

Author: Catherine Lacey

Award Winner

• Lambda Literary Awards - Winner
• Lambda Literary Award - Nominee
• Amazon.com Best Books of the Year
• Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year
• Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
• Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year
• NPR Best Book of the Year
• New York Magazine Best Books of the Year
• New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
• New Yorker Best Books of the Year
• Powell's Best Books of the Year
• Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
• The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
• Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
• Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year
• PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee

REGARDING MR. SMITH _______________ After two years of ignoring his letters, I took a meeting with Theodore Smith, at X’s request, to put an end to his nonsense. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” he said, “I can’t believe it. X’s wife—incredible.”* Though it was 1992, I was unaccustomed to such fawning, as she and I avoided the places where such people lingered. The sole purpose of this meeting, which I recorded for legal purposes, was to inform Mr. Smith that X would not cooperate with his supposed biography; she would not authorize it, would give no interviews, and would allow no access to her archives. As my wife’s messenger, I encouraged Mr. Smith to abandon the project immediately, for he would suffer greatly trying to write a book that was ultimately impossible. “If you truly want to write a biography,” I told him, “you must first select a subject who is willing to comply, advisably a ghost.” Mr. Smith sat there blinking as I explained, in slow detail, our total disapproval of this endeavor. The estate would not license any reproductions of any of X’s work, nor would he be allowed to use any of the portraits of X to which we held the copyright. We would not give permission for him to quote her lyrics, essays, scripts, or books, and of course X had no time to answer any of his questions, as she had no interest in his interest, nor any respect for anyone who intended to exploit her work in this way. “It is her explicit wish not to be captured in a biography, not now and not after she’s gone,” I reminded him, my tone absolutely cordial, or at least judicial. “She asks that you respect this wish.” But Mr. Smith refused to believe that X would choose to be forgotten, to which I explained that X had no such intention and already had plans for what would happen to her archives in the event of her death; all I knew of those plans at the time was that access would require forfeiture of the right to biographical research. “Her life will not become a historical object,” I explained, as X had explained again and again to me. “Only her work will remain.” “But she’s a public figure,” Mr. Smith said, smiling in a sad, absent way. (How odd to remember the face of someone I hate, when so much else is lost to the mess of memory.) He slipped a page in a plastic sleeve from his briefcase. I glanced down—it was unmistakably her handwriting, dated March 2, 1990, and addressed to My Darling , and though I should have been that darling, given the year, I had a way of overlooking certain details back then. “I have several others,” he said. “The dealers always call me when they come across one, though they’re rare, of course, and quite expensive.” “A forgery,” I said. “Someone has ripped you off.” “It’s been authenticated. They’ve all been authenticated,” he said. I thought I knew what he was doing—dangling false artifacts to entrap me and compel my cooperation—but I would not budge. The letters must have been (or so I wanted to believe) all fakes, and even if X had written such a letter to someone else, which she most likely had not, she would’ve never associated with anyone treacherous enough to sell her out. This pathetic boy—no biographer, not even a writer—was simply one of X’s deranged fans. I don’t know why she attracted so many mad people, but she did, all the time: stalkers, obsessives, people who fainted at the sight of her. A skilled plagiarist had merely recognized a good opportunity and taken it, as people besotted with such delusion hold their wallets loosely. “You must understand that my wife is extremely busy,” I said as I stood to leave. “She has decades of work ahead of her and no time for your little project. I must insist you move on.” “She won’t always be alive, you know.” I did not believe myself to be such a fool, but I was, of course, that most mundane fool who feels that though everyone on earth, without exception, will die, the woman she loves simply cannot, will never. “Whether she wants there to be a biography or not,” Mr. Smith went on, “there will be one, likely several, after she’s gone.” I told Mr. Smith, again, to cease all attempts to contact us, that we would file a restraining order if necessary, that I did not want to ever see or hear from him again; I was certain that would be the end of it. * * * Four years later, on November 11, 1996, X died. I’d always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was. For weeks all I could do was commit myself to completely and methodically reading every word of the daily newspaper, which was filled with articles about the Reunification of the Northern and Southern Territories, a story so vast that I felt then (and still feel now) that we might never reach the end of it. I gave my full focus to reports of the recently dismantled ST bureaucracies, the widespread distrust of the new electricity grids in the South, and all the sensational stories from inside the bordered territory—details of the mass suicides, beheadings, regular bombings—and even though my personal loss was nothing in comparison to the decades of tyrannical theocracy, I still identified intensely with this long and brutal story, as I, too, had been ripped apart and was having trouble coming back together. Reading the paper gave a shape to my boneless days: each morning I walked the length of the gravel driveway, retrieved the paper, walked back, and read it section by section in search of something I’d never find—sense, reasons, life itself. Immersed in the news, I felt I was still in the world, still alive, while I remained somewhat protected from the resounding silence she’d left behind. In early December of that year, I read something in the arts section that I could not, at first, comprehend. Theodore Smith had sold his biography of my wife to a publisher for an obscene advance.* It was scheduled to be published in September of the coming year. For a few days I succeeded in putting it all out of mind. I thought, No—no, it is simply not possible, it will fail, they’ll realize the letters are frauds, that it is a work of obsession, not of fact, and when I, executor of X’s estate, deny them all the photo and excerpt rights, that will be the end of it. How could there be a biography without any primary sources? As it happened, the editor who’d purchased the book was someone with whom I shared a close friend. She called me that winter— a courtesy , she said, as she was under no obligation to gain my approval. She insisted the research was impeccable. Scrupulous but respectful , she said, whatever that means. She assured me that Mr. Smith truly revered and understood X as an artist, as a woman, and that he had so many wonderful insights about her work, but of course, some would find the book a little controversial, wouldn’t they? Your wife never shied away from controversy , the editor said. Is that so? The editor suggested I come to her office to meet with Mr. Smith while there was still time to correct the text, that I might want to dispel some rumors he’d been unable to detangle, and though I’d been sure I’d never see Mr. Smith again, by the time I’d hung up I’d agreed to the meeting. Two days later I was sitting in a conference room with Mr. Smith, his editor, and two or three lawyers. The cinder block of a manuscript sat on the table, practically radiant with inanity. I asked for a few moments with our author, and once alone, I asked him how he’d done it. Oh, just, you know, day by day , he said, the false modesty so pungent it could have tranquilized a horse. But what could you have had to say about her? What could you have possibly known? He insisted he still had plenty to go on without the archive, as she’d given thousands of interviews since the 1970s, that she rarely repeated herself, and of course there were the ex-wives, ex-lovers, the collaborators, others. They all had plenty to tell him, and lots of original letters to share. It had all gone quite well, he said, except for his interactions with me, of course, and the fact that he’d never been able to speak with X herself—a miscarriage he still regretted. But I did not care what he wanted from me and only wanted to know who had given him interviews. He listed a few inconsequential names—hangers-on and self-important acquaintances—then, surprisingly, Oleg Hall. Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Lacey

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Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New...

Book Details

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New York Times , the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times , Vanity Fair , Esquire, the Chicago Tribune , Kirkus , Lit Hub , and Amazon . National Bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. “A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist. When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

9780374606176

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"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." —Chris Kraus, The Washington Post "Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." —Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic "In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times "Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." —Marcel Theroux, The Guardian "Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive—at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness—fiction can be." —Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic "A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." —Jude Cook, TLS "a towering work that comments on, among things, art-world ridiculousness, the elasticity of identity, culture divides in the United States, and the fool’s errand of compressing a life into narrative . . . Beyond the book-as-book exercise, Lacy’s inventiveness when describing X’s various attention-grabbing exhibitions, and the genius visual annotations, Biography of X consistently stuns on a sentence-to-sentence basis. This is a wise, wise work." — Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel " Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes—X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra—into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own." — The New Yorker "Bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity." — Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune "Brimming with negative capability, intrigue, and erudition, Biography of X is at once a tense, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the United States and a robustly supported argument for the idea that biographical knowledge alters the reading of an artwork." —Jenny Wu, Los Angeles Review of Books "Lacey is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them . . . in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding." —Emma Alpern, Vulture " Biography of X is criminally good, building on [Lacey's] previous five books’ fascination with the mutability of self with kaleidoscopic depth and astonishing propulsion . . . What is most spectacular is Lacey’s sleight of hand, inviting us to become engrossed in the unknowability of others, while gently reminding us that we, too, are unknowable—even and especially to ourselves." —Ayden LeRoux, BOMB "Sweeping, ambitious . . . too expansive to simply be called a novel . . . The book is a provocative project—one that mirrors and refracts our own cultural obsession with celebrity and our nation’s broken politics." —Sammy Loren, Document "One of the most inventive works I’ve read in a long time, Catherine Lacey’s latest novel is a must-read for fans of ambitious, genre-bending literary fiction." —David Vogel, Buzzfeed "Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph." — Kirkus (starred review) "An audacious novel of art and ideas . . . The author also perfectly marries her [character's] history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams." — BookPage (starred review) "A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels." — Library Journal (starred review) "Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process." — Booklist "Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny, and a pure joy to spend hours with . . . Suffice it to say that it feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X , Catherine Lacey somehow—magically—makes the nearly impossible look easy." —Lauren Groff, author of Matrix "I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once: a biography revealing masks beneath masks and faces beneath faces, a quest narrative unsure of what it's seeking, an impossibly ambitious parable about art and the enigma of others, an alternate history of America that serves as an X-ray of our own fractured country. Biography of X is a profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll—and maybe the con—of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it." — Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You " Biography of X is the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby " Biography of X is a triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator." — Sara Nović , author of True Biz

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Summary and Reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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Biography of X

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• Mar 21, 2023, 416 pages
• Mar 2024, 416 pages

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Book Summary

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

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Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• In a Guardian review, Marcel Theroux called Biography of X "a lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book." Discuss the structure of Biography of X . How does Lacey employ methods typically used in nonfiction? Why do you think she choose to approach her subject in this way? What's the effect of doing so?
• What did you think of CM? What do you think attracted her to X initially? Describe her relationship with X. Do you think their relationship works? Explain your answer.
• What's the effect of having images interspersed throughout the book? Did they enhance your understanding of the events described? If so, how? Were there other images that you would have liked to see? What were they?
• Maureen Corrigan described Biography of X as "a...
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

As a series of stories about an eccentric and bizarre person, Biography of X has plenty of moments of brilliance. The central premise that intrigued me was the question suggested by CM's quest: How well do we really know those we love, those we've chosen to spend our lives with? But CM's situation is so hyper-specific, her wife so willfully, intentionally unknowable, a literal master of disguise, that it lacks some of the universal appeal that might have otherwise invited readers to reflect on their own relationships. What holds the novel together is suspense. As CM finds out more about her wife, it becomes clear that X had a history of using and manipulating people, and even the occasional act of violence... continued

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Biography of X: A Novel Paperback – March 19 2024

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Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New York Times , the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times , Vanity Fair , Esquire, the Chicago Tribune , Kirkus , Lit Hub , and Amazon . National Bestseller. Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. “A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist. When X―an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter―falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publication date March 19 2024
• Dimensions 13.46 x 2.67 x 20.96 cm
• ISBN-10 1250321689
• ISBN-13 978-1250321688
• See all details

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"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." ―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." ―Chris Kraus, The Washington Post "Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." ―Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic "In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." ―Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times "Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." ―Marcel Theroux, The Guardian "Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive―at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness―fiction can be." ―Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic "A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." ―Jude Cook, TLS "a towering work that comments on, among things, art-world ridiculousness, the elasticity of identity, culture divides in the United States, and the fool’s errand of compressing a life into narrative . . . Beyond the book-as-book exercise, Lacy’s inventiveness when describing X’s various attention-grabbing exhibitions, and the genius visual annotations, Biography of X consistently stuns on a sentence-to-sentence basis. This is a wise, wise work." ― Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel " Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes―X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra―into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own." ― The New Yorker "Bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity." ― Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune "Brimming with negative capability, intrigue, and erudition, Biography of X is at once a tense, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the United States and a robustly supported argument for the idea that biographical knowledge alters the reading of an artwork." ―Jenny Wu, Los Angeles Review of Books "Lacey is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them . . . in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding." ―Emma Alpern, Vulture " Biography of X is criminally good, building on [Lacey's] previous five books’ fascination with the mutability of self with kaleidoscopic depth and astonishing propulsion . . . What is most spectacular is Lacey’s sleight of hand, inviting us to become engrossed in the unknowability of others, while gently reminding us that we, too, are unknowable―even and especially to ourselves." ―Ayden LeRoux, BOMB "Sweeping, ambitious . . . too expansive to simply be called a novel . . . The book is a provocative project―one that mirrors and refracts our own cultural obsession with celebrity and our nation’s broken politics." ―Sammy Loren, Document "One of the most inventive works I’ve read in a long time, Catherine Lacey’s latest novel is a must-read for fans of ambitious, genre-bending literary fiction." ―David Vogel, Buzzfeed "Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph." ― Kirkus (starred review) "An audacious novel of art and ideas . . . The author also perfectly marries her [character's] history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams." ― BookPage (starred review) "A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels." ― Library Journal (starred review) "Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process." ― Booklist "Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny, and a pure joy to spend hours with . . . Suffice it to say that it feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X , Catherine Lacey somehow―magically―makes the nearly impossible look easy." ―Lauren Groff, author of Matrix "I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once: a biography revealing masks beneath masks and faces beneath faces, a quest narrative unsure of what it's seeking, an impossibly ambitious parable about art and the enigma of others, an alternate history of America that serves as an X-ray of our own fractured country. Biography of X is a profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll―and maybe the con―of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it." ― Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You " Biography of X is the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed." ―Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby " Biography of X is a triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator." ― Sara Nović , author of True Biz

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador (March 19 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250321689
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250321688
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 354 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.46 x 2.67 x 20.96 cm
• #73 in LGBTQ2S+ History Books
• #75 in LGBTQ2S+ History (Books)
• #6,319 in LGBTQ2S+ Fiction (Books)

About the author

Catherine lacey.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books— Biography of X, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.

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Biography of X

Catherine lacey.

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The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain—and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk. With all the recent attacks, of course, security had tightened everywhere, and you had to have permission or an invitation to enter any building, and I never had such things, as I was no one in particular, uncalled for. One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them—the one person or the half person—but I never saw the one and I never saw the half, no matter how much I looked and waited, patiently, so patiently, and after some time I wondered if I could not find them because I was one of them, either the one or the half.

One evening, still alive at Penn Station to catch an upstate train, I asked a serious-looking man if he had the time. He had the time, he said, but not the place, as he’d been exiled from Istanbul years earlier but never had the nerve to change his watch, and looking into this stranger’s face I saw my own eyes staring back at me, as I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment. We parted immediately, but I have never forgotten him.

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.

Or maybe what kept me alive was all the secretarial work I had to do, as I’d become X’s secretary by necessity—she kept firing the others. I sometimes found a strange energy to shuffle through her mail in the middle of the night—signing contracts I barely understood, reviewing the amendments made “in the event of the artist’s death,” filing away royalty statements in the manner that X had instructed, and shredding the aggravating amount of interview requests addressed to me, the widow. The Brennan Foundation had invited me to come receive the Lifetime Achievement Award on X’s behalf, not knowing that she’d planned to boycott the ceremony in resentment for how long it had taken them to recognize her. There was also an appeal from a museum that had been eagerly anticipating X’s contractual obligation to make one of her rare public appearances at the opening of her retrospective that spring; by overnighted letter, they asked whether I, as a representative of whatever was left of her, might fly over to London in her stead? I sent back my regrets— I am currently unable to explain how unable I am to undertake such a task.

Tom called, despite a thirty-year silence between us. He’d learned of my wife’s death in the papers and wanted to tell me that he had been thinking about me lately, about our strained and ugly childhood as siblings. His own wife, he said (it was news to me that he’d married), had been given another few months to live, maybe less. His daughter (also news to me) was fourteen now, and there was a part of him that wished she were younger, that believed she might be less damaged by grief if she were protected by the abstraction of early childhood. What an awful thing , he said, to wish my daughter could have known her mother for fewer years.

But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

When Tom was fourteen and I was seven we lived in a clapboard house on a dead-end with our mother and assorted others, and that summer as we were eating spaghetti in the kitchen Tom stopped moving, and sat there with his mouth open and the noodles unraveling from his poised fork as he stared into nothing, everything gone from his eyes, and he kept staring, unblinking and frozen as our mother shouted, Tom! Stop it! Tom! His eyes kept draining, nothing and nothing, then even less than nothing as Mother shouted for him to stop, to stop this horrible prank, until she finally slapped him hard in the face, which still did not bring him back but freed his fork from his hand and sent it into my lap. That night, slowly, he did start to come back, and later a neurologist was excited to diagnose him with a rare kind of epilepsy, which was treated with a huge pink pill, daily, and for months after my wife died I’d often find myself in some abject, frozen state—sitting naked in a hallway or leaning against a doorframe or standing in the garage, staring at the truck, unsure of how long I’d been there—and I wished someone could have brought me such a pill, something to prevent me from pouring out of myself, at odds with everything.

Tom and I were living in different griefs now—his imminent, mine entrenched—but I wondered if the treatment might still be the same, and I asked him if there was any kind of pill for this, some pill like that pill they used to give him all those years ago, but Tom felt sure there wasn’t, or if there was he didn’t know about it, and anyway, it probably wouldn’t work.

__________________________________

From Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Lacey.

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Biography of x, by catherine lacey, recommendations from our site.

“The book I’ve been jabbering about to anyone who will listen is Catherine Lacey’s new novel Biography of X , which is a tricksy, intriguing book comprising a faux biography set in a contemporary, but counterfactual United States. It’s at once moving and bewildering, and terribly clever—quite extraordinary. It’s the book novelists are pressing into other novelists’ hands.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Summer 2023

Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

The book, according to the author

The counterfactual aspect of the book came out of a need to create a world in which two women could be married without it being an issue, and in order to create a world in which a woman could be powerfully creative during the 20th century in America without having to first account or apologize for her gender. Before I wrote anything I had this sense of X, a brazenly creative yet deeply flawed woman, and the woman who loved her and their relationship. I could see and feel it so vividly, but I didn’t want the plot to be encumbered by the sexism of the 20th century. So I tried to envision a different, but still deeply flawed, world where they could create and love and suffer on their own terms—more or less.

The Best Counterfactual Novels recommended by Catherine Lacey

Other books by Catherine Lacey

Pew by catherine lacey, our most recommended books, the road by cormac mccarthy, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, the shining by stephen king, einstein by walter isaacson.

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Biography of X

Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is a daring reimagining of 20th century America where the Vietnam War never happened, Bernie Sanders was President, and an enigmatic multi-hyphenate artist named X was worthy of two biographies. The novel opens in 1997, one year after X dies, just as a book about her is released. X’s widow, an alt-weekly journalist named C.M. Lucca, is unnerved by the biography’s publication—it’s not factually accurate—so she takes matters into her own hands. C.M. sets out to write the definitive book on X’s life, much of which, she learns, she was not privy to. Lacey casts X as a Zelig-like figure who loosely resembles the real iconoclasts of the downtown New York art scene of the ’70s ( Patti Smith , Nan Goldin, Susan Sontag, to name a few) and worked with some of the biggest names from that era (David Bowie, Tom Waits, Annie Leibovitz). Lacey seamlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction, including frequent footnotes that cite real articles and fake ones by real journalists. The result is a kaleidoscopic exploration of art, love, and grief. — Shannon Carlin

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From his view: Trump recalls apparent assassination attempt at West Palm Beach golf course

by Gershon Harrell

Following a second attempt on his life, former President Donald Trump spoke about the events that transpired on Sunday when gunshots were fired at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach. Trump spoke about the attempt on his life on Monday during a live-streamed interview on X Spaces where he was slated to speak about his new cryptocurrency business. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — Following a second attempt on his life, former President Donald Trump spoke about the events that transpired on Sunday when gunshots were fired at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.

Trump was slated to speak about his new cryptocurrency business on X Spaces, an audio live stream service, on Monday, but not before giving listeners his point of view on the shots fired, the quick thinking of a U.S. Secret Service and the actions of a civilian who helped catch the suspect.

During his interview, he described Sunday's morning assassination attempt beginning as a peaceful day, as he played golf with some of his friends. Then the shots were fired.

"It sounded like bullets," Trump said. "But what do I know about that? But the Secret Service knew immediately it was bullets. And they grabbed me."

Trump continued, "I would have loved to sank that last putt, but we decided let's get out of here."

See also: Federal agents on alleged Trump assassination attempt latest, Secret Service response

Trump noted that the gunfire was coming from a U.S. Secret Service agent who spotted the barrel of an AK-47-style rifle from the bushes and began to shoot. The suspect, identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, was never able to fire a shot and Trump was never harmed.

He lauded the civilian, who noticed the suspect's suspicious activity, followed the suspect from her car and took a picture of the license plate which she then gave to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

"How many people would have the brain power to follow him and take pictures of the back of his truck," Trump said.

Routh was later arrested on I-95 North by the Martin County Sheriff's Office near Exit 110. MCSO said earlier in a news conference it took them around two miles to surround it and force it to stop.

After his arrest, Routh appeared in a federal courtroom on Monday where he was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

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‘Truly an angel’: UPS driver who saved grandmother’s life visits her in hospital weekly

VALDOSTA, Ga. (WALB/Gray News) - A UPS driver who helped save a grandmother passed out in her driveway says he has forged a lifelong connection with her, visiting her in the hospital weekly and thinking of her as his own family.

UPS driver Raheem Cooper was on his normal route in August when he stepped out of his truck to find an elderly woman passed out in her driveway in Valdosta, Georgia. He called 911 and made sure she got help before continuing his route. Many saw it as an act of heroism, but Cooper saw it as an opportunity to build a lifelong connection.

“I told her at that moment, she was grandmother now, so we are pretty much family,” Cooper told WALB .

The woman was checked into the hospital as Jane Doe and later identified as Marie Coble. Doctors say she suffered a subdural hematoma from falling onto the pavement, according to a GoFundMe set up for the family.

Coble underwent emergency brain surgery and is starting to return to normal. Doctors told the family if it hadn’t been for Cooper, she wouldn’t have survived, according to her granddaughter, Kayla Cochran.

“I found his number and called him and told him thank you, that he was truly an angel to our family to have found her because if he didn’t, she would have died that day,” Cochran said.

Since the incident, Cooper has stayed in contact with Coble and her family, visiting her in the hospital weekly to bring her favorite snack: Twinkies.

“Five days after the surgery, she hadn’t talked at all,” Cochran said. “When he came into the room, she brightened up and actually pushed herself up and gave him a hug. It was the first hug she’s given since this whole thing has happened.”

Determined to continue helping, Cooper started a GoFundMe to raise money for Coble’s medical expenses and her family’s travel.

“Most of her family is coming from out of state to visit her and everything, so I felt like it could take a lot off of the family. I just wanted to be a helping hand for them,” Cooper said.

Coble’s family is currently focused on her recovery and getting her back in her own home.

Last week, Cooper received a letter from UPS’ chief executive officer for his act of heroism along with tickets to the Florida State University football game from a co-worker. The local UPS warehouse gave him a luncheon and presented him with a plaque.

Copyright 2024 WALB via Gray Local Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Cells Across the Tree of Life Exchange ‘Text Messages’ Using RNA

September 16, 2024

Cells across the tree of life can swap short-lived messages encoded by RNA — missives that resemble a quick text rather than a formal memo on letterhead.

Nash Weerasekera for Quanta Magazine

Introduction

For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA, which can persist for millions of years in its remarkably stable, double-stranded form, RNA isn’t built to last — not even within the cell that made it. Unless it’s protectively tethered to a larger molecule, RNA can degrade in minutes or less . And outside a cell? Forget about it. Voracious, RNA-destroying enzymes are everywhere, secreted by all forms of life as a defense against viruses that spell out their genetic identity in RNA code.

There is one way RNA can survive outside a cell unscathed: in a tiny, protective bubble. For decades, researchers have noticed cells releasing these bubbles of cell membrane, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), packed with degraded RNA, proteins and other molecules. But these sacs were considered little more than trash bags that whisk broken-down molecular junk out of a cell during routine decluttering.

Then, in the early 2000s, experiments led by Hadi Valadi , a molecular biologist at the University of Gothenburg, revealed that the RNA inside some EVs didn’t look like trash. The cocktail of RNA sequences was considerably different from those found inside the cell, and these sequences were intact and functional . When Valadi’s team exposed human cells to EVs from mouse cells, they were shocked to observe the human cells take in the RNA messages and “read” them to create functional proteins they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make.

Valadi concluded that cells were packaging strands of RNA into the vesicles specifically to communicate with one another. “If I have been outside and see that it’s raining,” he said, “I can tell you: If you go out, take an umbrella with you.” In a similar way, he suggested, a cell could warn its neighbors about exposure to a pathogen or noxious chemical before they encountered the danger themselves.

Since then, a wealth of evidence has emerged supporting this theory, enabled by improvements in sequencing technology that allow scientists to detect and decode increasingly small RNA segments. Since Valadi published his experiments, other researchers have also seen EVs filled with complex RNA combinations. These RNA sequences can contain detailed information about the cell that authored them and trigger specific effects in recipient cells. The findings have led some researchers to suggest that RNA may be a molecular lingua franca that transcends traditional taxonomic boundaries and can therefore encode messages that remain intelligible across the tree of life.

In 2024, new studies have exposed additional layers of this story, showing, for example, that along with bacteria and eukaryotic cells, archaea also exchange vesicle-bound RNA, which confirms that the phenomenon is universal to all three domains of life. Another study has expanded our understanding of cross-kingdom cellular communication by showing that plants and infecting fungi can use packets of havoc-wreaking RNA as a form of coevolutionary information warfare: An enemy cell reads the RNA and builds self-harming proteins with its own molecular machinery.

“I’ve been in awe of what RNA can do,” said Amy Buck , an RNA biologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with the new research. For her, understanding RNA as a means of communication “goes beyond appreciating the sophistication and the dynamic nature of RNA within the cell.” Transmitting information beyond the cell may be one of its innate roles.

Time-Sensitive Delivery

The microbiologist Susanne Erdmann studies viral infections in Haloferax volcanii , a single-celled organism that thrives in unbelievably salty environments such as the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake. Single-celled bacteria are known to exchange EVs widely, but H. volcanii is not a bacterium — it’s an archaean , a member of the third evolutionary branch of life, which features cells built differently from bacteria or eukaryotes like us.

Because EVs are the same size and density as the virus particles Erdmann’s team studies at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, they “always pop up when you isolate and purify viruses,” she said. Eventually, her group got curious and decided to peek at what’s inside.

The microbiologist Susanne Erdmann recently found archaea enclosing RNA in cellular bubbles and dispatching it into the environment. Her discovery extended our knowledge of this messaging ability to all three domains of life.

Alina Esken/Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology

“I was expecting DNA,” Erdmann recalled, following reports that other archaeal species pack DNA into EVs. Instead, her lab found a whole smorgasbord of RNA — specifically noncoding RNAs, mysterious stretches of nucleotides with no known function in archaea. These noncoding RNA sequences were much more abundant in the EVs than in the archaeal cells themselves. “It was the first time that we found RNA in EVs in archaea,” she said.

Erdmann wondered if there was a purpose to the archaean EVs. A cell can spontaneously make vesicles when its membrane pinches in on itself to form a little bubble that then detaches. However, other mechanisms involve more active and deliberate processes, similar to the ones that move molecules around inside the cell. Erdmann’s group identified an archaeal protein that was essential for producing RNA-containing EVs.

That suggested to her that the RNA wasn’t ending up in the EVs by chance, and that the process wasn’t just waste disposal. “It’s very likely that [archaea] use them for cell-to-cell communication,” she said. “Why else would you invest so much energy in throwing out random RNA in vesicles?”

Erdmann isn’t sure why the Haloferax microbes pack their vesicles with RNA while other archaeal species prefer DNA. But she suspects it has to do with how time sensitive the molecular message is. “RNA is a different language than DNA,” she said, and it serves a fundamentally different purpose both inside and outside cells.

Mark Belan for  Quanta Magazine

An organism’s DNA should be stable and relatively unchanging over the course of its life. It may pick up spontaneous mutations or even extra genes, but it takes generations of natural selection for temporary changes in DNA sequences to take hold in a population. RNA, on the other hand, is constantly in flux, responding to dynamic conditions inside and outside the cell. RNA signals don’t last long, but they don’t need to, since they can so quickly become irrelevant.

As a message, RNA is transient. This is a feature, not a bug: It can have only short-term effects on other cells before it degrades. And since the RNA inside a cell is constantly changing, “the message that you can send to your neighboring cell” can also change very quickly, Erdmann said. In that sense, it’s more like a quick text message or email meant to communicate timely information than, say, runes etched in stone or a formal memo on letterhead.

While it seems that neighboring archaea are taking up and internalizing EVs from their fellow cells, it’s not clear yet whether the messages affect them. Erdmann is also already wondering what happens to these vesicles in the wild, where many different organisms could be within earshot of the messages they carry.

“How many other different organisms in the same environment could take up this message?” she asked. “And do they just eat it and use the RNA as food, or do they actually detect the signal?”

While that may still be a mystery for Haloferax , other researchers have demonstrated that cells across species, kingdoms and even domains of life can send and receive remarkably pointed molecular missives.

Biological Cross Talk

Although RNA is short-lived, it has revealed itself to be a shape-shifting molecular marvel. It’s best known for helping cells produce new proteins by copying DNA instructions (as messenger RNA, or mRNA) and delivering them to the ribosome for construction. However, its flexible backbone lets RNA fold into a number of shapes that can impact cell biology. It can act as an enzyme to accelerate chemical reactions within cells. It can bind to DNA to activate or silence the expression of genes. And competing strands of RNA can tangle up mRNA instructions in a process called RNA interference that prevents the production of new proteins.

As researchers increasingly appreciate the ways RNA changes cell activity, they’ve studied strategies to use this mutable little molecule as an experimental tool, a disease treatment, and even the basis for the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine . All of these applications require transferring RNA into cells, but it seems that evolution has beaten us to it: EVs transmit RNA even to cells that may not want to get the message.

About 10 years ago, the molecular geneticist Hailing Jin and her lab at the University of California, Riverside discovered that two organisms from different kingdoms — a plant and a fungus — exchange RNA as a form of warfare. Jin was studying Botrytis cinerea , a fuzzy gray mold that ravages crops such as strawberries and tomatoes, when she saw it swap RNA with the plant Arabidopsis (thale-cress) during infection. The Botrytis fungus delivered RNA that interfered with the plant’s ability to fight the infection. Later work showed that the plant cells could respond with their own volley of RNA that damaged the fungus.

In this “coevolutionary arms race,” as Jin described it, both organisms used EVs as vehicles for these delicate but damaging RNA messages. Previously, scientists interested in host-pathogen dynamics mainly focused on proteins and metabolites, Jin said, because those molecules can be easier to study. But it makes sense for organisms to have multiple ways of resisting environmental challenges, she said, including using RNA to interact with distant evolutionary relatives.

Over the last decade, more scientists have discovered examples of cross-kingdom RNA exchange as an offensive strategy during infection. Parasitic worms living in mouse intestines release RNA in EVs that shut down the host’s defensive immune proteins. Bacteria can shoot messages to human cells that tamp down antibacterial immune responses . The fungus Candida albicans has even learned to twist a message from human EVs to its own advantage: It uses human RNA to promote its own growth .

Cross-kingdom correspondence isn’t always hate mail. These interactions have also been seen in friendly (or neutral) relationships, Jin said. For example, bacteria that live symbiotically in the roots of legumes send RNA messages to promote nodulation — the growth of little bumps where the bacteria live and fix nitrogen for the plant.

How can RNA from one branch of the tree of life be understood by organisms on another? It’s a common language, Buck said. RNA has most likely been around since the very beginning of life. While organisms have evolved and diversified, their RNA-reading machinery has largely stayed the same. “RNA already has a meaning in every cell,” Buck said. “And it’s a pretty simple code.”

So simple, in fact, that a recipient cell can open and interpret the message before realizing it could be dangerous, the way we might instinctively click a link in an email before noticing the sender’s suspicious address. Indeed, earlier this year, Jin’s lab showed that Arabidopsis plant cells can send seemingly innocuous RNA instructions that have a surprise impact on an enemy fungus. In experiments, Jin’s team saw the Botrytis fungus read the invading mRNA along with its own molecules and unwittingly create proteins that damaged its infectious abilities.

It’s almost as if the plants were creating a “pseudo-virus,” Jin said — little packets of RNA that infect a cell and then use that cell’s machinery to churn out proteins.

“This is a pretty powerful mechanism,” she said. “One mRNA can be translated into many, many copies of proteins. … It’s much more effective than transporting the protein itself.”

To her knowledge, Jin said, this is the first time she’s seen evidence of organisms across kingdoms exchanging mRNA messages and reading them into proteins. But she thinks it’s likely to be seen in lots of other systems, once people start looking for it.

The field feels young, Buck said, which is exciting. There’s still a lot to learn: for example, whether the other molecules packaged in EVs help deliver the RNA message. “It’s a fun challenge to unravel all of that,” she said. “We should be inspired with how incredibly powerful and dynamic RNA is, and how we’re still discovering all the ways that it shapes and regulates life.”

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Also in Biology

The Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea

How Our Longest Nerve Orchestrates the Mind-Body Connection

How Colorful Ribbon Diagrams Became the Face of Proteins

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Elon Musk Faces Firestorm Over ‘Appalling’ Assassination ‘Joke’ About Biden, Harris

Elon Musk drew fierce backlash on his own X (formerly Twitter) platform for what was slammed as an “appalling and indefensible” response to an apparent second attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump, the current GOP presidential nominee.

Per the FBI, Trump was the subject of “what appears to be an attempted assassination” at his golf club in Florida on Sunday, some nine weeks after he was injured when shots were fired during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Musk posted: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

The billionaire, who has 197 million followers, added a thinking-face emoji.

The criticism came fast as Musk — who has endorsed Trump’s 2024 campaign — was accused of stoking division and inflaming tensions.

Musk later deleted the post.

He explained, “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”

Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2024

“Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he added.

Musk did not elaborate on who was in the group that he initially told the “joke” to and who he said had found it “hilarious.”

Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2024

Musk’s explanation went down as badly as his alleged “joke” did.

Here’s how commenters responded to the initial comment:

Elon Musk just tweeted this and this is okay? https://t.co/X1qNnisj59 — Jvy_almighty (@JvyAlmighty) September 16, 2024

This is a dangerous and disturbing provocation. https://t.co/1xPdcBcPHD — Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) September 16, 2024

If you or I said this, the FBI would be at our door tomorrow and hauling us away for questioning. https://t.co/adLDboTtsY — A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) September 16, 2024

and they say this site has advertising problems https://t.co/nhO3ulEIOm — Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) September 16, 2024

Another example of why your children hate you. — Billy Baldwin (@BillyBaldwin) September 16, 2024

This is literally incitement. — DemsMight 🇺🇸 (@demsmight) September 16, 2024

Hello @DOJCrimDiv and @SecretService . Whenever a US citizen infers that people should consider assassinating @POTUS or @VP , I believe it should be taken very seriously. Please take @elonmusk 's statement here under serious consideration. https://t.co/70yrmGXuUN — Matthew Podszus (@matthew_podszus) September 16, 2024

this is a defense contractor @FBI @SecretService @CIA https://t.co/uyIEZVLR91 — hasanabi (@hasanthehun) September 16, 2024

This is actually crazy. You’ve officially lost it dude and it’s sad to see. A lot of people look up to you but you’re being super irresponsible all because you crave attention https://t.co/REYfWEWJia — Jonathan Morrison 🙋🏻♂️ (@tldtoday) September 16, 2024

WTF??? @SecretService you may want to pay this guy a visit. He ain’t right in the head! https://t.co/kZ5oaWD73U — MazJobrani (@MazJobrani) September 16, 2024

This is appalling and indefensible. https://t.co/QXAHfOdTnS — Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) September 16, 2024

this guy is out of control https://t.co/9DQOPeKn3w — David Kaye (@davidakaye) September 16, 2024

Imagine being the richest man in the world and buying a powerful social media platform, and this (among other outrageously irresponsible tweets) is what you do with it. https://t.co/6WKPTWMDqW — Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) September 16, 2024

Hey, richest man in the world with incalculable power and influence, please don’t say things like this https://t.co/yUanxcCyaq — Preston Moore, M.A. (@prestoncmoore) September 16, 2024

When it comes to murder, suddenly @elonmusk is a big fan of diversity equity & inclusion Seems about right . https://t.co/9namrPJZGB — Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) September 16, 2024

I had a security clearance for most of my adult life. If I had said something like this, I would’ve lost it instantly. And yet this guy is still a major government contractor. https://t.co/exrI8VYsa7 — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2024

And here’s how they reacted to his explainer:

Nothing is funny about sending a tweet about assassinating the President and Vice President. He deleted his tweet, but the targeted audience received the message. He knows exactly what he’s doing. — 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐝𝐢 (@ChidiNwatu) September 16, 2024

if you have to explain your joke it is not funny — Mantis (@mantis) September 16, 2024

tee-hee i was just joking about killing the president hehe im da joker baby! pic.twitter.com/zDIPU7eaSU — Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) September 16, 2024

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