emma's Reviews > Biography of X

the only thing better than the biography of an eccentric groundbreaking woman artist is one that's made up.

unfortunately that's not what this was about.

i love lucy dacus and i hate to disagree with her, especially since we read this book at the same time which is thrilling, but we couldn't have had more disparate experiences.

this book was strange. it had a lot of interesting things to say, and a lot of interesting ways of saying things, but these two didn't always match up. some of its most compelling points are made in throwaway lines connecting middling paragraphs, and some of its strongest structural choices are wasted on the alternative history subplot it insists on destroying itself within.

in other words, this is likely good, but it's far from uniform.

the most bizarre moments of this book are twofold: its attribution of boring faux-biography to some of the 20th century's coolest nonfictional minds (oh hi, renata adler and chris kraus! you again, kurt cobain and david bowie!) and the fact that this is not so much biography of an artist and ex wife as it is relation of a history in which the southern united states seceded from the north in 1945 for the reason of "religion."

never mind that surely we would not be treated to this history if this were actually a biography of a woman. never mind that this makes no sense. never mind that world war ii still happened in this universe and we would thereby have to ignore the sense of american unity and patriotism that pervaded following this victory. never mind that also in the 1940s, the north was so progressive as to approve of socialism and of same-sex marriage and of a variety of other liberal causes, even though it elected a neofascist shortly after (who ran against ronald reagan, the green party candidate?).

i could never lose myself in these characters or in this story, because my suspension of disbelief was constantly being f*cked with by an alternate history so silly it resurrected my fading memories of apush syllabi.

i don't know. this book is so weird.

i badly wanted it to be my problem rather than the book's, but then there's the writing. i can deal with overwrought language if it’s precise. sentences that contain bits like “she glimpsed in my direction” and “dark black” are just too much for me to look past.

bottom line: the definition of an unpleasant surprise.