Biography of X

Biography of X is presented as the book a widow named C.M. Lucca writes after the death of her wife, an elusive artist known only as X. Furious at an unauthorized biography, Lucca sets out to correct the record and instead uncovers a life built entirely from false identities, abandoned names, and fabricated histories. Her research takes her across an alternate-history United States that split into separate territories after World War II, including a sealed-off authoritarian South. The novel comes wrapped in the full apparatus of nonfiction, with footnotes, archival photographs, and quotations drawn from real artists and writers recast into X's invented life, until the line between document and fiction dissolves.