Biography of X by Catherine Lacey - discussion forums, ideas, anything.
June 13, 2024 3:38 AM Subscribe
I've got book club this Sunday, and the title in question is "Biography of X" by Catherine Lacey.
The problem? I really enjoyed the book, but something feels hollow inside me about the fact that it presents a (relatively) perfect gay future(~ish) for most, where trans people don't exist. I'm looking for any content which might help me here.
I don't know how to raise this in book club without it being a "god they can't stop centering themselves" thing. This article describes how Lacey came to the setting *because* she wanted to normalise queer relationships... but there are no trans people in the book. An awful lot of gender, an awful lot of gay, an awful lot of identity and change in identity, plenty of drag, but very conspicuously no trans. I was really hoping there'd be discussion already out there that I could build off to not go in unprepared.
- Everyone else at the book club will be cis, one or two will be gay, a few might be bisexual.
- I haven't read any of her other works yet, although I'm considering knocking out Nobody is Ever Missing or Pew if it'll make the difference in my understanding, although all indications are there are only passing references to trans people as a concept.
- I'm not trying to cancel her or anything, but I am really having trouble understanding how you could write *this* book in today's world and steadfastly refuse to ever acknowledge the idea of trans people.
- Building on above... this is a book about identity, change, and to a slightly lesser extent, gender. At least as I read it. It's like, an exemplar of where you might want to raise the idea of trans people and thus the complete absence feels glaring.
I want to be prepared to talk to the other book club members about this in a coherent way. I'm already... they're English teachers, and I'm not. I tend to feel at a disadvantage, and this is the strongest I've ever felt about a book we've read, even though I'm not sure *how* I feel. Literary analysis has never been my strong point.
My three vague conceptions of *why* the book is this way are "she is a crypto-terf but too smart to be open, there are no trans people, because with a withering of patriarchy and acceptance of homosexuality, nobody would be trans anymore" (under a certain set of self-alleged transphobic beliefs)
"there *are* trans people, it is simply so normal and accepted that they do not bother to acknowledge it, they simply are the gender they identify as". This is complicated by the section in the Southern Territory, where we are told that homosexuality must never be discussed. That would also apply doubly to trans people, and be all the more critical to warn against and thus mention.
or "she is neither a crypto-terf or a utopian trans positivist, she is merely a coward, maximising potential audience". Which, while perhaps the most likely, is also in many ways the most concerning to me. When I tried to find discussion online before coming to the green, she is mostly referred to as a trans-positive author, especially in reference to Pew. I don't see why Biography of X is tagged "LGBT". It should be tagged "LGB".
My colleagues are not card-carrying bigots, if anything, they're great examples of what generally passes for the opposite. That does not reduce my fears about raising this as one of my key experiences with the text. If anything, they are positioned to feel attacked, as good allies, by someone demanding more and more and reading too much into a book they enjoyed.
If anyone on Ask is already across this book, and knows what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate hearing from you. If you're not, but perhaps you know somewhere good but perhaps not SEO-optimised which might have what I'm looking for... that would be great too.
***SPOILER SECTION*** for those who are not across the book, won't ever be, and don't get what I'm talking about.
This is a book largely about a fictional bi/pan woman who adopts a wide range of identities, who almost reflexively defaults to drastic changes in identity and appearance sometimes on an almost daily basis, presenting as a dozen different women, even wearing a fake moustache at one point. By the end of the book, she is primarily presented as dangerous and abusive.
Shortly before this is cemented for the audience, we see X "dreamily" identifying with a comment, intended as insult, "you're being the worst kind of man". I am not suggesting I think X is a trans man. I am not sure if the author is suggesting she is. If that is what Lacey suggesting X is... it does not improve my perception of her writing about gender. This is not the only example, merely what I felt was the most poignant.
***END SPOILERS***
Something is being raised here. I simply don't understand what.
I don't know how to raise this in book club without it being a "god they can't stop centering themselves" thing. This article describes how Lacey came to the setting *because* she wanted to normalise queer relationships... but there are no trans people in the book. An awful lot of gender, an awful lot of gay, an awful lot of identity and change in identity, plenty of drag, but very conspicuously no trans. I was really hoping there'd be discussion already out there that I could build off to not go in unprepared.
- Everyone else at the book club will be cis, one or two will be gay, a few might be bisexual.
- I haven't read any of her other works yet, although I'm considering knocking out Nobody is Ever Missing or Pew if it'll make the difference in my understanding, although all indications are there are only passing references to trans people as a concept.
- I'm not trying to cancel her or anything, but I am really having trouble understanding how you could write *this* book in today's world and steadfastly refuse to ever acknowledge the idea of trans people.
- Building on above... this is a book about identity, change, and to a slightly lesser extent, gender. At least as I read it. It's like, an exemplar of where you might want to raise the idea of trans people and thus the complete absence feels glaring.
I want to be prepared to talk to the other book club members about this in a coherent way. I'm already... they're English teachers, and I'm not. I tend to feel at a disadvantage, and this is the strongest I've ever felt about a book we've read, even though I'm not sure *how* I feel. Literary analysis has never been my strong point.
My three vague conceptions of *why* the book is this way are "she is a crypto-terf but too smart to be open, there are no trans people, because with a withering of patriarchy and acceptance of homosexuality, nobody would be trans anymore" (under a certain set of self-alleged transphobic beliefs)
"there *are* trans people, it is simply so normal and accepted that they do not bother to acknowledge it, they simply are the gender they identify as". This is complicated by the section in the Southern Territory, where we are told that homosexuality must never be discussed. That would also apply doubly to trans people, and be all the more critical to warn against and thus mention.
or "she is neither a crypto-terf or a utopian trans positivist, she is merely a coward, maximising potential audience". Which, while perhaps the most likely, is also in many ways the most concerning to me. When I tried to find discussion online before coming to the green, she is mostly referred to as a trans-positive author, especially in reference to Pew. I don't see why Biography of X is tagged "LGBT". It should be tagged "LGB".
My colleagues are not card-carrying bigots, if anything, they're great examples of what generally passes for the opposite. That does not reduce my fears about raising this as one of my key experiences with the text. If anything, they are positioned to feel attacked, as good allies, by someone demanding more and more and reading too much into a book they enjoyed.
If anyone on Ask is already across this book, and knows what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate hearing from you. If you're not, but perhaps you know somewhere good but perhaps not SEO-optimised which might have what I'm looking for... that would be great too.
***SPOILER SECTION*** for those who are not across the book, won't ever be, and don't get what I'm talking about.
This is a book largely about a fictional bi/pan woman who adopts a wide range of identities, who almost reflexively defaults to drastic changes in identity and appearance sometimes on an almost daily basis, presenting as a dozen different women, even wearing a fake moustache at one point. By the end of the book, she is primarily presented as dangerous and abusive.
Shortly before this is cemented for the audience, we see X "dreamily" identifying with a comment, intended as insult, "you're being the worst kind of man". I am not suggesting I think X is a trans man. I am not sure if the author is suggesting she is. If that is what Lacey suggesting X is... it does not improve my perception of her writing about gender. This is not the only example, merely what I felt was the most poignant.
***END SPOILERS***
Something is being raised here. I simply don't understand what.
Best answer: Geez, I wish I could point to a specific essay, but this reminds me of a comment that got made about science fiction a lot in the 2010s by writers and fans of color (and this seems to be science fiction of a sort) - basically, if you get to your utopian future and everyone is white, does that mean that the foundation of your utopia is a massive genocide? How can you write a white future and claim it's a utopia?
This really goes to afrofuturism and the idea that who gets to envision the future is contested. There are a lot of ideas in afrofuturism that don't just map onto other struggles - it's not as though people could or should just swap out Black experience and try to port afrofuturism theories and strategies into other situations. But I will say that I found the future archeology parts of Further Considerations On Afrofuturism to be really powerful. I think that image/idea sort of flows backward to say that there's also a political fight for the past, which seems to dovetail with this book.
I think it's perfectly possible that this woman (is she straight and cis?) just...didn't really think things through, but that doesn't matter for the politics/critique of her book. My beloved alternate history novel Fire On The Mountain by Terry Bisson, an extremely radical novel, has exactly zero gay people in it. I don't know if that's how he would have written it if he wrote it in the 2000s instead of the eighties, but I think it should have some gay people in it.
The wonderful Octavia Butler really basically never wrote queer characters, and while everyone makes a lot of to-do about "queering" gender by means of bodily weirdness in her books, there aren't any gay people. There's a future where you literally cannot be gay in one of her series, and it's very clear that she never considered that aspect important. Octavia Butler was a great writer and a towering figure and I don't believe she was some big homophobe, and I imagine that she'd write differently if she were writing now, but I still wish her books had gay people in them.
In short, I think that if someone is going to write science fiction, even literary science fiction, they must accept a science fiction critique, and "how, in the queer-utopian near future, did we get to a point where there are lots of gay people but apparently zero trans people" is a perfectly reasonable question. If this were a science fiction book group with anyone who was paying attention to GLBTQ matters in it, I think it would be a significant topic of discussion.
Someone could make the case that there are lots of trans people and she just never mentions it, but that's a bit like saying, "oh in my space utopia the BIPOC characters are just out of frame, laughing too" - you have to ask yourself what and who a utopia is written for. A utopia (or book with utopian elements) isn't a documentary of what actually exists, it's a story told for a particular audience with a political point.
Now I'm mad about this. Good luck with the book group!
posted by Frowner at 5:35 AM on June 13 [16 favorites]
This really goes to afrofuturism and the idea that who gets to envision the future is contested. There are a lot of ideas in afrofuturism that don't just map onto other struggles - it's not as though people could or should just swap out Black experience and try to port afrofuturism theories and strategies into other situations. But I will say that I found the future archeology parts of Further Considerations On Afrofuturism to be really powerful. I think that image/idea sort of flows backward to say that there's also a political fight for the past, which seems to dovetail with this book.
I think it's perfectly possible that this woman (is she straight and cis?) just...didn't really think things through, but that doesn't matter for the politics/critique of her book. My beloved alternate history novel Fire On The Mountain by Terry Bisson, an extremely radical novel, has exactly zero gay people in it. I don't know if that's how he would have written it if he wrote it in the 2000s instead of the eighties, but I think it should have some gay people in it.
The wonderful Octavia Butler really basically never wrote queer characters, and while everyone makes a lot of to-do about "queering" gender by means of bodily weirdness in her books, there aren't any gay people. There's a future where you literally cannot be gay in one of her series, and it's very clear that she never considered that aspect important. Octavia Butler was a great writer and a towering figure and I don't believe she was some big homophobe, and I imagine that she'd write differently if she were writing now, but I still wish her books had gay people in them.
In short, I think that if someone is going to write science fiction, even literary science fiction, they must accept a science fiction critique, and "how, in the queer-utopian near future, did we get to a point where there are lots of gay people but apparently zero trans people" is a perfectly reasonable question. If this were a science fiction book group with anyone who was paying attention to GLBTQ matters in it, I think it would be a significant topic of discussion.
Someone could make the case that there are lots of trans people and she just never mentions it, but that's a bit like saying, "oh in my space utopia the BIPOC characters are just out of frame, laughing too" - you have to ask yourself what and who a utopia is written for. A utopia (or book with utopian elements) isn't a documentary of what actually exists, it's a story told for a particular audience with a political point.
Now I'm mad about this. Good luck with the book group!
posted by Frowner at 5:35 AM on June 13 [16 favorites]
I don't know how to raise this in book club without it being a "god they can't stop centering themselves" thing.
If I can address something other than your main question: are you sure this would be a problem? In my book groups I love when people can bring their personal experiences to the book, especially if they have a perspective that's not like mine. If the other readers haven't noticed that there aren't any trans characters, you pointing that out would give them a deeper understanding of the book. They should be grateful!
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:09 AM on June 13 [5 favorites]
If I can address something other than your main question: are you sure this would be a problem? In my book groups I love when people can bring their personal experiences to the book, especially if they have a perspective that's not like mine. If the other readers haven't noticed that there aren't any trans characters, you pointing that out would give them a deeper understanding of the book. They should be grateful!
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:09 AM on June 13 [5 favorites]
Best answer: Sci fi is set in the future, but for me it's about the authors conscious and subconscious views of the present.
Like the afrofuturism point, some of this reminds me about all the Asimov futures that have few or no women in. And in particular, it's often not an active choice to say that there are no women or BIPOC or trans people in the future as much as it is a reflection of the unexamined male/white/cis privilege of the author. If so it usually either provokes a retcon from the author about why the version of the future they wrote about is ok, or a reflection and realisation that the omission is important. (And the retcon is always the wrong approach.)
I also think it's a perfectly valid criticism of the book, and it doesn't make it less valid if it was either a deliberate choice or simply one of subconscious omission. Working by analogy with other groups might help to explain why the lack of trans characters is a problem, and might also provide you with suggestions that helps you articulate the critique better..
posted by plonkee at 6:11 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
Like the afrofuturism point, some of this reminds me about all the Asimov futures that have few or no women in. And in particular, it's often not an active choice to say that there are no women or BIPOC or trans people in the future as much as it is a reflection of the unexamined male/white/cis privilege of the author. If so it usually either provokes a retcon from the author about why the version of the future they wrote about is ok, or a reflection and realisation that the omission is important. (And the retcon is always the wrong approach.)
I also think it's a perfectly valid criticism of the book, and it doesn't make it less valid if it was either a deliberate choice or simply one of subconscious omission. Working by analogy with other groups might help to explain why the lack of trans characters is a problem, and might also provide you with suggestions that helps you articulate the critique better..
posted by plonkee at 6:11 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
Have you written to Lacey and asked?
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:14 AM on June 13 [5 favorites]
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:14 AM on June 13 [5 favorites]
Best answer: Building on what The corpse in the library says, you're making an interesting point about the book and this is exactly the kind of discussion I would like to have in a book club (I am a cis woman, ex-librarian, never took any English classes after high school). I haven't read the book but honestly I think this would stick out for/bother me too.
FWIW I often get hung up on even minor details of worldbuilding in speculative fiction (why doesn't anyone ride bicycles in Station Eleven? why are all the sentient animals in Terraformers mammals?) and it usually seems to be carelessness/a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Having only read your post and the linked interview I can come up with at least one additional (unsatisfying!) theory for why trans people are not mentioned in the book (although gay liberation is accelerated in the alternate timeline of the book, trans liberation is not and therefore the level of acknowledgement of trans people's existence is the same as it might be in a book written in our 1990s, but then... why? and why choose to create/write about that world?).
You've articulated your points really well here - I think you already have everything you need to have this conversation. (It's book club, not an oral thesis defense!)
posted by mskyle at 7:15 AM on June 13 [2 favorites]
FWIW I often get hung up on even minor details of worldbuilding in speculative fiction (why doesn't anyone ride bicycles in Station Eleven? why are all the sentient animals in Terraformers mammals?) and it usually seems to be carelessness/a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Having only read your post and the linked interview I can come up with at least one additional (unsatisfying!) theory for why trans people are not mentioned in the book (although gay liberation is accelerated in the alternate timeline of the book, trans liberation is not and therefore the level of acknowledgement of trans people's existence is the same as it might be in a book written in our 1990s, but then... why? and why choose to create/write about that world?).
You've articulated your points really well here - I think you already have everything you need to have this conversation. (It's book club, not an oral thesis defense!)
posted by mskyle at 7:15 AM on June 13 [2 favorites]
Best answer: Echoing that I would be interested in your critique and I don’t think you need to find “supporting evidence “ for your question. I am not familiar with this book but if someone is deliberately creating a world to explore queerness it seems like a really really big gap.
For focusing the discussion through a literary lens you can just pepper in some phrases like:
As a reader, I felt…
I’m wondering about her world building/character choices to exclude…
Given her care around gay characters. I find it puzzling that she’s left out trans characters
With world building, it can be a failure of imagination or it can be that the world is created with limitations, or just for word count - I’m reading a book a friend is writing where a lot of backstory is ending on the cutting room floor. But she would be thrilled to discuss her choices, because they are choices. I think your book club likely will be too.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:39 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
For focusing the discussion through a literary lens you can just pepper in some phrases like:
As a reader, I felt…
I’m wondering about her world building/character choices to exclude…
Given her care around gay characters. I find it puzzling that she’s left out trans characters
With world building, it can be a failure of imagination or it can be that the world is created with limitations, or just for word count - I’m reading a book a friend is writing where a lot of backstory is ending on the cutting room floor. But she would be thrilled to discuss her choices, because they are choices. I think your book club likely will be too.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:39 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
Your questions and concerns make a lot of sense to me based on what you've said here, and would be great book-club discussion fodder, but I get why you're concerned about bringing this up in this group.
I wonder if it would help to reach out in advance to one or two people in the club you know or hope to be knowledgeable and sensible about trans topics, if there is such a person, to ask what they thought and if they'd help bat around with you ahead of time how to talk about this stuff? It might help a lot just to go in knowing you've got at least one person who is in your corner, has thought through some of the same things, and is not going to go all I Feel Attacked About This Conversation.
posted by Stacey at 8:13 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
I wonder if it would help to reach out in advance to one or two people in the club you know or hope to be knowledgeable and sensible about trans topics, if there is such a person, to ask what they thought and if they'd help bat around with you ahead of time how to talk about this stuff? It might help a lot just to go in knowing you've got at least one person who is in your corner, has thought through some of the same things, and is not going to go all I Feel Attacked About This Conversation.
posted by Stacey at 8:13 AM on June 13 [3 favorites]
Best answer: If you want a little validation: I'm a cis het guy, read the book, and I also found the complete lack of trans... existence a little weird. For exactly the reasons you did. By contrast, I think race is under-addressed in the worldbuilding, but it is not absent the way trans identities are, and (IMHO) provides a useful contrast. I think you lay out a solid case and, in my opinion, the difference between "not the focus" and "absolutely and oddly absent" is a really significant one.
"she is a crypto-terf but too smart to be open, there are no trans people, because with a withering of patriarchy and acceptance of homosexuality, nobody would be trans anymore" (under a certain set of self-alleged transphobic beliefs)
I don't think you have enough evidence to say this is definitely the case but the text of the book as I recall it offers no evidence against it, and that absence, in a book about identity and gender, screams at the reader. At a bare minimum, this is exactly the kind of thing I would want a really good book club to bring up and discuss.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:16 AM on June 13 [7 favorites]
"she is a crypto-terf but too smart to be open, there are no trans people, because with a withering of patriarchy and acceptance of homosexuality, nobody would be trans anymore" (under a certain set of self-alleged transphobic beliefs)
I don't think you have enough evidence to say this is definitely the case but the text of the book as I recall it offers no evidence against it, and that absence, in a book about identity and gender, screams at the reader. At a bare minimum, this is exactly the kind of thing I would want a really good book club to bring up and discuss.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:16 AM on June 13 [7 favorites]
Best answer: I don't think you have enough evidence to say this is definitely the case but the text of the book as I recall it offers no evidence against it, and that absence, in a book about identity and gender, screams at the reader. At a bare minimum, this is exactly the kind of thing I would want a really good book club to bring up and discuss.
I think this gets at something else I was thinking - different types of story have different purposes. You wouldn't say, for instance, that a really tightly-set book about an individual family was per se a bad book because there were no GLBTQ characters and no characters of color - those facts might be revealing, whether about the author or about the world the author wants us to see, but you wouldn't say, "this story should have different, additional characters or else it is a bad book".
However, when you're writing science fiction or fantasy and building a world de novo, part of the purpose of the book is to convey this new world. You can't literally write everything into a book ("what happened to Swedish-Americans from the upper Midwest in your utopia? Huh? Huh?") but it's not weird to look at how the book suggests that big questions would be answered.
I think it's also not weird to read the book against itself - for instance, there are a lot of SF novels (even by the sainted Ursula Le Guin, as Samuel Delany points out) where formally we are told that the world is very gender-equal, but the gender relationships we see in the book are consistently unequal. Those relationships aren't just random exceptions, because they are the only ones the author has chosen to show us.
It sounds like this book is formally describing a gender-liberated future but what we actually see suggests something different.
posted by Frowner at 10:14 AM on June 13 [4 favorites]
I think this gets at something else I was thinking - different types of story have different purposes. You wouldn't say, for instance, that a really tightly-set book about an individual family was per se a bad book because there were no GLBTQ characters and no characters of color - those facts might be revealing, whether about the author or about the world the author wants us to see, but you wouldn't say, "this story should have different, additional characters or else it is a bad book".
However, when you're writing science fiction or fantasy and building a world de novo, part of the purpose of the book is to convey this new world. You can't literally write everything into a book ("what happened to Swedish-Americans from the upper Midwest in your utopia? Huh? Huh?") but it's not weird to look at how the book suggests that big questions would be answered.
I think it's also not weird to read the book against itself - for instance, there are a lot of SF novels (even by the sainted Ursula Le Guin, as Samuel Delany points out) where formally we are told that the world is very gender-equal, but the gender relationships we see in the book are consistently unequal. Those relationships aren't just random exceptions, because they are the only ones the author has chosen to show us.
It sounds like this book is formally describing a gender-liberated future but what we actually see suggests something different.
posted by Frowner at 10:14 AM on June 13 [4 favorites]
OK, this is a meta answer, meaning I claim that there is a dog that didn't mark (a la Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze"). It is currently 2024, I am 70 years old. I began watching the "Original Star Trek" TV Series in 1966 when I was 13. That show had oriental, white, negro, Russian, Southern, alien to Earth and other cast members. So 57 years hence books are still being written "set in the future" with only a subset of the above and/or a subset of the present population. I think the author should apologize, and you do NOT need to defend your observations to a book club. But I'm just a grouchy old man. FWIW.
posted by forthright at 2:01 PM on June 13 [2 favorites]
posted by forthright at 2:01 PM on June 13 [2 favorites]
This is a great issue for book club discussion; I love it when someone has an insight that benefits from various peoples' knowledge.
posted by theora55 at 9:06 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]
posted by theora55 at 9:06 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]
Best answer: As a fellow trans person I totally get your apprehensiveness about discussing your feelings in a mixed setting and wish I could pull you into a trans book club where you could express yourself freely, without this kind of concern. In the meantime, if any of the members of your book club feel attacked by your reactions to the total absence of transness in a book where there's so much happening around gender.. they aren't good allies. And that wouldn't be super surprising, really, even for the well-meaning, but it also wouldn't mean that your contributions were any less valuable or less relevant. Neither does not having a degree to back it up: you have your life, which speaks for itself. It's totally fair to comment on what you've observed and to speculate on possible reasons for the omission; even if we can't really know, it was a fucking weird choice! Whatever the reaction tomorrow, know that those of us who get it would get it--I hope this ends up being a good discussion.
posted by wormtales at 4:17 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]
posted by wormtales at 4:17 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Heya ppl! Thanks for all your responses.
In the end, I was worried about the wrong thing... sometimes too much pushback would be preferable to no pushback, people just going "oh that's interesting, you're right". I do get that sometimes, and it drives me mad - I *want* to discuss trans issues! I'm very open about this stuff! But a lot of people seem like they just throw up their hands and say "it's not my lane". Reminds me of weaponised incompetence, at a certain point.
Anyhow. While the discussion could definitely have been more interesting, I think most people were happy to hear what I had to say. It just drives me mad that we didn't discover anything *more* between us, I only have my research and what you good folks have contributed. Most people didn't really like the book, even if they found it compelling, and we had a lower-than-usual turnout, probably affected by the number of DNFs.
In the end, finding the New Yorker review by Audrey Wollen made a lot of difference, that was the main thing I found by myself and it really helped to have someone with a little authority (god I should stop simping for the New Yorker so hard) basically telling me I was right to feel confused.
But before I got to that, I was warmed by all of your helpful responses! Thank you so much to all of you. Thinking more about race in the novel was useful - it drew attention to the fact that originally pitched to the book club, we expected this novel to have a lot to say about race, and the other members appreciated attention being drawn to just how barebones the manner in which Lacey addressed it was.
Overall, my belief about the book is that Lacey didn't expect to be faced with the idea that, as Frowner puts it "if someone is going to write science fiction, even literary science fiction, they must accept a science fiction critique". She didn't want to write a sci-fi novel, she wanted to write a novel that reveled in references to art and literature in 70s and 80s NYC. She came to the alt-history premise by that method, and not the other way around, as many of us would expect.
The entire novel was written with an idea almost *opposite* to what I believe about science fiction - that we write about the future to talk about today. When I started adding things up, race, transgenderism, class, disability... of all of these, race gets the most interrogation, with like two or three separate paragraphs, and most are not touched on at all. Even the way she handles (cis)gender relations comes off as a little half-baked to me. The whole section about the Painter's Massacre doesn't sit right at all.
I'm thinking about writing to her, which would be a first for me, if only because I think I've now read just about everything published online about Biography of X. I'm halfway through Nobody Is Ever Missing, which both has and hasn't answered my questions. Perhaps I won't write to her, because the same things I find missing from Biography of X have been similarly absent, and I have a feeling that whatever her response would be, if I got one, it wouldn't resolve anything.
posted by Audreynachrome at 1:30 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
In the end, I was worried about the wrong thing... sometimes too much pushback would be preferable to no pushback, people just going "oh that's interesting, you're right". I do get that sometimes, and it drives me mad - I *want* to discuss trans issues! I'm very open about this stuff! But a lot of people seem like they just throw up their hands and say "it's not my lane". Reminds me of weaponised incompetence, at a certain point.
Anyhow. While the discussion could definitely have been more interesting, I think most people were happy to hear what I had to say. It just drives me mad that we didn't discover anything *more* between us, I only have my research and what you good folks have contributed. Most people didn't really like the book, even if they found it compelling, and we had a lower-than-usual turnout, probably affected by the number of DNFs.
In the end, finding the New Yorker review by Audrey Wollen made a lot of difference, that was the main thing I found by myself and it really helped to have someone with a little authority (god I should stop simping for the New Yorker so hard) basically telling me I was right to feel confused.
But before I got to that, I was warmed by all of your helpful responses! Thank you so much to all of you. Thinking more about race in the novel was useful - it drew attention to the fact that originally pitched to the book club, we expected this novel to have a lot to say about race, and the other members appreciated attention being drawn to just how barebones the manner in which Lacey addressed it was.
Overall, my belief about the book is that Lacey didn't expect to be faced with the idea that, as Frowner puts it "if someone is going to write science fiction, even literary science fiction, they must accept a science fiction critique". She didn't want to write a sci-fi novel, she wanted to write a novel that reveled in references to art and literature in 70s and 80s NYC. She came to the alt-history premise by that method, and not the other way around, as many of us would expect.
The entire novel was written with an idea almost *opposite* to what I believe about science fiction - that we write about the future to talk about today. When I started adding things up, race, transgenderism, class, disability... of all of these, race gets the most interrogation, with like two or three separate paragraphs, and most are not touched on at all. Even the way she handles (cis)gender relations comes off as a little half-baked to me. The whole section about the Painter's Massacre doesn't sit right at all.
I'm thinking about writing to her, which would be a first for me, if only because I think I've now read just about everything published online about Biography of X. I'm halfway through Nobody Is Ever Missing, which both has and hasn't answered my questions. Perhaps I won't write to her, because the same things I find missing from Biography of X have been similarly absent, and I have a feeling that whatever her response would be, if I got one, it wouldn't resolve anything.
posted by Audreynachrome at 1:30 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
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posted by HearHere at 4:43 AM on June 13 [1 favorite]