3 books to read this month: Biography of X, Users & I Fear My Pain Interests You

More about books you should read, and the authors who wrote them, that were recently featured on the Weird Era podcast.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

This one is delicious and simply too fun to put down. Lacey merges genres in Biography of X, in that it reads as a non-fictional biography full of completely fictional characters. Its narrator is a woman named CM, and at the onset of the novel, we learn that she is grieving the sudden loss of her wife X, who, in Lacey’s dazzling world, happens to be a very famous artist. X is not a real person! She doesn’t exist in our world! These are mantras I found I had to constantly remind myself of every time I put this book back down (an act that was few and far between). Lacey audaciously creates historical events that feel frighteningly too possible, such as a division between the Southwest and Northwest territories, rooted in a fundamental religious uprising, within which X finds herself mistakenly born. As each page turns, CM realizes she never really knew her famous wife at all. X’s entire motif was to identify as “personless.” This is precisely how X lived a multitude of lives, as a musician, writer, etc (alongside friends like David Bowie and Susan Sontag, no less). I don’t know another book like it.

Users by Colin Winnette

I, for one, am here for our tech-lit overlords. As the tech industry evolves, so does our collective understanding of capitalism. This, I think, explains the tech lit boom. In Users, Miles works for a VR company that creates a game recreating the experience of being haunted by your ex. How could a game like this possibly be fun? I asked Winnette this very question. His response was that it was less about pleasure, and more about the satisfaction of holding onto something that can be so hard to let go of. Miles is haunted himself as he receives mysterious threatening notes from (he assumes) an angry consumer. As he continues to push the frontiers of VR at his job, Miles also grapples with the unsettling aspects of parenting, and in doing so, Users ends up being a tech novel that explores the bonds of modern family. How to be a good employee? Father? Husband? Friend? This is a novel about guilt, a burden we all bear.

I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava

Start reading this on a plane. This novel’s narrator, Margot, the child of famous punk musicians, is a young woman at the tail end of a fraught relationship with an older man. She sets out to leave New York, looking for distance from her ex-lover as well as the eyes of the rest of the world. If you have never been able to empathize with a famous person, this book might help get you there. There is luxury in fame, but there is also threat in the public eye. Margot is red-headed, and as LaCava explained during our conversation, there is a very real (but rare) genetic disorder among redheads that results in a different tolerance of pain. For Margot, this means a lack of physical pain, which says nothing of her inner turmoil. In this episode I asked her about the ways the, “throb of prying eyes (is) harder to sit with than the pain of a bruised leg.” Read this book for the last few pages because you will never see them coming.

The Weird Era podcast is available via Apple and Spotify.

This article was originally published in the June 2023 issue of Cult MTL.

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