Two Novels, One Conversation

Fact: Still Born and Biography of X are written in the first person, seemingly by someone who exists in our world. Fact: Both texts’ narrators focus primarily on someone close to them, initiating the reader into a fictional biography-memoir situation. Another fact: I enjoyed these books immensely.

Still Born is Nettel’s fourth novel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, whose skillful work effectively encapsulates the narrator’s frankness from Spanish to English. I’ve been told that the narrator, Laura, is an anomaly among Nettel’s small but mighty arsenal of protagonists. I haven’t read her earlier work, but one New York Times reviewer notes that it “veered toward the phantasmagoric,”making Still Born “all the more haunting” for its “vivid realism.” Like the progression of the plot, Laura’s language is stark and clinical. She comes across as raw, sometimes bold. This viscerality, coupled with the distance inherent in Laura’s perspective on her friend’s complicated pregnancy, leaves room for a plethora of real emotions. Nettel writes a story—a fiction—but in such a way that I internalized it as gut-wrenching history.

Catherine Lacey’s fourth novel, Biography of X, purports to be the biography of a famed and deceased artist, X, written by her wife, C.M., who seeks to correct the narrative surrounding X’s tangled existence. As C.M. researches X’s past, she also learns a great deal about herself. Biography of X is Lacey’s first novel to experiment with this level of genre-bending, and I’m not alone in applauding its ingenuity. The Atlantic’s Hillary Kelly called it “the ultimate funhouse novel” in an exhilarating March 2023 review. The text assumes a world in which all our heroes have alternative histories. My heart fluttered at every faked footnote and revised past of famous celebrities and politicians. Lacey created an entire parallel universe, and so convincingly that my real-world knowledge of Connie Converse is already a bit muddled. I’ll probably, accidentally, end up telling someone that she died mysteriously in the ’80s. “No, seriously, Google it!” I’ll say.

One Booker Prize judge noted that Still Born is timely in its concerns: “What does it mean to have true agency over one’s body or life? What does caretaking entail? Where do we draw the borders of our bodies and our families?” Arguably, the same questions can be asked of Biography of X.

Nettel’s text considers these questions quite literally. It examines the notion of motherhood, how it shapes a woman, redefines her life, swallows her whole, makes her come alive, or has absolutely no effect at all. Nettel reminds us of the stark reality that children are a lifelong responsibility. If you have them, you will never again be alone in the world. Through the narrator, Nettel asks her readers to consider this fully, to think about all that could go wrong and all that could go right before blindly accepting a biological fate.

Biography of X is all about C.M. investigating those aforementioned borders: between herself and X, between herself and X’s public personas, and between X and the fictitious U.S. border that separates the North and South. The entire “biography” is a big question mark grasping at the fluidity—or otherwise—of the self. Where do I end and others begin? Lacey complicates this question even further through the lens of a toxic relationship. X is most definitely a raging narcissist. We see this play out as the narrator paradoxically goes on a quest to define herself by filling in the blanks of her wife’s past.

What I like about these books—and what everyone else should, too—is that their narrators don’t apologize. C.M. and Laura see their shortcomings, accept them, and write about them. They acknowledge their humanness and don’t insult the reader’s intelligence by pretending to be “solved” on the final page. Nor, on that note, do the narrators unravel to a masochistic extent. I appreciate this middle ground. Both books left me feeling pieced together. It is hard to achieve that without being cast in pastels and bubble letters—no offense to the perfectly circular texts of our age that balm and soothe and flex the muscles of many a book club. Still Born and Biography of X are unique, and they celebrate a world in which women can choose, to have kids, to be in a toxic relationship, to pursue a Master’s degree. And within those choices, the authors seem to suggest, we define the limits of our bodies and souls.