Catherine Lacey at Golden Hour Books

• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book (please select either Mobius Book or Biography of X) or a $10 Golden Hour Books gift card.
• Additional copies of Lacey's books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• This event is co-sponsored by Butler University and the Butler LGBTQIA+ Alliance

About Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey's most recent work, The Möbius Book, is half pure fiction and half pure memory.

She is also the author of four novels: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and a short story collection, Certain American States.

Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman fellowship, an O. Henry, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction.

A second short story collection, My Stalkers, will appear in 2027. She lives in México with her husband, Daniel Saldaña París.

About The Möbius Book

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The New York Times, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, A.V. Club, Chicago Review of Books, OurCulture, and LitHub

Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and heartbreaking—and heart-mending—exploration of endings and beginnings.

A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s power, and inherent danger.

About Biography of X

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1), Vulture, and Publishers Weekly, and one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, & Lit Hub.

Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

“A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Host or Publisher Golden Hour Books