Hoo boy. This is a faux-biography of the artist simply known as X, a woman who made her career over having no fixed identity both in her work and literally as a person, taking the concept of pen names to the absolute extreme. The biography is written by her widow, who not only seeks to clear up misunderstandings of X's life and work but also find out just who in the hell she married. It's also an alternative history in which the USA dissolved in the late 1940s into three territories, most notably the ethnoreligious Southern Territories from which X escaped as a young woman.

It's a two-pronged book that will click well with former college radio kids; it's as if an artist made her entire life the work by taking subjective vs. objective to the logical conclusion, including making other people her "works". This includes the marriage, and it's not a spoiler to say that the widow must come to terms with being an artpiece. This concept would be amazing on its own, but the alt-history part is another fascinating layer (even if I think Lacey dines a bit too much on it). It's one of the few books I would have preferred to be longer.