A short life of the author
Catherine Lacey (b. 1985) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She studied at Loyola University New Orleans and Columbia University.
Life and Career
Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014) — about a woman who abandons her life in New York to go to New Zealand — is a debut of extraordinary voice: obsessive, recursive, and built on long sentences that map the spiraling movement of a mind in crisis.
The Answers (2017) — about a woman who signs up for a psychological experiment involving a famous actor — explores commodification and the quantification of intimacy. Pew (2020) — about a person of indeterminate gender, race, and age found sleeping in a church pew in a small Southern town — is a parable about the human need to classify.
Biography of X (2023) — an alternative history in which the American South has seceded and the narrator writes the biography of her dead wife, a famous artist — is her most ambitious work: a novel that is also a meditation on marriage, art, identity, and the construction of history.
Major Works and Themes
Lacey writes about identity, intimacy, and the impossibility of fully knowing another person. Her fiction is formally restless — each novel takes a different shape — and intellectually demanding without being cold.
Key Works
- Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014)
- Biography of X (2023)
Collecting Lacey
First editions (FSG, Farrar Straus and Giroux) bring $15–$30. Lacey signs at literary events and festivals.