As a child, the novelist Catherine Lacey, 37, adopted different names and later legally changed her last name to her middle name—“My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s maiden name,” as she put it to me when we spoke recently. “I don’t really feel identified with any name and think there’s something nice about that.”
The protagonists of Lacey’s novels evince a similar penchant for protean identities; you could call them consummate escape artists. The narrator of her first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), wants “a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history,” and travels from New York to New Zealand to wriggle out of a marriage with her husband. In 2017’s The Answers (currently being developed into a TV series for FX with Darren Aronofsky and Danny Strong as executive producers), the main character is compelled to evacuate herself of agency in order to participate in a pseudo-scientific “Girlfriend Experiment.”
