Lucy Sante - I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

2024, English, Interview, Lucy Sante,

Full title: "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" by Lucy Sante.

"An iconic writer's lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place.

Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself."

"Sante's memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man's identity, in a man's world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond."

In 2024, I interviewed Lucy and asked her about whether COVID was the tipping point, the last trigger that made her realize that she was a woman: "It may have had some circumstantial influence, but I don’t think it was critical. What tipped the balance was my decision to pass every earlier photo of me through FaceApp. That made it a project, since I had to search all over the house for pictures, and I’m very susceptible to projects. What I only realized recently is that the project, which took days, broke through a mechanism I wasn’t aware I had in place, which put a time limit on my fantasizing. After an hour or two my superego would stop it – I knew that without that check I would have to confront my wish to transition, and I was terrified."

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of several books, including Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and The Other Paris. She is also a professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College. She announced her transition to female in September 2021 on her Instagram account. 

Available via Amazon

and Heroines of My Life

Photo via Instagram