Original title: "Ella era yo: Memorias de mi transición" (She was me: Memories of my transition). The book is the Spanish language edition of "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" by Lucy Sante.
Ella era yo: Memorias de mi transición is the Spanish-language edition of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, the extraordinary late-life memoir by Lucy Sante, one of the most distinctive and revered voices to emerge from New York’s underground literary and cultural scene. Translated with great sensitivity and precision by María Alonso Seisdedos, winner of Spain’s National Translation Prize, the book brings Sante’s deeply personal journey to Spanish-speaking readers without losing the clarity, irony, and emotional exactitude that define her prose. It is not simply a story of transition, but a meditation on truth, time, self-knowledge, and the long, often painful distance between who we are and who we allow ourselves to be.
In February 2021, at the age of sixty-six, Lucy Sante sent a message to those closest to her announcing that she was transitioning. In that message she wrote of fear, of terror even, and of the moment when the dam finally broke, when the fog lifted and denial could no longer hold. That moment, described in Ella era yo with startling honesty, is not framed as a sudden revelation but as the inevitable result of a lifetime spent circling an unspoken truth. Sante does not romanticize this turning point. Instead, she approaches it with the same sharp, inquisitive gaze that made her one of the most incisive commentators on American culture, now turned inward, toward her own life.
Born in Belgium to conservative, working-class Catholic parents and raised in the United States after multiple migrations, Sante grew up with a profound sense of dislocation. She found something like belonging only after arriving in New York City in the early 1970s, immersing herself in a bohemian milieu marked by brilliance, excess, creativity, and loss. Many of her peers would die young from drugs or AIDS, while others would achieve sudden fame. Sante herself skirted both destinies, building instead a formidable career as a writer, critic, artist, and teacher. Yet beneath professional success and cultural authority ran a persistent feeling that her life was a performance, that she was inhabiting a role rather than living fully inside herself.
That tension lies at the heart of Ella era yo. The memoir weaves together two narratives, the outward arc of a life spent observing, interpreting, and documenting culture, and the inward, step-by-step process of gender transition that finally brought Sante into alignment with herself. What makes the book so compelling is not only its subject matter, but the way Sante writes about it. She brings irony without cruelty, vulnerability without sentimentality, and humor without deflection. Her descriptions of learning how to be a woman after more than six decades living in a male role are tender, often quietly funny, and deeply humane. There is no pretense of mastery, only attention, curiosity, and a willingness to admit uncertainty.
Critics across the English-speaking world recognized the book as a major literary event, naming it a Best Book of the Year in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate. Reviewers praised its clarity, warmth, and intellectual courage, noting that while it speaks powerfully to transgender readers, it also resonates far beyond that audience. At its core, Ella era yo is about breaking out of what Sante herself calls a “prison of denial,” about stopping the quiet self-punishment that comes from wanting something one believes is forbidden. It is a book about aging and vanity, about immigration and assimilation, about love, fear, and the cost of silence.
For Spanish readers, the translation opens access to a voice that has long illuminated hidden histories and overlooked lives. María Alonso Seisdedos’s work ensures that Sante’s lapidary sentences, her precise emotional calibrations, and her subtle shifts in tone survive the crossing between languages. The result is a text that feels intimate and immediate, preserving the sense that the reader is accompanying Sante as she thinks, doubts, remembers, and gradually allows herself to live more openly. The themes explored in Ella era yo echo strongly with what Lucy Sante shared in her extensive interview for Heroines of My Life, conducted on February 14, 2024. In that conversation, Sante spoke candidly about the long evasion of her transness, the emotional reexamination of her past, and the relief and serenity she has experienced since transitioning. She described how knowledge of one’s true gender does not fade with time, no matter how strenuous the effort to suppress it, a sentiment that runs like a quiet but insistent current through the memoir. The interview also highlighted Sante’s belief that authenticity, though costly, is ultimately sustaining, a belief that gives Ella era yo its moral and emotional gravity.
What makes this memoir especially powerful is its refusal to offer easy resolutions. Sante does not present transition as a cure-all or a simple narrative of liberation. Loss, fear, and uncertainty remain, particularly around love, aging, and belonging. Yet there is also joy, humor, and a profound sense of rightness. The book ends not with triumph, but with clarity, with the knowledge that facing oneself, however late, is preferable to living behind a façade. Ella era yo: Memorias de mi transición stands as a vital contribution to contemporary literature in Spanish, not only as a transgender memoir but as a work of profound self-reflection and literary craft. It asks questions that reach far beyond gender, about who deserves to live openly, how much of ourselves we hide to survive, and what it means to finally answer the voice that has been calling our name all along.
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Photos via Heroines of My Life
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