“Io sono lei: Storia della mia transizione” is a book that arrives quietly and then refuses to let go. It is not a manifesto, not a theoretical treatise, and not a victory lap, even though it narrates one of the most radical acts a person can undertake, the decision to finally live as oneself after decades of denial. Lucy Sante’s memoir of transition is instead a work of patient excavation, a journey backward through memory, language, and perception, written with the same precision and curiosity that have long defined her work as a cultural historian. What makes the book extraordinary is not only the fact that Sante transitions at an age when society insists that identity should already be settled, but the way she understands that transition as something that had been present all along, an underground current shaping her life long before it was allowed to surface.
At the beginning of 2021, Luc Sante sent an email to a small circle of friends that shattered the frame through which they had known her. At sixty-seven, she announced that she was about to begin her gender transition. The message did not come out of nowhere, yet for many it felt seismic. For Sante herself, it was the end point of a lifelong tension between what she understood intellectually and what she allowed herself to feel. The book retraces this long repression with disarming honesty, showing how a deeply buried awareness of being female quietly informed her choices, her sensibility, and even her way of looking at the world.
Born in Verviers, Belgium, in 1954, the only child of Catholic, working-class parents, Sante experienced displacement early on. Her family emigrated to the United States when she was still a child, returned briefly to Europe, and then crossed the Atlantic again. This back-and-forth left her with a lasting sense of unbelonging, of having to construct herself deliberately rather than inheriting a ready-made identity. Growing up as an immigrant in America, speaking French at home while learning English in school, she devoted herself to becoming American in the deepest sense, absorbing its myths, its histories, and its margins. That early effort to belong, to master codes and suppress difference, would later echo painfully in her relationship to gender.
New York became the city where Sante’s intellectual and artistic life truly took shape. Arriving there in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she immersed herself in a cultural scene that was raw, experimental, and porous. She formed friendships with figures who would later become legends, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Paul Auster, and Martin Scorsese, who would draw on Sante’s work while making Gangs of New York. As a writer and critic, she developed a singular voice, attentive to what official histories overlook. Her landmark book Low Life mapped the underworld of old New York, chronicling thieves, hustlers, and forgotten neighborhoods with empathy and forensic detail. Again and again, her work returned to the marginal, the hidden, the lives lived in the shadows.
One of the most striking qualities of “Io sono lei” is its refusal to frame transition as a clean narrative of before and after. Sante does not disown her past, nor does she pretend that becoming Lucy erased decades of pain. Instead, she writes about continuity, about how her subconscious had been “taking notes” all along. Her aesthetic sensibility, her attention to surfaces and details, even her clothing choices as a man, appear in retrospect as expressions of a female gaze that never went away. Transition does not rewrite her life, it allows her to read it differently.
This emotional re-reading stands in contrast to her earlier autobiographical work, The Factory of Facts, which she now recognizes as deliberately impersonal. In interviews, including her 2024 conversation with Monika Kowalska for The Heroines of the My Life, Sante has spoken candidly about how impossible it was for her at the time to claim her transness. In that interview, she reflected on how her writing once leaned on history and sociology as a way of evading self-depiction, a strategy shaped in part by fear and in part by the presence of her still-living parents. “Io sono lei” feels like the book she could not have written earlier, because it required a different relationship to vulnerability.
The memoir is also unsparing about loss. Sante does not romanticize late transition or present it as cost-free. She writes about the end of a long-term romantic relationship, about the loneliness that followed, and about the persistent question of whether love will return. These passages are among the most painful and human in the book, resisting any narrative of easy triumph. Yet even here, the tone is not bitter. There is sorrow, yes, but also a deep sense of rightness, the conviction that living as a woman, even with heartbreak and uncertainty, is preferable to the safety of self-erasure.
Throughout the book, Sante’s prose remains sharp, ironic, and precise. She refuses clichés about authenticity while embodying it. Her humor is dry and self-aware, her insights often arriving sideways, through anecdote and observation rather than declaration. She understands that identity is not a slogan but a lived condition, shaped by history, class, migration, and desire. In this sense, “Io sono lei” is not only a memoir of transition but also a continuation of her lifelong project, to show how individual lives are woven into larger cultural patterns.
The Italian title, “Io sono lei,” carries a quiet insistence. It is simple, almost blunt, yet after hundreds of pages it resonates as a statement earned through struggle. Lucy Sante does not claim to have arrived at a state of perfect peace. What she claims instead is integration, the end of an internal civil war that had lasted more than sixty years. The future she gestures toward is not idealized, but it is hers, inhabited as a person finally connected to her own name, her own body, and her own voice.
In the interview with The Heroines of the My Life, Sante described the serenity she has felt since transitioning, a satisfaction she finds difficult to convey but impossible to deny. That serenity is palpable in the closing pages of the book, not as happiness in the conventional sense, but as coherence. “Io sono lei” stands as a powerful testament to the idea that truth does not expire, that even a lifetime of repression cannot extinguish it, and that it can still demand recognition, gently or violently, at any age. Lucy Sante’s story is singular, yet it speaks to anyone who has lived divided against themselves, waiting, sometimes for decades, for the courage to say, at last, this is who I am.
Available via Amazon
Photo via Wikipedia
Other related sources:
Post a Comment