A Memoir of Transitioning

The best writers are worth reading, no matter their subject matter. The wildly talented, idiosyncratic, and erudite Lucy Sante is a case in point. Sante is a versatile wordsmith who has appeared in the New York Review of Books for decades, been the film critic for Interview, the book critic for New York, the photography critic for The New Republic, and has been published in countless “little magazines” including The Threepenny Review. She even won a Grammy for some of her liner notes. I’ve been a fan since reading Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, her deeply researched history of crime and the hard lives of the poor in lower Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, shortly after it came out in 1991.

Sante’s latest work, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of transitioning from Luc, the male name under which she functioned until her mid-sixties, to Lucy. Par for the course with Sante, the writing is sublime, filled with artful turns of phrase and droll asides. Though Sante’s The Factory of Facts (1998) was also a memoir of sorts, that earlier work played its cards close to the vest on the personal front. It includes the memorable line, “I had no illusions about genealogy, a pathetic hobby that combined the bold passion of stamp collecting with the modest sobriety of medieval reenactments,” but large chunks of the book dig into the history of the author’s rural Belgian forebears with a level of family tree forensics which seems at least partly a convenient avoidance of self-disclosure. It provides no hint of the gender dysphoria that Sante now recalls being a lifelong struggle.

I Heard Her Call My Name, on the other hand, delves deep into the gender confusion that Sante describes actively suppressing well into her sixties. Chapters on the period leading up to and including her gender transition alternate with sections on earlier parts of her life, from childhood in Belgium and New Jersey through wild times in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.

Sante participated in the first-wave NYC punk and renegade arts scenes, running around with artistically inclined movers and shakers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and Darryl Pinkney. Her descriptions of the cash-strapped but creatively fecund milieus in and around what became known as Alphabet City are alone worth the book’s cover price. One choice passage: “All of us were performing all the time. It was what we had come to New York City to do. Every single person under forty walking down Saint Mark’s Place between Second and Third was acting in a movie only they could see. Band of Outsiders, Expresso Bongo, Ashes and Diamonds, Cruel Story of Youth, Baby Doll, Shock Corridor, Lonesome Cowboys, Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes you could just about call out the name of the picture when you saw them walk by.” (Her stellar collections of essays and experimental pieces, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be The Times, are packed with great stuff on Sante’s friends, inspirations, and obsessions from that era.)

As the Eighties slogged on, the ascendance of finance, insurance, and real estate profiteers squeezed out bohemians from their formerly cheap digs, decimating the world that helped shape Sante’s esthetic orientation. In that progressively more gloomy decade, Sante writes, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture” and “we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel.”

Despite displaying a slothful work ethic at her early ’80s New York Review of Books mailroom job, Sante was snagged by the highly-esteemed Review editor Barbara Epstein to be her assistant. Epstein must have noticed how well-read Sante was; her new employee was a lifelong autodidact who had immersed herself in broad reading of classic European and other literature. Sante closely studied Epstein’s sharply-honed editorial skills. Having Epstein school her in revising and improving essays helped Sante find her own distinctive voice. The New York Review of Books accepted the first piece Sante submitted to them, on Albert Goldman’s trashy biography of Elvis Presley. She took on a wide range of topics for paid writing assignments, including portraits of individual writers, artists, and musicians, cultural tendencies, and such offbeat history as the heyday of “spirit photography,” which purported to catch images of ghosts.

Sante describes an old romantic partner as having “a keen sense of the quackeries of language.” That fabulous compliment also applies to Sante, whose work embraces the esoteric and the eccentric, recovering and relishing forgotten slang and colloquialisms from previous eras and subcultures; Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, aptly described her as “one of the handful of living masters of the American language.”

To Sante’s credit, she avoids misty-eyed sentimentality when drawing from the past: in her book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (2009), she describes nostalgia as “the term Americans use for the bargain they strike between ignorance of the past and discomfort with the present.”

Affection and identification with women runs throughout I Heard Her Call My Name. A bohemian aesthete, very much drawn to fashion, Sante writes that as she eased into her identity as a newly-emerging woman in 2021, “I felt fortunate to have my friends: tough, stylish, independent-minded women, some of whom I’d known for over forty years and had seen evolve, who now weren’t kids anymore but were not in any way backing down. I modeled my attitude on theirs, and studied their style.” Sante exults over female role models in the wider world as well, listing a wonderfully eclectic mix which includes Eartha Kitt, Poly Styrene, Thelma Ritter, Emma Goldman, Anna Mae Wong, Memphis Minnie, Gloria Grahame, Dorothy Day, Helen Levitt, and Billie Holiday. Just to balance things out, “I inhabited Angie Dickinson as Police Woman.”

I Heard Her Call My Name clearly depicts the daunting process of transitioning to a freer, more fully realized life as Lucy, and coming out to family, friends, and acquaintances. Clocking in at 226 pages, a manageable length for even the most internet-damaged attention spans, the book includes a generous selection of photographs from Sante’s life. These include Sante head shots treated with the gender swapping feature of something called Face-App, which transformed old photos into images of the writer’s truer female self.

In describing the emotional terrain and practical realities of emerging as a woman, Sante’s honesty and attention to particulars keep her narrative free of strident polemics or grandstanding. Sante describes herself as a trans writer, rather than a trans writer. She writes, “I’m allergic to theory and even more to the kind of shibboleth retoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much — though by no means all — of trans writing. […] I don’t wish to be a spokesperson, although I accept that by writing this book I will have become just that.”

In this age of billionaire-backed fascists using weaponized transphobia to divide and conquer, I Heard Her Call My Name could hardly be timelier. The book inspires empathy and solidarity through its nuanced, powerful, and accessible account of Sante’s transformation from Luc to Lucy. Sante concludes, “I certainly hope that my story will be read by people who need to see that gender dysphoria, expressed in childhood or adolescence, is not a passing fancy that will evaporate when the social climate changes.” So do I.

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