Lucy Sante’s new I Heard Her Call My Name: a Memoir of Transition is everything that’s been enumerated in most recent media coverage: a brilliant, funny, surprising, deeply poignant narrative about transitioning from male to female in one’s late 60s. A collection of shrewd insights on identity, history, tradition, culture, art, expectations, career, and love from the author of essential urban histories like Low Life: The Lures and Snares of Old New York and decades of prestigious criticism.
But what if, in addition to all that, it’s a deft and brilliantly disguised 225-page humblebrag?
Clearly, a ridiculous notion. This is a book forged from a lifetime of bone-deep angst and pain, written with blazing courage, and addressing one of the most important topics of the decade. I’m sure I’m among many people who’ve been awaiting its publication ever since hearing about Sante’s transition. We waited partially as a super-fans of the supreme non-fiction author FKA Luc Sante, partially as friends, parents, lovers, uncles, and cousins of people on a similar journey (in my case, of a teenage, non-binary family member).
But after finishing it, I realized two things. One: the truth of the truism that when you’ve met one [identity descriptor] person, you’ve met one [identity descriptor] person. Two: despite her clear yet unknowable pain of bearing such a secret for so long, I envy the life in these pages.
The main story begins almost exactly three years ago this week, when thirty people among the trusted inner circle of a major New York writer received the following email:
The dam burst on February 16, when I uploaded Face-App for a laugh. I had tried the application a few years earlier, but something had gone wrong and it had returned a badly botched image. But I had a new phone, and I was curious. The gender-swapping feature was the whole point for me, and the first picture I passed through it was the one I had tried before, taken for that occasion. This time it gave me a full-face portrait of a Hudson Valley woman in midlife: strong, healthy, clean-living. She also had lovely flowing chestnut hair and a very subtle make-up job. And her face was mine … She was me.
From here, the memoir unfolds along two chronological narratives: one from the author’s assigned-male birth in Belgium, 1954; the other from the start of her transition into womanhood in 2021. Sante ties these two strands together with a genius visual motif: archival photos of the author, gender-swapped across the decades, each one bearing an invisible, deeply poignant third-conditional caption, “what I would have looked like.” And felt, and thought, done, been. “The less altered the resulting images were, the deeper they plunged a dagger into my heart. Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.”
Yes, it’s almost unspeakably sad. So how come, once the Bildungsroman gets cracking, you keep oohing and ahhing over the autodidactic supreme hipster in the making?
Just check out the university years.
First: “Even outside my requirements I read Freud and Marx and Joyce, attended lectures by visiting greats, attended concerts of serious music, attended gallery openings in SoHo. At one of those I met John Ashbery, and while I was trying to ask him questions about translating Raymond Roussel I realized he was trying to pick me up.” (Yep, just like my freshman year.) Summer job: While running a drill press, Sante reads “the entirety of Proust’s great novel in the Scott Moncrieff translation,” along with Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy and Élie Faure’s history of art,” which, having already digested Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Desnos, sets Sante up for a junior year in Paris, in a language the student speaks as a native.
Somewhere on the way from childhood deprivation to express-train education, Sante’s Ur-cool experiences start to pile like a real-life version of the seminal moments James Murphy’s jaded hipster observes in “Losing My Edge.”
…I didn’t see the [New York] Dolls play until their last days, two or three years later. But I did go alone to see Patti Smith, whom I’d read and read about in the youth-culture press but had never heard. She was playing Le Jardin, a gay disco in the roof garden of the raffish Hotel Diplomat on West Forty-third Street. …She hadn’t yet put out a record…
We discovered a shared passion for dancing, in a tiny, barely ventilated African disco in a deep cellar on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts; it was the summer of “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango and “That Lady” by the Isley Brothers and “The Payback” by James Brown.
By the time we get to James Brown at the Apollo, whose entire show Sante fits into parenthesis, you kind of want to cry uncle:
(...cartoon, followed by comedian, followed by fashion show, followed by three or four of the secondary vocalists in the Brown company, followed by a full solo set by the J.B.’s, and only then, after more than two hours, did the man appear, and proceed to astound everyone. I could not believe that someone could be over forty and fling his body around like that, while also barking, crooning, throwing words like ninja stars, doing the cape routine, giving short homilies, introducing celebrities in the audience….)
That is, a full set by the J.B.s, arguably the greatest R&B ensemble, if not live band, of all time. An hour-plus of peak James Brown at his ideal venue, giving a performance that might well have wound up on Revolution of the Mind or other live-at-the-Apollo albums and compilations? When Sante goes back a few months later to see Marvin Gaye, whose appearance gets canceled due to illness, her crew has to console themselves by visiting the new CBGB to see Television and Patti Smith. Bliss it must have been that dawn to be alive. But to be young, even gender dysphoric, must have been very heaven.
This is the life that formed one of the preeminent writers on American culture, whose work on painting, poetry, smoking, photography, punk, blues, and autobiography itself is in a class by itself. Since this book revisits much of the world that Sante foregrounded in the essay collections Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be the Times, maybe it’s not so odd how much competition the central drama gets from the background scenery.
If it was very heaven to be alive in what Sante has called “my particular subgenerational pocket” (lower Manhattan, the post-hippie era), it was a chaotic, foreboding kind of heaven. A few years ago, I spent much of a year writing pitch-deck material for a TV series about seminal music albums, the majority of my research unsurprisingly revolving around Lindsay-era New York City: Robert Moses, white flight, Times Square sleaze, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” garbage strikes, transit strikes, the whole Taking of Pelham 123 dystopia that laid the groundwork for cultural revolution.
In all of that reading and watching, I don’t think I saw anything quite as precise as Sante’s description of 1972, which begins with reference to the ambient paranoia of the time and place, with cults on every block, and insane conspiracy theorists on every corner:
I would spend [the decade] dancing on ruins: the ruins of ideals, of struggles, of the university, of the city, of housing, of transit, of expectations, of ambitions. The system had begun to liberate itself in the previous decade, but choked before it could quite get there. Now it lay broken: murder or suicide? Either way, our inheritance was chaos, which I grew to savor. The city was a vast trash heap of Western civilization, paradise for scavengers like me.
If you’ve never heard Patti Smith’s Horses, this is the only secondary text you’ll need.
By the time Sante’s perambulations take us to Tin Pan Alley, inspiration for the 42nd Street bar in David Simon’s golden-age-of-porn series The Deuce, you get a fuller sense of the cultural figure narrating this story. Tin Pan Alley is “a perfect distillation of my New York, where I could always find someone I knew to hang out with; the jukebox had my two favorite songs of the time (“Totally Wired” by the Fall and “Jah Is a Guiding Star” by Tappa Zukie).” “One of the bartenders was a photographer named Nan.” Nan Goldin, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Downtown music giant Phil Kline, artist Jean Michel Basquiat: none of these names are dropped so much as they walk on and off as first-name personalities, members of Sante’s crowd of misfit friends.
After I’d written most of this piece, I heard Sante tell the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air” that, despite having publishing the crafty, lineage-tracing 1998 memoir The Factory of Facts, the new book represents the first time she’s actually written about people in her life, “because somehow there was a chain of constraints…that prevented intimacy, and that even included intimacy on the page.”
So the bold-faced names and cultural landmarks really are fixtures in the personal story. And the walk-ons by future stars are nowhere near as electric as the civilians Sante falls in love with along the way. Like Lisa: “a fellow poet, who was very beautiful and completely mystifying… We stared at each other, played word games, read Gertrude Stein, wrote collaborate poems. I swam in her eyes, which were like the clearing after a storm at sea.” And Sante’s life-haunting femme fatale, Eva: “small with enormous dark eyes and pouting lips and long, thick, black, wavy hair gathered into a single braid that rode her shoulder, wearing a gray windbreaker and round tortoiseshell glasses. She looked faintly pissed off. I knew immediately she was the one for me.”
The hipster odyssey ends with a melancholy swan song at the famous converted roller-disco The Roxy, hip-hop petri dish and one of that scene’s key transmitters to the larger culture. Her friends having drifted into careers, relationships, or addictions, Sante attends alone, and gives an unorthodox account of Afrika Bambaata, whose abrupt transitions she credibly attributes to being so fucked up behind the decks that he spins ESG’s instrumental “UFO” “at least a dozen times in succession. It was a fitting last club for me, the culmination of all my local musical paths over the years finally merging into one.”
Part of Sante’s struggle in trying to push through an entire lifespan of core repression is abiding guilt at having benefited from male privilege for all those decades, and hence not deserving to be called a woman. This struck me as a pretty J.K. Rowling way of looking at things until I realized that many of the accounts Sante gives of a youthful male experience are what critics of an earlier generation would have called “universal” — that is, straight, white, and male. On “Fresh Air,” Sante said that some of the passages critiquing the oppressive strictures of masculinity were seized on by a well-meaning cis-male friend, whose minimizing response was “Well,I feel the exact same way as you do, but I’ve never wanted to be a woman.”
The thing is, I read the same passages with the same twinge of identification that Sante’s clueless friend expressed, though his sounds like misplaced resentment at a supposed defector from our losing team. While there’s a difference between knowing you’re a woman and hating the oppressive strictures of masculinity, the two produce similar enough aperçus that I often felt as if Sante’s accounts of youthful sexual fumbling could have been taken from my own journals. (“I craved physical intimacy, but the strictures of my upbringing prevented me from having much idea how to obtain it or what to do when I got there.” Said every Irish Catholic boy in early-80s Boston.) But I consider this to be an asset for a book like this, if only because it helps make this largely unknowable and internal experience more accessible to people outside the usual trans-lit demo.
This book mostly elides the amplified opportunists of today’s right, since Sante’s race, class, and age protect her from the worst effects of the vicious propaganda and fake moral panic, and likely because today’s political insanity might take over the whole book. It also forgoes critical theory entirely, which is no mean feat for an Ivy League-educated, Francophone author who came of age in the 1970s and is writing a book about gender. Sante could have simply sketched out her bio, plugged in Lacan, Foucault, Judith Butler or whoever, pushed a button, and popped out 300 densely argued, irrefutable pages that kept her entire actual experience safely hidden away.
For all these reasons, I can imagine Gen Z or younger readers, who might have already metabolized the kind of personal transformation at its core, looking right past that drama to the brilliant pageant that surrounds it.
After saying goodbye to Downtown low life, Sante finds an Uptown home at the New York Review of Books,whose legendary editor Barbara Epstein hires her as an assistant, and then pupil. “She gave me the most important gift I’ve ever gotten from anyone, shy of life itself,” writes Sante. “The ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. It’s the reason I can write meaningfully on an array of subjects, without being an expert on any of them; it’s the reason I’m able to write this book.”
One lasting fascination that emerges in the twinned narrative strands is the sense of some semi-mystical, unconscious driver of Sante’s transition, a benevolent presence, instinct, or protector that seems to indulge and sympathize with Luc’s concerns, fears, and back-sliding but gently keeps things moving forward, in a way that I’ve heard recovery can work, as a group effort with peers and a higher power. I wonder if this is the same fuse that drives the flower that gets words on the page.
Whether it was Barbara Epstein, Proust, Rimbaud, or Faure, something definitely arrogated unto Sante the authority to speak. She’s a true prose master, and this book is a reminder of the way her cultural critique and reportage always seemed to emerge from some much older and less geographically-fixed presence than other commentators on the scene, and give her words a rare authority. But I really like the idea that she doesn’t know quite how the mechanism works.
Two weeks after the initial “bombshell” email, Sante sent another to the same people, which attempted to walk back some of the first one’s bolder declarations, in a standard one-step-forward, two-steps-back way. While she called the second email “largely hooey,” I bet these two sentences weren’t: “I couldn’t write — anything —if I knew in advance what was actually going to happen on the page. I move through life guided mainly by chance and a belief in negative capability. It’s not the steadiest or most bankable procedure, but I can’t help that.”
I don’t know if I should be surprised to respond so deeply and personally to a world-class author’s memoir about gender transition, especially when my confidence about my own prose ebbs with every passing week. I guess the unsteady, unbankable procedure Sante describes unites a surprisingly vast array of sufferers, across the gender spectrum. People gripped by the same compulsion and foolish enough to make it a life’s work. People who must sit before a glowing Word document in order to learn what they think, how they feel, and what the truth is.
What a ridiculous way to live. May Lucy Sante have mercy on us all.
Loved this piece, and you've made me very eager to read her book (despite knowing in advance that every sentence contained within is going to make me want to quit writing, if only because she makes it look so effortless).
Thanks so much! (Great book too.)