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There’s an itinerant quality to Lucy Sante’s life and work. She attended Columbia University but left without a degree. She worked at the Strand Bookstore during the day and by night, hung out with Basquiat and Nan Goldin. After (literally) working her way up from the mailroom at the New York Review of Books, she became a writer there, covering topics ranging from noir literature to Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe. She’s also an active visual artist. Most recently, she retired from Bard College where she had been a visiting professor of photography and writing for over two decades. Across nine books, she has written on topics as disparate as Paris, Lower Manhattan, Walker Evans and the reservoirs that provide water to New York City.
In her new book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press), Sante unfolds a dual narrative, looking back at her life and how it both presaged and informed the first six months of her transition. As much a cultural history as it is a personal history, it’s a book she’s been waiting her whole life to write. It’s a story Sante felt compelled to tell so other stories can be told.
Recently, Vogue sat down with Sante to discuss her new book, liberation and the forms it takes, the pain of looking back, and the anticipation of what lies ahead.
I Heard Her Call My Name begins with a letter sent to a group of your closest friends in February of 2021 after your “egg cracked.” What does that mean?
Lucy Sante: It means that the elaborate system of denial and repression which I’d spent most of a lifetime building had suddenly developed a fissure and consequently exploded. I could no longer lie to myself about being trans, something I’d known since I was nine or ten.
What did it feel like to not just write the letter but to also hit “send?”
It felt like saying “Here goes nothing” and stepping out into thin air.
After your initial letter, you wrote a second one which came from a vastly different place. What happened?
I’d known beforehand that my 14-year relationship would not survive my transition, but I was still devastated when it actually happened. And I was worried that I might have forever removed myself from the love of women, which was the major factor that had stood in the way of transitioning earlier in life. So I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.
You write that “transitioning did not involve piling on additional stuff; rather it was a process of removal, dismantling the carapace of maleness that had kept me in its grip for so long.” When/how did you realize this?
I realized it when those male attributes and tendencies began to leave me one by one, as estrogen gradually permeated my system.
When was the first time you saw the name Lucy Sante? What was that like for you?
I appeared as Lucy in a picture-caption typo in a small suburban New Jersey gazette when I was twelve. It was a very hidden thrill, but a reverberating one. My mother scratched out the “Y” in ballpoint.
Early in the book, you write “I’m a writer before I’m anything else.” How did being a writer shape your transition?
Almost the minute I realized that I was trans I knew I was going to write a book—it’s a conditioned reflex for me, with any significant experience or insight. I started keeping a notebook—which I barely consulted when writing the book—and started researching the history of transexuality and acquiring books and significant artifacts. That’s just how I operate. If I were becoming a surgeon or moving to Pago Pago I’d be deep in the histories of those things. But my book ended up being almost entirely about me.
You had an itinerant childhood and grew up in a devout family. What impact did that have on you both at the time and as you looked back to write this book?
I was extremely isolated as a child, literally so for years at a time, and I never trusted my parents enough to confide in them. I was also ignorant of the world for far too long. I’d kind of known those things about myself but never realized them as fully as when I was recounting my condensed life story in the book.
The language you use around transitioning—"the dam has burst, the scales have fallen away, the fog has lifted”—suggests a sense of relief, a repression lifted. Was that the dominant feeling? What else did you feel?
I continue to be amazed, every day, by how right and sensible it feels for me to be a woman. It clears up so many small mysteries, resolves so many long-term personality quandaries. I can breathe fully now. I might feel ugly or unconvincing but that does not seem to affect the core knowledge that this is who I am. I have never felt so much myself, unapologetically.
At one point, you write about a “ thoroughgoing failure to play a male role in life…”How did you see gender roles before transitioning and how did they evolve for you?
An interesting, unanticipated consequence of estrogen is that I now see men as I’d never quite seen them before. I’ve become an amused observer of styles of gender roleplay I just lazily or fearfully took as givens back then. It continually blows my mind when I realize how completely I’d misunderstood masculinity when I was trying to perform it. As for femininity, I had previously worshiped it, and now I live there. I just decreed that everything I did or thought would henceforth be feminine, because I was.
What kind of support did you receive from the Transgender community?
I’m never sure quite what anybody means by the C word, but a number of trans women were and are hugely important to me: my friend Leor and her friend Jordon, both recent Bard graduates, and a number of correspondents in other states who are closer to my age. I also joined the local trans support group for a year, and met people from every background, which was illuminating.
Speaking of Leor, I was quite moved by your description of what you learned from her. Who is she and how did she become a mentor of sorts?
Leor was the star pupil of my late friend Barabra Ess, in the photo department at Bard, and that’s how we met. It was kind of a miracle, really. She was the perfect person to guide me through transitioning: beautiful, self-confident, brilliant, and brilliantly empathetic. She gave me courage, in addition to a lot of practical tips. And I love the fact that my elder is 43 years younger than me.
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At a few different points, you bring up your age when considering your transition. Do you wish you had done it or could have done it sooner?
It’s my particular heartbreak to realize that no matter how hard I try, I will never be a young woman. I dearly wish I could have transitioned in my teens, as early as possible. Or at any time since. But it would not have been possible before maybe a decade ago.
You write about “building Lucy…as an amalgam of overlapping construction projects—visual, social, behavioral, internal—that had to be fit in around whatever crazed spurts of nerves or sometimes immobilizing euphoria interrupted their tight schedule.” Do you still feel like you are building Lucy? Or, is she, are you complete?
I don’t think Lucy is complete, by any means, and I’m delighted to think that I will continue to evolve. Even physically, since I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for a mere 32 months, the process is far from peaking. But I’m not really much engaged in working on my presentation these days—apart from making fashion choices, of course.
You write frequently about feelings of heaviness or unease. “My secret poisoned my entire experience of life” and “I was actively practicing hypocrisy.” What does life look like for you these days?
I’m quite at ease in my body. Since fully inhabiting myself—it’s been three years since the egg broke—I haven’t felt for a second the way I used to: crippled by self-consciousness.
I was very moved to read “ I genuinely like who I am—I’m turning out better than I imagined, or feared.” A couple pages later, you say “ I am the person I feared most of my life.” Do you feel any tension in holding these two truths simultaneously?
There’s no contradiction there. I had to face the fear of being who I am before I could become who I am.