Dawn of Woman
A prominent writer recounts the trials and joys of her gender transition in a new memoir.
“I WANT TO change my sex,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1948. “Is that possible?”
It is a longing that has existed as long as we have. Now comes Lucy Sante with a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” about transitioning in her late 60s from male to female. She can hear what some of you are thinking. She fears that, by coming out as transgender now, she will be thought to be “merely following a trend, maybe to stay relevant.” She worries her transition will be viewed as a timely shucking of male privilege, a suit of armor that has grown heavy and begun to rust, or as a final bohemian pose, or as something more literary to do in semiretirement than sucking on a Werther’s Original.
Sante worries too about her byline, her newly “dead” one, as if someone had shot it. It “was, in a sense, my shop sign,” she writes. “Would I be risking my public identity as a writer by changing it?” Her books include a classic work of urban history, “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York” (1991) — it always seems to be on a front table at the Strand bookstore, where she used to run the paperback department — and the well-regarded “Evidence” (1992) and “The Factory of Facts” (1998). At one point, she writes, she considered publishing a memoir that began: “This book is by Luc Sante, although it was written by Lucy Sante.”
Yet here, happily, is Lucy entire. It is an ideal letter, her added “y,” to symbolize a fork in the road.
We are living in what appears to be, pun barely intended, a transitional moment. Without dismissing the punitive effects that anti-trans bills are having on lives in some states, including the right to publicly exist, it is possible to recognize that trans existence is slipping into the vital center. Take for example the forthcoming Will Ferrell documentary, “Will & Harper,” the toast of the Sundance Film Festival. It is about Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with his best friend of 30 years who is transitioning. Writing in The Washington Post, Jada Yuan called the documentary “so generous and gentle about explaining trans-ness to older generations that it feels like it should be shown in schools and toured around the country as a vital, lifesaving tool.”
“I Heard Her Call My Name” might function, for older readers, in a similar manner. Beware, though: Sante is not as cuddly as Ferrell. Like a shark, she has an extra row of teeth. “I’m urban, concrete, disabused,” she writes. She was a New Jersey kid, the only child of immigrants from Belgium. She attended Columbia and her sensibility was formed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, where she ran with a crowd that included pre-fame Nan Goldin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She worked as the editor Barbara Epstein’s assistant at The New York Review of Books, a launching-pad placement, before becoming a critic and a writer and teaching for many years at Bard College.
Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis she must undergo instead.
The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps:
I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.
Reading “I Heard Her Call My Name” sometimes put me in mind of a throwaway line from “Detransition, Baby,” Torrey Peters’s shrewd 2021 novel: “Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.” Sante’s wrestling with her vanity also brings out some of this book’s darkest moments. She is subject to intense moments of selfdoubt and impostor syndrome. There is a bleakly funny moment when, on a friend’s Instagram, she sees a photo of “a wig atop an upright stick, and I felt an instant shock of recognition.”
Sante writes that, from nearly the beginning, she absorbed every cultural detail that had to do with “the matter of boys changing into girls.” She filed all this material away. “It was the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” Was it a sign that her first sexual experience, as young Luc, involved a trip to the emergency room because of a uniquely painful condition called phimosis, “a congenital narrowing of the opening of the foreskin so that it cannot be retracted”? (Talk of genitalia is otherwise mostly elided in this memoir.) She would go on to marry twice and to have a son.
The urge to transition became unde
niable during Covid. In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.
The book presents a life in layered stages. We shift back and forth between present and past. The present has greater impact. We are with Sante as she tries on wigs, joins support groups, finds an endocrinologist and begins to take subcutaneous injections of estrogen. She practices sitting like a woman, to shake off what she thinks of as her lifelong imitation of masculinity. She was tired of, she writes, “trying at all times to mount a production titled ‘Luc,’ written and directed and produced by and starring me.” She gets into jewelry. She has a mani-pedi. On a deeper level, she senses herself becoming more open toward the world. She finds that she is becoming more social, less shut down.
One of the things that make this memoir convincing is that it is, on a certain level, unconvincing. Sante is a writer with a lot of peripheral vision. Below and beyond the press of her sentences, you sense her working as both her own private investigator and her defense attorney. Is femininity some kind of test that she still might not pass? The book is powerful because this has always been true: Ambivalence is more convincing than stone certainty. Masculinity had long been Sante’s oversold thesis, and here came the more honest and understated antithesis.
“I Heard Her Call My Name” will not be, I hope, the final memoir from Lucy Sante. It’s a story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring. Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal. She does not try to arrange herself in a consistent mellow light. As Sarah Moss wrote in “Summerwater,” her excellent 2020 novel, in a line that I will only paraphrase: Being “a little old lady” does not stop you from wanting to smack people. □