I Heard Her Call My Name is Lucy Sante’s deeply personal and elegiac memoir of her gender transition, undertaken at age 66. Sante, a veteran writer, critic, and artist, presents two intertwined narratives: her life up to the point of public transition, and the first year (or so) of that transformation. The work is not only a coming-of-self story, but also a reflection on identity, language, creativity, and how we narrate our lives.
Sante begins by exploring her lifelong sense of being misaligned with the public persona she inhabited. Raised in a conservative immigrant family, she recounts how the rules of appearance, conformity, and self-suppression guided much of her life’s choices. Her earlier career in writing, cultural criticism, working in New York’s art worlds, provided a space of expression that nevertheless existed in partial dissonance with her inner sense of self. Over the decades, she “performed” parts of life – not willfully, but through survival.
When, in later life, Sante uses tools like FaceApp and photo editing as experiments with how she might appear, a kind of fissure opens. The memoir chronicles her decision to come out to friends (via letters and conversations), to accept medical and social changes, and to reconfigure her identity publicly and privately. Along the way, she reflects on love, solitude, language, aging, and the literary self.
Sante’s style is spare, precise, rich in observation. She brings intellectual curiosity to her own internal terrain. She is unafraid to explore the awkwardness, the missteps, the humor, and the sorrow that accompany such a transition. One reads not just the transition, but a lifetime refracted through it.
While the memoir is deeply about gender, it transcends that frame: it is about what parts of ourselves we bury, how we negotiate belonging (to family, art, communities), and what it means to speak, finally, in one’s true voice. The book offers both a testament and a guide, though not prescriptive, for readers curious about identity, aging, and reclamation.
About the Author
Lucy Sante (born 1954 in Belgium) is a celebrated writer, critic, and artist. She emigrated to the United States in her youth and built a multifaceted career as an essayist, cultural critic, and historian, contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books.
Before I Heard Her Call My Name, Sante was best known for works such as Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, The Factory of Facts, Nineteen Reservoirs, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, among others. Her writing often spans cultural history, art, photography, urban life, and hidden narratives in the margins.
In 2021, she publicly announced her transition and I Heard Her Call My Name, published in 2024, is her memoir of that journey.
Her work is marked by exacting prose, a probing eye for nuance, and an engagement with identity and history.
