Publishers Weekly
★ 03/04/2024
In this miraculous memoir, New York Review of Books critic Sante (Nineteen Reservoirs) recounts the story of her life in light of her gender transition at age 66. After passing a few photos through FaceApp’s gender swapping feature in early 2021, Sante recognized herself as the person she’d always been: a woman. This epiphany (or “egg cracking”) unleashed a flood of revelations, which Sante unpacks in parallel timelines—one covering her younger years, the other focusing on the days and months after her FaceApp-facilitated breakthrough. In the former sections, Sante describes her experiences as a child immigrating to the U.S. from Belgium in the 1960s, as a young adult partying and making friends in 1970s and ’80s New York City, and as a cultural critic. In the latter timeline, she recounts coming out to friends, colleagues, and the public, and depicts the strain her transition put on her relationship with her partner, Mimi, as she struggled through feelings of envy and shame. With piercing insight and a formidable command of language, Sante molds the material into a trenchant self-portrait that’s equal parts humorous (she wryly gives her coming-out email the subject line “A Bombshell”) and hard-nosed. This is a major achievement. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Beautiful . . . A profound narrative of self-realization written with curiosity and bracing clarity, I Heard Her Call My Name is a work that both new and established readers of Sante will treasure.” —Nicole Chung, Esquire’s The Best Memoirs of 2024 (So Far)
“Reading this book is a joy. Sante is funny and warm . . . I Heard Her Call My Name has much to say about the trans journey and will undoubtedly become a standard for those in need of guidance. But the book speaks to a wider audience, too: for anyone who needs to break out of their self-imposed ‘prison of denial,’ as Sante puts it, or to stop punishing themselves for wanting what they want.” —The Washington Post
“A timely but timeless memoir . . . At its heart, I Heard Her Call My Name is a poignant but forceful portrait of a life liberated from shame and fear . . . Emblematic of someone who has straddled cultures, languages, and genders, Sante’s bold devotion to complexity and clarity makes this an exemplary memoir. It is a clarion call to live one’s most authentic life.” —The Boston Globe
“Extraordinary . . . [Sante’s] writing remains as perceptive, elegant, and striking as ever, and furthermore it is fearlessly honest—a quality that often seems almost as rare as Sante-style bohemians . . . There has always been much truth in her work, flourishing like those renegade artists in the squalor of 1970s New York. And now there is even more.” —Slate
“This affirming memoir of late-in-life transition examines the writer’s gender-identity realization and her place in society. A gorgeous, essential read.” —People
“Arresting . . . it’s impossible not to be moved and fascinated by Sante’s exhilarating if painful journey.” —Los Angeles Times
“Deeply moving, often surprisingly hilarious . . . [Sante is] an exceptional prosaist . . . One of the memoir’s most poignant aspects is the way that Sante compares and contrasts her gender transition with the sort of transitioning she had to do “as an immigrant child becoming acculturated in the United States.” —Air Mail
“[Sante’s] 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 . . . Powerful.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Miraculous . . . With piercing insight and a formidable command of language, Sante molds the material into a trenchant self-portrait that’s equal parts humorous (she wryly gives her coming-out email the subject line ‘A Bombshell’) and hard-nosed. This is a major achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Disarmingly frank . . . In part an epistolary memoir that captures a fervid love affair with oneself . . . [I Heard Her Call My Name] also treats its material with the retrospective zeal and precision of a detective . . . Reminiscent of the Didion of The Year of Magical Thinking, examining from the outside the workings of her own mind in extremis . . . What feels most poignant is the clear continuity with Sante’s earlier work.” —The New Republic
“Not to be missed, I Heard Her Call My Name is a powerful example of self-reflection and a vibrant exploration of the modern dynamics of gender and identity.” —Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024
“A sustained and joyful exhale.” —4Columns
“An absorbing analysis of a long-standing search for identity in writing and life.” —Kirkus
“Poignant, arresting, and ultimately affirming.” —Booklist
“An astonishing, once-in-a-lifetime achievement, as two stories thread into one, from losing yourself in the lights, the sounds, the eyes of others, to the miraculous discovery of the language with which you can put yourself back together.” —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
“Radical, humble, and wise, Sante’s account of discovery is the most generous of gifts—a book to treasure, and a memoir that will enter the canon of twenty-first-century greats.” —Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue
“I've admired the utter clarity and authority of Lucy Sante's work for years, and I was deeply moved by how she tunneled through the specificity of her experiences to create this vivid, encompassing, and compassionate book.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
“I Heard Her Call My Name is a generous, fearlessly revealing book, full of heart. Lucy Sante brings a reader through her transition, a story that moves across continents, time, and discovery. It is revitalizing. Sante’s dedication to truth asks beautifully honest questions: Who deserves to be a woman? What do we contain? What is it to live, survive, to thrive? This celebration of womanhood is fresh air you will want to breathe in deeply.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book and The Seas
FEBRUARY 2024 - AudioFile
Memoirs are often best when they're read by the author, and Lucy Sante's intimate and poignant account of her journey from assigned-male-at-birth to female-presenting is sometimes raw, sometimes soft, and altogether genuine. Her own voice delivering vignettes from her life resonates with authenticity. Sante's lifelong success as a writer comes through in her near-poetic storytelling without being saccharine. What kind of voice defines a woman? Sante addresses this and answers it by unapologetically being herself and sharing why she chose, among other decisions, not to hire a vocal coach. Listeners who are curious, those who love people who are transitioning, and those who simply enjoy a well-told coming-of-age story will enjoy this audio. C.F. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-28
An award-winning writer chronicles her late-in-life gender transition.
This memoir charts Sante’s recent transition from male to female in her late 60s. Her commentary alternates between explaining the challenges of her decision and reflecting on earlier moments in a life marked by gender dysphoria. The author provides detailed and engaging descriptions of the process of transitioning, from choices about makeup, clothing, and drug therapies, to making connections with community support groups and handling the delicate protocols of coming out to friends and co-workers. Sante delivers sharply rendered sketches of bohemian New York, where the author has spent much of her life. At the beginning of the book, Sante describes how she experimented with FaceApp’s “gender‑swapping feature.” Looking at the digitally altered images—many of them included here—produced “one shock of recognition after another” and the sense that what she saw was “exactly who I would have been” at various stages of her life, from childhood to middle age. In tracking her own long-standing self-evasions, Sante offers perceptive commentary on the psychological dynamics that led her to delay the process of fully assuming a female identity. A poignant irony, sensitively explored over the course of the memoir, is that her writing career sought to expose important truths in the social communities she inhabited, especially among those with nonconformist lifestyles, while privately she denied a fundamental truth about herself. Also insightful is Sante’s broader societal analysis, which locates her struggles within a culture that seems to both covertly acknowledge and severely punish gender fluidity. The memoir concludes with a justifiable expression of hope that the author’s experiences might be instructive to those seeking to understand transition and the personal and social complexities it can pose.
An absorbing analysis of a long-standing search for identity in writing and life.
