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Sebastian Ritscher
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I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME

Lucy Sante

A Memoir of Transition

This is an iconic writer's beautiful, gem-like memoir of a life spent running toward a dream of artistic truth while on the run from the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was.
Lucy Sante had enough reasons to feel like an outsider. Born in Belgium, the one child of conservative Catholic working-class parents who transplanted their little family to the United States without ever entirely settling here, she only really felt at home when she moved to New York City in the early 1970's, a feral moment in which she found her people among a band of fellow bohemians picking their way through the wreckage.

Some of her friends would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But in the deepest sense, she still felt like an outsider, her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself.

Lucy Sante's memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative, the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. It is a story with many twists and turns: However necessary and long overdue her embrace of womanhood was, it was nonetheless a fearful business, filled with pitfalls and pratfalls. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man's identity, in a man's world.

She had switched teams, and she had found herself, widening the aperture of her heart in the bargain. A marvel of grace and empathy, I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, having to do with gender identity and far beyond. Like all great books, it is a wisdom book, and a gift to seekers of all denominations.

Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. She recently retired after 24 years of teaching at Bard College.
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Published 2024-02-13 by Penguin Press

Book

Published by Penguin Press

Comments

Lucy Sante on Kafka, Communism, and Comme des Garçons Read more...

UK / C: Hutchinson Heinemann ; Spanish: Libros del K.O.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Read more...

"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." Read more...

Extraordinary . . . [Sante's] writing remains as perceptive, elegant, and striking as ever, and furthermore it is fearlessly honesta 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. Read more...

Arresting . . . it's impossible not to be moved and fascinated by Sante's exhilarating if painful journey.