Coming of age in the 1980s, Lucy Sante cut her teeth on a downtown scene haunted by the likes of Kathy Acker and Tom Verlaine. She wrote for publications like The New York Review of Books and penned works on topics from the anarchic history of Paris to the reservoirs of upstate New York. In 2021, after a long life as a man, she announced that she was transitioning to being a woman—an experience that is now the subject of her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. Documenting the solitude and solidarity that came from transitioning, the book, Stepahnie Burt writes in her essay about it for Books & the Arts, also “describes an aspect of existence common to her generation of trans people and so to mine, too: We often felt that we grew up profoundly alone.” Less formal and research-driven than her past books, I Heard Her Call My Name, Burt argues, is also more intimate, more personal, and more forthcoming: It describes the feelings of being “too old, too settled, too busy, and perhaps too cautious” when it comes to finding one’s place in trans culture. It also shows Sante, who was born in Belgium, finding a new kind of home. “Sante has moved—immigrated, if you like—from the cumulative, self-concealing, recorded details that made her famous for writing about lives other than hers, into a brighter land of openness about her body and her desires. It’s a good place to settle; it may even—to judge by my own life—feel like coming home.” Read “Lucy Sante and the Solitude and Solidarity of Transitioning”