Renowned writer, cultural critic, and scholar of the demimonde Lucy Sante joins to discuss her career and a new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” reflecting on her transition and self-actualization in her sixties.
Debbie Millman:
Before her latest book, Lucy Sante had written, edited, or translated a shelf full of books, fiction and nonfiction, and a mountain of short pieces for magazines like The New York Review of Books. In 2021 at the age of 66, Lucy shared an announcement that she had joined the other team and was transitioning, and that her pronoun, thank you very much, was she. We should consider ourselves lucky for all of the above because she has written about the experience and her life, both wittily and magnificently in her new book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. Lucy Sante, welcome to Design Matters.
Lucy Sante:
Hello.
Debbie Millman:
Lucy, I understand you consider the 1942 book, American Thesaurus of Slang by Lester Berry and Melvin Van den Bark to be your Bible. I’m wondering what do you like most about that book?
Lucy Sante:
Well, it’s a thesaurus of slang. It’s not a dictionary, it’s a thesaurus, so things are grouped in categories, which is very useful for research. If you, say, are writing a crime novel set in 1938, you can imagine what the boss butcher at the slaughterhouse would be called by his men and stuff like this. But also for me, for just a writer, it’s this treasure chest of words and expressions. You dive into it and it opens all sorts of doors in your head.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of slang were Americans using back in 1942?
Lucy Sante:
There were slangs for all kinds of individual professions and settings and sociological groups of various sorts. You could see it in movies from the ’20s and ’30s, people spoke very fast. And the demonic, it was, well, you could write a book about the sociology of it, but it was at a point where people were becoming city slickers. They come in from the country, but they were refashioning themselves as sophisticates of a certain kind.
Newspapers. There were many newspapers, daily ones, and they all had columnists and they were all polishing up their verbal acts. So it was a period of particular verbal invention on the printed page as well as in the street.
Debbie Millman:
You said that the book helped you open the doors for language and that you used to use Finnegans Wake by James Joyce for that too. Ulysses is one of my all-time favorite books and has been so for most of my life, but I find Finnegans Wake impenetrable. How do you decipher it?
Lucy Sante:
Well, I had a brilliant college professor, Michael Wood, who’s now retired, but he writes for the London Review of Books and he gave a reading of a section of Finnegans Wake in an Irish voice because he’s like Anglo Irish or something, but he knew he could read it in the brogue and suddenly it became three dimensional. It popped into relief like just reading it off the page, never had. And so for a few years I was able to recreate that experience in my head when I opened to a random page and heard Michael reading it spectrally.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Verviers, Belgium. In your 2012 memoir, The Factory of Facts, you describe yourself as three quarters peasant. Why is that?
Lucy Sante:
My father’s family has been in the same town I was born in Verviers since at least the 13th century. I mean, we’re there in the very first census, so we don’t know how far back it goes before that. Very localized and a city, a city as far back as it was a Roman villa, but it was a city of some kind by the Middle Ages. My other three quarters, my mother’s side and my father’s mother’s side were all from people from the country, people from [inaudible 00:04:33] and my mother’s side and on my paternal grandmother’s side from Luxembourg, which is basically another state. And so they were farmers working the unforgiving land of the [inaudible 00:04:51] which is very stony and has a very short growing season, and they did that for hundreds and thousands of years.
Debbie Millman:
At the time your father worked in a foundry and have stated that your mother seemed to have two modes in one. She was tearfully, clingy, cloyingly affectionate, cooing, and caressing, and kissy-kiss. In the other, she was a rattlesnake. Do you think a lot of this stemmed from the stillborn daughter who proceeded you?
Lucy Sante:
Oh, it had a lot of causes. It had that stillbirth of my older sister one year and one month older than me whose names I inherited in inverted form, but that was only one component. It was also she was treated very badly by her own parents. She was the idiot of the family and she was profoundly destabilized by the move to the United States. Never really made her peace. Her social orbit was her cousins. They were in the country. Even moving to the city shattered her world and every remove after that broke it some more. So she was this compounded mass of pain from various sources.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned moving back and forth to Belgium, from Belgium to the US four times and started first grade without knowing a word of English. And you picked it up quickly and have written that your instruction was vivid. And I’m wondering in what way was your instruction vivid?
Lucy Sante:
Because I picked up so many words from seeing them on packaging, painted signs in storefronts, billboards, sides of trucks, all kinds of places as well as books and newspapers. But it was all around. I could still see the word delicatessen as it appeared on this shop front in Summit, New Jersey or the penguin decal in the glass door of the drugstore advertising cool cigarettes and noticing that they spell it with a K and it’s not normally how it’s spelled. All these kinds of things and they still live in my head.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I was also somewhat captivated by the cool cigarette packaging logo because I love the way that the O’s were entwined. It’s so interesting how these things.
Lucy Sante:
Those are deco.
Debbie Millman:
Exactly. It’s my fascination with things like that that give me the sense that that’s ultimately why I went into making logos for a living. You’ve written that you were pretty much the only immigrant kid around and that the other kids hated that you read books for fun and knew the answers in class. What kinds of books were you reading at that time?
Lucy Sante:
When I think back on it, especially having had a child myself and having to learn about American children’s literature, I had no guidance, so nobody told me about Charlotte’s Web. I didn’t know any of the classics and didn’t really know what to read. Read in fiction, that turned me off for the most part, and really that’s when I started reading history. There was a series called Landmark Books about American history. I read them all. Also, a neighbor did give me the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I read all of those. Did not read Tom Swift. The scientific boy wonder that did not appeal.
Debbie Millman:
You described yourself as an imaginative and fearful child who saw omens everywhere. What kinds of omens?
Lucy Sante:
Oh, golly. I mean, everything was portent. Everything could be like step on a crack, break your mother’s back, but often it had to do with life and death kind of stuff. It was all about my death, the end of the world. A lot to do with. I write in the book too about how I was completely filled with my parents’ wartime memories. The most traumatic stuff just imprinted itself on me. I did think that planes were going to drop bombs on the house. A shell had just missed my maternal grandparents’ apartment house, landed in the courtyard next door. So this stuff, even though I was born nine years after the end of the war, it still permeated my childhood.
Debbie Millman:
When you were 12, the principal of your school who was also a nun, scheduled a consultation for you with a psychologist. Why?
Lucy Sante:
Because I was in fights every day. I was obviously unhappy. I had no friends at all of any sort. For three years I was deeply alienated. She took pity on me.
Debbie Millman:
Did that help? What was a diagnosis made?
Lucy Sante:
No, I don’t know what happened. I will never know. Nothing. The shrink gave me all these tests then called in my parents. My parents were both furious by what they heard, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I wish I’d asked my father before he lapsed into dementia. My mother would never have told me.
Debbie Millman:
When you were very young, your mother searched your room on any pretext and read every bit of writing she found. What were you writing at that time?
Lucy Sante:
Well, I wasn’t.
Debbie Millman:
What was she looking for?
Lucy Sante:
She was looking for sin. She was looking for smut. She was looking for anything morally wrong because she thought that everything in the world was morally wrong. And Satan was nipping at my trouser cuffs. And she was going to find out the dirt on me. That’s why I did not write anything down. I did not. And I still don’t. This is carried over. Although, I don’t have that paranoia anymore, but I just never got the habits when never kept a diary, which I’m actually grateful for by the way.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Lucy Sante:
Because if you write memories down, your memory will be inherent in what you’ve written and you lose the actual memory. It just gets transferred. So my memories are still wild. I can still roam around in there. They’re not fixed.
Debbie Millman:
Now when you’re writing, when you’re actually… Because you write for a living, do you do drafts or do you sort of pull it all from your head into the writing in that first attempt?
Lucy Sante:
Yeah. I only do one draft, then I work it endlessly. For me, it has to… The thought happens on the page. I can’t do it in my head ahead of time. I may think like the sentence, but once I write it down, it’s not going to be the same as it happened in my head because I was just getting the thought and not the words, and the words are what really structures the thought and that can only happen on the page.
Debbie Millman:
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
Lucy Sante:
I was in fourth grade. I was nine. So many things happened around age nine. I don’t know which came first, but I remember that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gibbs told me I had talent as a writer and I wrote a composition on, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I wrote about how I want to be a writer with a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson on the cover.
Debbie Millman:
Now I understand you also drew an underground comic for your school paper. Were you also interested in becoming an artist?
Lucy Sante:
Well, becoming a cartoonist, it’s almost a Belgian national profession. I mean, the golden age of cartooning was at its red hot peak when I was a child there. And everybody here knows Tintin or Tintin and Les Schtroumpfs otherwise known as the Smurfs. But there’s a whole lot more to the Belgium cartoon world. And kids aspire to be cartoonist the way American kids in my generation aspire to be rock and roll stars, and so I tried my hand at it. I wasn’t very good, but I had a strip called Neanderthal Man. He was a superhero.
Debbie Millman:
Around that time, you won a essay contest in your school for Arbor Day. What was that essay about?
Lucy Sante:
It was Arbor Day. It was an essay about why Arbor Day is great. They’re always really why I like trees. I like trees for many reasons.
Debbie Millman:
There was one winner from each of the schools in your town, and at the time you were the only boy when a photo of the five of you was published in the New Providence Dispatch, you appeared in the caption as Lucy Sante, not Luke Sante. How did that make you feel?
Lucy Sante:
Oh, very weird. Again, it’s pretty distant for me to capture the exact emotional pitch, but it was thrilling and embarrassing and my mother immediately scratched it out with ballpoint. But I mean it took up permanent residence in my head, that’s for damn sure.
Debbie Millman:
And I Heard Her Call My Name. You write that you can’t say with certainty when the idea that you might or should be a girl first took hold, but it was probably around age nine or 10. How did that manifest to you?
Lucy Sante:
How did it first start? I saw myself as a girl. I thought about looking like a girl. I thought my interests were pretty much a girl’s interests, although, well, they were like artistic, not very domestic, and I didn’t really know any girls. That was another component. So I had really nobody to measure myself against, but it crept in and very soon it was a very strong emotion that I immediately started at one at the same time indulging in and trying to suppress.
Debbie Millman:
At the time you thought you were the only person in the world who had ever wanted to change genders. You said at the time that you prayed for Jesus to turn you into a girl overnight in your sleep, but don’t remember whether Jesus proposed this or if you requested it and wrote, “There it was and it wouldn’t leave me alone. I trembled from both desperate wishfulness and naked fear.” What scared you most at that point?
Lucy Sante:
Oh gosh. Well, I was young enough to still believe in a certain kind of magic and thought that something dramatic like that could actually happen. And how would my life change? I was just entering the period that never stopped really of conflict with my parents, and this seemed like an additional point of conflict. So I was very wary of it. I desired it, but I also knew it was an impossibility except that I believed in magic. You see all the contradictions, right?
Yeah, I was very confused. I had no guidance of any sort and didn’t for many years afterward, even though a trickle of news items would come my way, and I realized, “No, I’m not the only one, but there are like 48 of us.” Something like that really.
Debbie Millman:
You were admitted to Regis High School when you were 14 on the basis of a written exam, which is a very prestigious private school. You’d never heard of it. A nun who taught you in eighth grade suggested it. You got in and commuted two hours from New Jersey to the Upper East Side in New York City and write that that experience being in Manhattan changed your life. How so?
Lucy Sante:
Well, it just took me out of the immediate constant supervision of my parents for about eight hours a day or more. I was in this big city and everything seemed available. I didn’t have any money, but I read all the underground newspapers. They only cost a quarter and things in general were so much cheaper. So I could go to the movies, I could buy books on this very, very small allowance I had. But I had a universe open to me. The only place that presented me with that much of a range of options previously was the library.
I went from the library to Manhattan, which is like hyper library, so it showed me the world outside. I must have started thinking of my family as a prison very early. I had already this fleeting vision of New York City as we were about to go back to Belgium the first time and didn’t know that we would ever be coming back. And already New York City had established its symbolic function in my mind because it was Halloween and something nobody has seen in 50 years. Just massive crowds of kids running in costume, running on chaperone through the streets.
So when I was admitted to high school and I started commuting and I’d leave the house at seven in the morning and not be back until six or seven in the evening, I had autonomy during those hours.
Debbie Millman:
There was a line in your book that really touched me. You said for the first time the jail door was briefly left ajar. Yep. You went on to get a full scholarship at Columbia University, and in your first year there you got into one of Kenneth Koch’s poetry classes, and you’ve written that you felt that he pinned poet’s wings on your lapel. It was the only class you always attended, fully prepared and not stoned, and its influence was such that the writing classes you later taught for 27 years were always modeled on it. Can you share how he taught you how to teach?
Lucy Sante:
I still don’t know how other people teach writing, right? I mean, I took poetry classes with Kenneth and with David Shapiro and I took a translation class, and those are the only writing classes I’ve ever taken. But in any event, I taught an assignment based class. It wasn’t workshops. Every week I’d assign a reading excerpt and then a writing assignment that would be related to that reading. My emphasis was on voice, on style, on rhythm, and these are very hard concepts to get across, especially to undergraduates, but I tried anyway. It was formalistic, but that’s just a means to an end. I strongly believe in taking a conceptual approach. I mean, my book is an example that it’s structured in a very particular way, which gives the voice room to move.
The fact that it’s a kind of formalistic device, it unleashes the emotions rather than restricts them. That all goes back to Kenneth. And so yeah, I attempted to convey these thoughts to students for all those years, graduate students at Columbia and the new school, and then for 24 years to undergraduates of Bard.
Debbie Millman:
You felt that he pinned poets wings on your lapel, but about a year or so later it dawned on you that you actually weren’t a poet. Why?
Lucy Sante:
Well, the second year I was in his prosody class and I realized that… And here’s the paradox. I’m vitally interested in rhythm in my writing, but I could not bring myself to care about prosody or about verse form like cutting off lines seems arbitrary. I just want to go. So I’m a prose writer.
Debbie Millman:
What did Kenneth think of your writing?
Lucy Sante:
Beats me. I mean, I went to a reading that he gave not long before his death. He’d already been very sick with cancer, but he had a brief burst of energy and he gave a little tour. I went to see him with Jim Jarmusch who’d also been a student of Kenneth’s and Kenneth saw Jim and was like, “Oh my God, you’re here.” Who are you? He didn’t remember me at all.
Debbie Millman:
After you left Columbia, you felt that writing was your only real talent, but you write that you had no idea what to do with it. Sometimes you wrote reviews, you intended to submit to The Village Voice, but then you’d lose your nerve. You got a job as a clerk at the Strand Bookstore. Within a couple of weeks you were promoted to head and sole employee of the paperback department. While you were there, you started a magazine called Stranded and published four issues. Who did you publish? How did you publish and what was the reaction to this zine, essentially? There wasn’t the word then, but that’s I think what it was.
Lucy Sante:
No, it’s exactly what it was. Well, we borrowed it from this venerable Brooklyn based magazine, which no longer exists called Hanging Loose, which gathered individual sets of pages from writers. In other words, you don’t just submit your poem, you submit 200 or 300 whatever copies of your poem, and then we collate. So there was no editing involved. Anybody who wanted to submit that many pages got in. And then I packaged them. It went for four issues.
It was mostly, but not exclusively Strand employees. Kathy Acker is in there. In fact, actually the fourth issue is highly sought after because Jean-Michel Basquiat has a contribution in there and he never worked at The Strand. So it was some very interesting stuff, all kinds of… There’s bad poetry. There’s interesting Xerox graphics.
People collecting the top 10 all time favorite record lists of everybody who worked at The Strand, stuff like that. All kinds of stuff. Oh, and also great long beefs. My argument with X.
Debbie Millman:
How did you first meet Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Lucy Sante:
I met him with some friends of mine and we can’t figure… Or they seem to think we met him at a party. I thought we met him at the Mud Club, somewhere around late ’78.
Debbie Millman:
I think I read in your book that a friend of yours he painted on the refrigerator door and she sold that and also I think… There are a couple of different things that he painted on friends of yours.
Lucy Sante:
Well, the bathroom door and a fresco in the bedroom, which she only had that taken out and sold about 10 years ago. They lived together. They were not a couple exactly, but they shared a residence and he left all kinds of stuff with her. She still has some really substantial amount of… Not there, they’re in storage, but that he just left there because he was a young man on the go.
I mean, he left behind artwork all over town. And actually some of it got tossed. Now, I remember this great and one friend’s apartment, there was this great accumulation of abstract expressionist sweatshirts he’d made with spray paint. And they were kind of chaotic and they eventually just got tossed.
Debbie Millman:
That breaks my heart. You got your first job at the New York Review of Books in the mail room. How did you get that job?
Lucy Sante:
I had a friend, Noah Shapiro, whose father was the business manager. I’d known Noah since freshman year of college, and I ran into him on the street and bingo, I had a job.
Debbie Millman:
After a year there, editor Barbara Epstein hired you as her assistant where you realized you were wildly ignorant of the world and its ways. And I understand you didn’t know how to make a reservation at a restaurant.
Lucy Sante:
I’d never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know that it existed. My parents never would’ve occurred to them to go to make a restaurant reservation. They probably didn’t know it existed either. And in general, the job involved being social in a way, just not entertaining with a glass in hand, but social in the sense of being connected with other people in ways that were completely unfamiliar to me. It was both the fact that I came from this working class immigrant family, but also that I was were suspicious and resentful of the entire adult world. And Barbara, bless her soul, understood this. She basically explained the adult world to me.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think Barbara saw in you at the time? She basically handpicked you out of the mail room-
Lucy Sante:
Yeah, she did.
Debbie Millman:
… into her life. What do you think she saw in you?
Lucy Sante:
I still don’t really know because I mean, did she read anything I’d written? I mean, I guess she probably just, she talked to Lizzie Hardwick whose house had been to a bunch of times with my friend, Darryl Pinckney, and I don’t know, liked the cut of my jib.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that Barbara Epstein gave you the most important gift you’ve ever gotten from anyone shy of life itself, the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. And I’m wondering how did she do that?
Lucy Sante:
It happened a little by little. It’s really hard to say at what moment it tipped over, but I went from… Well, I went from being as much of a wallflower on the page as I was in life feeling that I can’t review this book because I’m not an expert on every detail concerning it, that kind of thing, to realizing that, “Yeah, no, I have an angle. I mean, I read this book that gives me the right to have an opinion about it and proceed from there.” Not just books, but all kinds of situations that, “Yes, I was there. I’m a witness. I don’t need a graduate degree in the subject to express what I think.”
Debbie Millman:
So do you feel like she gave you some confidence to be a writer?
Lucy Sante:
Exactly, yeah. That’s the whole point. This confidence that I found very hard to come by otherwise given everything.
Debbie Millman:
You published your first professional piece of writing in the New York Review of Books in 1981 when you were 27. Do you remember what that essay was about?
Lucy Sante:
It was about Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis Presley, which I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and I was immediately struck by how false it was. I really believe in the lie detector functions of prose. All kinds of syntax, word use, whatever will tell you if this is genuine or not. I mean, it’s not foolproof obviously, but a rough sketch. And his book just wreaked of falsehood. There was nothing sincere about it. He’s whipping up this kind of tabloid fable to sell books and that’s it.
Albert Goldman was not nobody. He was pretty respected critic. He wrote a really good book about Lenny Bruce, but he hated the younger generation. That’s the thing about him. It’s like anybody who came in like post Beatles was trash because they weren’t following this kind of ’50s great man author kind of thing. He took his revenge first with the Elvis book and then with the John Lennon biography, which I also reviewed for the New York Review, which was in many ways even worse.
I don’t even know if those books were in print, but they were really pretty. They were hatchet jobs, more sophisticated hatchet jobs than you usually see, because he was not a dumb guy. Nevertheless, that’s all they were.
Debbie Millman:
What was the reaction to your criticism of these books in your writing?
Lucy Sante:
Well, Bob and Barbara accepted it. It was published. My friends were happy, and I never heard from anybody else.
Debbie Millman:
Did you ever feel nervous about being critical of other writers in print?
Lucy Sante:
Not exactly. I mean, sometimes I was always worried about getting things wrong. That was my great terror, especially getting something big wrong, like the intended meaning of this phrase, whatever. So I was belt and suspenders when it came to stuff like that, but that’s the point. Barbara gave me this authority so that it didn’t matter. The fact that I was whatever young person and had no publications on my belt criticizing somebody much older with a whole library of volumes out, I could do it. I was allowed.
Debbie Millman:
You worked full-time at the New York Review, but left on your 30th birthday in 1984, and you wrote this about that time in your memoir. “Writing was a very unhip art in the ’70s, very uptown. My friends all became filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. And the ’80s were really hard for me because three of my friends, three pretty close friends almost simultaneously became world figures, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin. And I thought, I’m fucked. They did it, I didn’t. Bye. See you later.” Talk about that, if you can, a little bit about what that felt like and what that was like for you and how you dealt with it.
Lucy Sante:
The ’80s coming after the ’70s when everybody was beneath visibility, all my friends, it took years for the bands at CBGBs to be recorded. It’s hard to credit now how isolated we felt in Lower Manhattan at that point. We had our own little world, and the rest of the world was completely indifferent to us. But the ’80s people suddenly became rich and famous. It was crazy. Jean-Michel first and eventually Nan and Jim. And I was pretty close to all three of them.
I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t produced anything, but it really hurt because I felt like… And I mean in some ways I still feel like if you’re going to succeed, do it when you’re young because at my age it’s great having the success, but it’s not the same thing as when you’re young, when you can profit in all kinds of ways from this. All I can do is have a quiet satisfaction now, but when you’re young is when you’re tasting things. I don’t know, the world of the senses is open to you, and it didn’t happen to me and I thought, “Well, there goes my chances forever.” Because I also had no consciousness of existing past age 40 or whatever.
And the ’80s were people were treated into… Not their shelves. Well, some people were treated into their shelves, but it’s called class system established, so among the artists which had never existed. And some people were just up there on one shelf and there were various succeeding shelves, and I was maybe down here until I published a book. I was 37 by the time that happened. I’m still sad that I didn’t enjoy the high life of my peers back then, partly because at that point, one’s audience was one’s immediate contemporaries, one’s actual peers, and it felt very valuable to be valued by those people. It’s wonderful being valued by younger people now, but it’s not quite the same secret handshake thing that goes on among contemporaries.
Debbie Millman:
Despite all of your longing, as I would put it, maybe you’ve won a Whiting Award. You published your first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York in ’91. This was followed by Evidence, a volume of crime scene photographs in ’92. Your first memoir of The Factory of Facts in 1998, a super famous collection of essays titled Kill All Your Darlings in 2007, a collection of essays and occasional pieces, The Other Paris, which serves as a sort of bookend to Low Life in 2015.
You’re included in several other books by way of anthologies, introductions and so forth. You taught at Columbia University School of the Arts, the new school beginning in 1999 until your retirement at Bard in writing and the history of photography. So you’ve had a pretty amazing career. Maybe not as star-studded as you would’ve like, but I think anybody listening and viewing
this would think, “She’s pretty fucking cool.”
Lucy Sante:
Well, my greatest achievement is that I really only wrote about stuff I was actually passionate about. I mean, I did a lot of work for hire, but there’s very little that I would not embrace. I mean, not that my writing was always tip top, right? But I mean in terms of I never had to shed my soul in order to do my job.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote that during this time you were writing and you did a lot of work for magazines and newspapers like Interview, and Wigwag, and New York, and Spy, but throughout you felt like you were playing a character more worldly and sophisticated than you actually thought that you were. So you had to keep your real self tightly buttoned up. Is that why you avoided at that time writing more in the first person?
Lucy Sante:
Well, yeah, I was hiding. I mean, the gender thing was only a part of it, right? I was also hiding the fact that I was this nobody from nowhere, a dropout, and with no inherited educational status in my family. I really had a major case of imposter syndrome for so much of my life.
Debbie Millman:
Do you still?
Lucy Sante:
Now it’s shifted. The imposter syndrome is actually… Well, it’s termed dysphoria as opposed to gender dysphoria of the umbrella term. Having a bad attack of dysphoria means having this imposter syndrome is applied to gender presentation.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote about yourself in the book about this time in the following way. It’s so beautifully written. I just want to read it out loud. You wrote, “I pretended to myself that what I was trying to conceal was my inferiority to the character I tried to create in writing and in life. I was boring, clumsy, nebbishy, unsexy, squirrely, pedantic, useless, feeble, no fun, eternally on the B or even the C list of even my best friends. To be sure this self-portrait was not strictly a byproduct of gender dysphoria, my parents’ class anxieties, the immigrant experience and the residue of a Catholic upbringing contributed as well.” Lucy, I felt like you could have been writing about me. I love this paragraph so much. I’m wondering if this sense of yourself was why you started your first memoir with a series of make believe versions of your early childhood.
Lucy Sante:
No, that’s not why. Why is because I saw this event that is the bankruptcy of the wool trade in Verviers and therefore the shuttering of my father’s foundry, which made equipment for these factories. I saw that as the pivotal moment of my life, and I want to explore how things might’ve gone had it not followed the path that it did take. So my versions are based on family fears and obsessions of one sort or another spun out by me.
Debbie Millman:
I loved the conceptual quality of providing those various fictional or semi-fictional possibilities for your early life. It felt very Eugene Ionesco in a lot of ways, and I loved it. I loved it. In retrospect, you’ve written that you were dodging self-depiction because you didn’t want to be seen because you didn’t know who you were. And I’d like to talk more about your beautiful new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. First, I’m wondering if you could read a passage about what happened on February 16th, 2021.
Lucy Sante:
On February 16th, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone just for a laugh. I’d had a new phone for a few months, and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape, or hairstyle, I was specifically and exclusively interested in the gender swap function. I fed in a mugshot style selfie and in return got something that didn’t displease me, a picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I’d seldom allowed myself such graphic self-depiction. Over the years, I’d occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman, but had always immediately destroyed the results, and yet I didn’t delete that cyber image. Instead, over the next week or so, I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed beginning at about age 12, snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman I could now see was a coherent phenomenon consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.
Debbie Millman:
Would this be when you say you’d cracked your egg?
Lucy Sante:
Yes. And by the way, people keep asking me how I came up with that phrase, but I didn’t. It’s common in trans world.
Debbie Millman:
I hadn’t heard that phrase before. What happened after you cracked your egg?
Lucy Sante:
The whole process of digging up these photographs and passing them through. It wasn’t a single moment. It transpired over about 10 days. And then I came out to my therapist and then to my partner, and then to my son. I wrote this letter that I sent to about 30 people who are my closest immediate friends.
Debbie Millman:
You write that you’re grateful to whatever force cracked your egg before it was too late that you were saved from drowning. Do you really think it was the FaceApp photos or do you think the FaceApp helped you manifest the courage you needed to take this next step in your life?
Lucy Sante:
The FaceApp photos were transforming. I mean, because I’d never seen what I looked like as a woman. It was like seeing a movie of my alternate life. It was very, very, very powerful. Furthermore, on the mechanical end, it took me long enough to round up all these photographs. It’s scattered all over my house that it broke, and I didn’t realize I had this. I had an internal time lock. I was terrified. After wanting so much to go to the other side, I was terrified of it happening, so I would guard against it. And I didn’t realize I had the system where if I thought about it, if I fantasized, et cetera, it could only be for an hour or two and then bang, it would stop. And that was a safeguard. And looking for these photographs just burst through that ceiling and that really opened the floodgates. So it was both seeing the photographs and the act of looking for them weirdly.
Debbie Millman:
Had you ever shared with anyone in your life prior to your egg cracking that you felt like you were a female?
Lucy Sante:
I came close all week once in my whole life, and that was when I had this wonderful therapist in the late ’80s named Paul Pavel who by the way was also Art Spiegelman’s therapist, and he appears as a character in Maus too. He was a great man, a wonderful person. And to him, I admitted that I tried out my mother’s clothes and we never quite got back to it because not long after I shared that memory with him, he died of a massive heart attack 20 minutes after
I left his office. It wasn’t that same day, but it was not long thereafter. I don’t know. I mean, if Pavel had lived, might I have come out 30 years older earlier than I did? It’s not entirely impossible.
Debbie Millman:
I didn’t come out until I was 50. I’m 62 now, so it’s only been 12 years, and it’s a very different life internally in terms of the amount of freedom that I feel to be who I am. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, even being lesbian was almost a ticket to a very different kind of life, and I already felt so othered that I didn’t want to be any more othered.
Lucy Sante:
Bingo.
Debbie Millman:
After you sent the letter to your friends and came out to your partner and your therapist, what made you almost send another letter to your friends taking it all back?
Lucy Sante:
Obviously, when I was a kid, it was a different story, but when I became an adult, there were main two major impediments to my acknowledging my trans nature. One of them was my ambition. The other was the fact that I am attracted to women romantically, sexually, exclusively. And I thought it would at worst discuss them and at best get me sympathetic hearing, but shut the door to romance forever. So I knew that my relationship which had gone on for 14 years with somebody who were still very, very close, but I knew the romantic part was gone and she would not have wanted to keep going down that road. So I was trying to talk myself. I was so loathed to lose her or in fact to lose the prospect of love that I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.
Debbie Millman:
Before you came out, you wrote that your absorption of transgender lore before the internet was a matter of seeing things out of the corner of your eye and mentally photographing them, filing them away in the vault marked X. Did remembering any of those images help you claim who you are as you came out? I also had a file that I hid the joy of lesbian sex became…. It was a book in my library that was backwards so you couldn’t see the spine, and it were these articles from The Village Voice that I’d read in 1980 about Ann Bannon books. Did you have an actual stash or was it all just mental?
Lucy Sante:
Oh, it was mental because nobody could find out this. It was deeply secret to everybody in my life. Did it help me actualize it? Well, it’s hard to say. Really it took me onto the internet before I even read about people who were specifically like me. I mean, I’d read about drag queens or I’d read about famous sex changes like Christine Jorgensen or something. But it did start giving me this panoramic view of the trans universe, which is much larger and much more various than almost anyone suspect. It did help me realize I wasn’t alone, except that being alone is so ingrained in me for other reasons already that I was reluctant to shed the aloneness in a way.
Debbie Millman:
Looking back on it now, you write how your secret poisoned your entire experience of life and that there was never a moment when you didn’t feel the acute shame of being you. Did you continue to have shame as you were coming out and has that shame abated at all?
Lucy Sante:
No. I mean, it’s funny, but when I started coming out, aside from the specific point of my letter and the two letters in the book, there’s the one letter I didn’t send and the one letter I did send. I was trying to put myself back in the clause in the second letter too, but I abandoned that idea within 10 days because I knew it was real. I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak, I knew this was real and that I had better get behind it. I better claim it. I had better walk proud. I had no choice. It wasn’t like it was a debate. I was proud. I was a little afraid of how it might be received or what people would think. And this remained unchanged to this day. This is who I am, and if you don’t like it that tough, it’s the truth. I am manifesting the truth.
Debbie Millman:
You are now who you’ve described as the person you feared most of your life and you stated that you genuinely like who you are and that you’re turning out better than you imagined or feared. But you also said that you’re unwittingly benefiting from a bad thing, the invisibility of older women. I wanted to tell you something. I read that line to Roxanne, my wife, and she said, “Lesbians and trans folks aren’t invisible to each other at any age.” And I realize-
Lucy Sante:
This is true.
Debbie Millman:
… it’s right, right? I love that, and I really wanted to share that with you. You said you’re not only lucky to have had your egg crack at something close to the last minute. You’re also lucky to have survived your own repression. And for anybody that’s feeling their own repression, whether it be coming out as in any LGBTQ plus manner is there anything that you might say to them to help them face that repression?
Lucy Sante:
Well, it really helps if your identity is not entirely bound up. I had an ambition and while it did retard my coming out, it also acted as a counterweight to the fear because I had this thing I was doing. I had the author to present as a shield, so it really helps if you’re not doing this for a living, if you’ve got another identity with which to present the world.
Debbie Millman:
In your book, you quote your friend Daryl, who years ago declared that he was not a gay writer, but a writer who is gay. And you state you are a writer who is trans. How do you feel about your bylines pre-transition? I do see most of them now read Lucy Sante.
Lucy Sante:
Yeah. Somebody changed my Wikipedia entry within half an hour by coming out on Instagram and the New York Review of Books had changed its entire archive going back to 1981 within a couple of days. It’s cool. I mean, obviously, I lived as Luke for 66 years. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t there. I’m not like a younger person who is trying to erase the experience of schoolyard bullying. That hardly happened a decade or so beforehand. For me, I’m far away from all that stuff, so I don’t care that people know that I had this former name. I mean I don’t like looking at the pictures frankly. I’d rather if those went away, but the name and my standard joke is my dead name will never die. Not as long as we still have back inventory. Please buy those books even if we got the wrong name on them.
Debbie Millman:
You write about yourself pre-transition as a walking byline and are still very much aware of your pre-presentation self who you sometimes like to think of as your sad sack ex-husband. I laughed out loud at that line. Do you have affection for your sad sack ex-husband?
Lucy Sante:
Sometimes. I mean, I get impatient and I get retroactively embarrassed sometimes.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Lucy Sante:
Well, because he said and did dumb things that’s why. I’m not very patient with dumb things, you see. But in any event, I recognize this is… I had a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn over the course of my life, and I realized that no matter how much I would’ve liked to have been a rock star when I was 24 years old, it was never going to happen because I still had to build a self. And gender transition is only one part of that. There was so much unresolved, so much that was damaged by experience that I had to rectify so much that I was naive about that I had to learn. It was a big, huge process. Just the irony of it is when I was a kid, I remember I wanted to be a precocious child. I wanted to be a wonder. But actually I’m a very late bloomer. You might even say I’m only blooming now even though I’ve been at it for a really long time. Everybody’s rhythm is different.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I have one last question and then a request. You are now nearly 70. Towards the end of I Heard Her Call My Name, you state that transitioning is not an event, but a process and it will occupy the rest of your life as you go on changing. How do you envision Lucy Sante at 80?
Lucy Sante:
I don’t go there. I don’t think about the future. In fact, thinking about the future always freaks me out. And it goes back to that childhood superstition thing, so I’m not going there. Maybe I’ll be alive then, who knows? But probably not. I imagine the way the world is going in general.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I hope so. I hope you are. My last question is really more of a request. Would you read one last excerpt from I Heard Her Call My Name?
Lucy Sante:
You bet.
My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel the acute shame of being me even as I deny to myself that my secret had anything to do with it. I might feel proud of things I’d done, might even be able to summon the will to entertain ambitions and might describe such things to an idealized self. I sometimes try to make myself believe in, but eventually I was going to catch sight of myself in a mirror and that would destroy me for an hour or a day, or a week. I’ve been in therapy for 38 years, but because I was guarding my secret even in the therapist’s office, no diagnosis ever came close to identifying the cause of my malaise. At some point in the relatively recent past, I came upon a citation from the gnostic gospel of Thomas. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Debbie Millman:
One of the lines in your book that is now imprinted on my soul is this, and I wish it for everyone listening today, “When there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom.” Lucy Sante, thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself. Thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Lucy Sante:
Thank you so much, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Lucy Sante’s book is I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. And you could read more about her at lucysante.com. That’s lucysante.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening .and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.