I Heard Her Call My Name
A New York Times Best Book of 2024
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2024
‘A joy’ THE WASHINGTON POST
‘Vibrant’ LIT HUB
‘Moving’ THE NEW YORK TIMES
‘Powerful’ NEW YORKER
Lucy Sante has often felt like an outsider. Born in Belgium to conservative Catholic working-class parents, she was transplanted to the United States without ever entirely settling here. But a feeling of home finally arrived when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s amidst her fellow bohemians. Through those electric years, some of her friends would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and others would become jarringly famous. Lucy flirted with both fates, on her way to building a glittering career as a writer. But she could never shake that feeling.
When she was finally ready, Lucy decided to confront the façade she’d been presenting to everyone, including herself, over these years. I Heard Her Call My Name is the story of that confrontation, of a life with a missing piece that with transition, falls into place. This a memoir of grace and wit that parses the issues of gender identity and far beyond with unbounding humility and hope.
'Radical, humble and wise' HERMIONE HOBY
'An astonishing, once-in-a-lifetime achievement' HUA HSU
'Vivid, encompassing and compassionate' CATHERINE LACEY
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
