Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, artist, and one of the most distinctive cultural voices of her generation, known for her ability to illuminate hidden histories and overlooked details with precision, empathy, and wit. A longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, she has written influential works that move effortlessly between social history, memoir, photography, music, and film, including the landmark Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and later books such as The Other Paris, Nineteen Reservoirs, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times. Born in Verviers, Belgium, and raised in the United States, Sante’s career has unfolded across many disciplines, from writing lyrics for the Del-Byzanteens and consulting on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to exhibiting her own collages and teaching generations of writers and photographers at Bard College. Across her work, she has shown a rare talent for connecting personal memory with collective experience, often focusing on marginal spaces, vanished worlds, and the quiet poetry of everyday life.
Her writing is marked by intellectual rigor as well as a deep affection for the strange, the forgotten, and the unfashionable. She has also played an important role as a cultural translator, bringing overlooked voices and images into sharper focus through editing, translation, and critical commentary. As a teacher, she influenced countless students by encouraging attentiveness, curiosity, and ethical engagement with history and images. Her contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Grammy for album notes, and prestigious fellowships from institutions such as the MacDowell Colony and the New York Public Library. In recent years, her work has taken on an especially intimate and resonant dimension with I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, a candid and beautifully crafted account of coming out and transitioning later in life, a book widely praised for its honesty and literary grace, named one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2024 and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. This interview explores Lucy Sante’s life, work, and evolving sense of self, as well as the curiosity and courage that continue to shape her remarkable journey.
Monika: Hello, Lucy! Thank you so much for accepting my invitation.
Lucy: Thanks for inviting me! I’ve dipped into your blog many times over the past five or ten years, and it has helped me see the great variety of transgender experiences.
Monika: Thank you, that truly means a lot to me. You are an incredibly prolific writer. In your view, what truly makes someone a good writer?
Lucy: Close attention to language and its nuances; a sense of adventure and exploration about writing itself, quite apart from the subject matter.
Monika: How do ideas for your books usually come to you? Do your own experiences and instincts play a central role in that process?
Lucy: Yes, always. I write strictly about things that interest me, I have earned that luxury because I have been doing it for more than forty years.
Monika: Your family emigrated to the United States more than once between 1959 and 1963, navigating repeated moves and serious financial difficulties. How did those early experiences shape you?
Lucy: We emigrated twice, in 1959 and 1960; then my mother and I went back twice to take care of dying grandparents, and those visits were so long that I felt as if I were emigrating all over again when I came back. My teenage years weren’t as dramatic, although I did get kicked out of my first high school.
Monika: As a child, were you eager to leave Europe behind, or did the move feel unsettling to you?
Lucy: Not at all! I was a child and up for adventure of any kind. The US was a big, unreal mystery until I got there, and maybe afterward too.
Monika: After settling in the United States, you began working in the mailroom and later became assistant to editor Barbara Epstein at The New York Review of Books, eventually becoming a regular contributor yourself. You wrote about film, art, photography, and a wide range of cultural phenomena, as well as book reviews. How do you remember working with Barbara, and what did that period mean for you personally and professionally?
Lucy: Barbara changed my life and probably saved it. She taught me how to be an adult, and she taught me how to assume authority in my writing, how to have self-confidence there even if I was lacking it in every other part of my life. I sometimes think of her as my real mother.
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| "I was obsessed, and also paranoid and at war with myself." |
Monika: In 1998 you published your first autobiographical book, “The Factory of Facts.” There seems to be no direct reference to your transness in that book, or perhaps you felt compelled to conceal it at the time. How do you see that now?
Lucy: No, I was very far from being able to claim my transness there, and that also accounts for a certain impersonality in the writing. I described all the cultural forces that molded me while evading self-depiction, and my transness was a leading factor in that evasion (the fact that my parents were still alive then was another).
Monika: If you don’t mind me asking, what was your relationship with your mother like? Do you think she would have been able to accept you as her daughter?
Lucy: My mother and I, beginning when I was 9 or 10, fought relentlessly for the rest of her life. We hated each other. I had a stillborn older sister with whom she seemed to have conflated me when I was small, and the troubles began on the outskirts of puberty, when, as I suspect, one of the problems was that I seemed to be male. Despite this, she would never have accepted me as her daughter. She was an uneducated voodoo-Catholic peasant who never adapted to the US or the modern world at all.
Monika: Is “I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition” (2024) a natural continuation of the life you described in “The Factory of Facts,” or does it represent a rewriting of your life story from a consciously female perspective?
Lucy: I haven’t rewritten my life from a female perspective exactly, not sure just what that would entail, but I have reexamined my life from an emotional perspective, rather than a historical or sociological point of view.
Monika: Looking back, which elements of your story in “I Heard Her Call My Name” do you think could be especially meaningful or helpful for other trans women?
Lucy: I think there could be many, both for the older trans woman, who will certainly identify with many parts, and for the younger, who will see how knowledge of trans nature does not go away, no matter how strenuous the efforts or how long the struggle.
Monika: You are a well-known writer, and your transition reminds me of that of Jan Morris, the renowned Welsh historian, author, and travel writer. Do you think being a public figure makes coming out more difficult, perhaps because there is more at stake or more to lose?
Lucy: I did worry briefly about how it would affect my career, but only briefly. What being semi-well-known did was to ensure that my transition would be a public matter from the start. If I had been more obscure, nobody would care.
Monika: You first came out publicly on Instagram in 2021 and then spoke even more openly in Vanity Fair in 2022. Were you satisfied with the response you received from the media and from your readers?
Lucy: Yes, I heard from tons of people from my past, and someone changed my Wikipedia entry within half an hour of my coming out on Instagram. It was very satisfying.
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| Lucy as generated by the Epik AI photo editor. |
Monika: Did you carefully plan your coming out to the public, or was it more of a spontaneous decision?
Lucy: Yes, I definitely thought that I had to make it public. The offer from Vanity Fair to write my story, I wasn’t interviewed; I wrote it myself, came the same day as the Insta post, and that was just what I had been hoping for.
Monika: Based on my own experience and that of many women I have interviewed, I sometimes wonder whether we should be called ‘runners’ instead of trans women. We run, run, and run away from our feminine selves until it catches up with us. The only difference is how long we can run. You ran a lot…
Lucy: I did. I fully intended to take it to my grave.
Monika: Fortunately, that didn’t happen. You compared this early stage to an “egg,” a moment when we are not yet fully aware of our transness, and the moment of revelation occurs when the egg cracks. This moment can happen at any time, depending on many known and unknown factors. Was COVID the tipping point, the final trigger that made you realize you are a woman?
Lucy: It may have had some circumstantial influence, but I don’t think it was critical. What tipped the balance was my decision to pass every earlier photo of me through FaceApp. That made it a project, since I had to search all over the house for pictures, and I’m very susceptible to projects. What I only realized recently is that the project, which took days, broke through a mechanism I wasn’t aware I had in place, which put a time limit on my fantasizing. After an hour or two my superego would stop it – I knew that without that check I would have to confront my wish to transition, and I was terrified.
Monika: When you fed your mug-shot-style selfie into FaceApp, it must have returned a picture of an attractive woman. Did that please you?
Lucy: It did! I was amazed, and it led me to feed into FaceApp every picture of myself I could find beginning at about age 11, and that is what cracked my egg.
Monika: Before your egg cracked, did you maintain any interest in transgender matters?
Lucy: Yes, of course. I was obsessed, and also paranoid and at war with myself, so I had to conduct my research under the highest levels of cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and with the aforementioned time limit, which served to kill many impulses before they could really get started.
Monika: How did you conduct your research? Did you watch YouTube videos? You mentioned scrolling through endless photos of Japanese otokonoko models. Why did you focus on them?
Lucy: Luck of the draw, I guess. YouTube, Google keyword searches. In the early days of being online (late ‘90s), I would follow all 200 links on any given trans person’s GeoCities page, etc.
Monika: Did you ever crossdress during your teenage years?
Lucy: Never for more than about five minutes at a time. I knew that any gender exploration I did was going to be a one-way trip, and I was terrified.
Monika: We all pay a high price for the fulfillment of our dreams to be ourselves. Often, this means losing families, friends, jobs, and social positions. Did you have to pay such a price as well, and what was the hardest part of your coming out?
Lucy: I lost my romantic and domestic relationship of fourteen years. We’re still very close, but my girlfriend hated that I had kept a secret this big from her, and she isn’t attracted to women. That devastated me.
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| Available via Amazon. |
Monika: You met her while your relationship of fourteen years was reaching its breaking point. Was she surprised by your transness, and how did you come out to her?
Lucy: I showed her a FaceApp photo - that was my prop. She was completely unprepared.
Monika: Why did you choose the name Lucy? Was it simply practical to add a “y” to your deadname?
Lucy: When I was 12 I won a writing contest, and a local newspaper ran a photo of the five of us who had won prizes. The others were all girls. The caption writer may not have looked at the photo and may have assumed that “Luc” was a misprint, so I appeared as “Lucy.” It’s been my name ever since.
Monika: We are often described as prisoners of passing or non-passing syndrome. Although cosmetic surgeries can help, we are always judged by others’ perceptions. How do you cope with this reality?
Lucy: Well, I’m old, and there’s nothing I can do about it. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never be a young woman. And also I just have a limited time left alive. I’ll be 70 next birthday, so at best that gives me what, ten or fifteen years? So I’m going with no surgeries at all. I was on the list for vocal surgery, a proprietary glottal narrowing performed at Mount Sinai in New York, but the waiting list was long enough that I had to record my audiobook before my scheduled date, so at that point I just thought, the hell with it. I’m very fortunate that HRT has been doing much of the critical work on my face all by itself, and my face is the most important thing for me.
Monika: In Vanity Fair, you wrote that you wear little makeup and that you do not concern yourself with how passersby perceive you or whether you are misgendered. How do you manage that? For me, I find it very difficult. I never go out without my makeup, and I am always hyper-aware of being gawked at by men and very sensitive to being misgendered.
Lucy: In retrospect, I was doing a bit of fronting there. I did go through a period of avoiding makeup (I was being puritanical; it didn’t seem “honest”). But now I wear makeup (a five-minute routine: eyeshadow, mascara, concealer, lipstick) every time I leave the house. Obviously I care about how I’m perceived, but I have done a pretty good job of walking a straight line, out in the streets, and not taking in the side view. Sometimes people stare so hard that I notice, but mostly I don’t.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Lucy Sante.
© 2024 - Monika Kowalska
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