I Heard Her Call My Name

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 70'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. Lucy 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. 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 60 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.