Book excerpt: "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" by Lucy Sante

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After wrestling for decades with a sense of mistaken identity, in 2021, at age 66, the acclaimed writer-editor known as Luc Sante wrote to more than two dozen friends and announced that she was transgender and would be known as Lucy.

"I Heard Her Call My Name" (Penguin) is a brave and timely memoir that describes Lucy Sante's life and the struggle to be true to herself.

Read an excerpt below.

"I Heard Her Call My Name" by Lucy Sante

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I did not have a strong gender identity when I was small. I drew pictures and played with my large family of stuffed animals, to whom I assigned family roles. I read the adventures of the boy reporter Tintin, but I also read the purely quotidian adventures of Martine, a sort of Everygirl, which must have been sent by a relative. I have a distinct but vague memory (I couldn't tell you the year or even the country) of being somewhere with my parents and picking something up — a magazine? a record? — with a girl's face on it, and them laughing at me. I certainly took it as a warning to avoid displaying pictures of girls — to not, say, tack up pictures of Françoise Hardy all over my room, after my paternal aunt and uncle, small-town newsagents, began sending me the French teen magazine Salut les copains. But I didn't really know what the laughter meant. Were they laughing because it seemed suspiciously feminine that I would be interested in a girl on a magazine? Or was it because it seemed precociously heterosexual? That second one did not occur to me at the time.

But I was never pushed in any conspicuously masculine direction, either. Despite his interest in sports (he was an avid basketball player in his youth, although 5'2"), my father didn't seem to care that I felt no pull in that direction, and we never engaged in the traditional male bonding experiences, not even tossing a ball back and forth. He also never taught me any of his skills: carpentry, plumbing, painting, paperhanging, even shoe repair (he had at one point apprenticed with a cobbler), although that had more to do with class than with gender. The way he saw it, I would grow up to be an important person who would have laborers to do those things for him. He was eager that I extricate myself from the working class and earn my pay from the comfort of a desk chair. He had no objections to my being a writer — he was a frustrated writer himself, who in 1948 had published an O. Henry-like sketch in a newspaper under the byline "Luc Sante."

My mother never taught me her skills, either, not even allowing anyone into the kitchen when she was cooking. But then her mother and her aunt had been legendary cooks and she was forever made to feel like the graceless idiot daughter; her repertoire of dishes was limited to recipes written down by her mother. Naturally she would not have wanted to be observed in her daily race against failure. I'm certain my mother wanted me to be a girl.

From "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" by Lucy Sante. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2024 by Lucy Sante.

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"I Heard Her Call My Name" by Lucy Sante

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• "I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition" by Lucy Sante (Penguin Press), in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats