Coming out of her shell

I Heard Her Call My Name, Lucy Sante’s second work of memoir, opens with the euphoric email sent to her closest friends at the end of February 2021, saying that she has crossed the Rubicon and changed gender. The certainty of the statement stands in contrast to the opening chapter of Sante’s first memoir, The Factory of Facts (1998), written under her “deadname” of Luc Sante, which offered a smorgasbord of possibilities to the tale of the author’s becoming. Born in Verviers, Belgium, in 1954, the only child of Lucien and Denise Sante, Luc was raised in the Congo, where they had servants and a chauffeured car, but fled after independence; born in Verviers in 1954, Luc set fire to his Christian Brothers boarding school, killing five boys; born in Verviers in 1954, Luc idled away his youth as an international playboy; born in Verviers in 1954, Luc became a Jesuit priest and was appointed secretary to the papal nuncio in El Salvador.

The true story is that Sante, who was born in Verviers, a factory town in southern Belgium, in 1954, emigrated with her parents to New Jersey in 1959, but the job her father was promised turned out not to exist, so the family flew home. Ten months later they were back in New Jersey, but over the next few years Sante returned with her mother to Belgium for prolonged visits, which meant she was “unassimilable in two cultures”. When they settled in America for good, Sante had effectively immigrated four times. Now began the process of changing from “the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent”.

This was done “wilfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably”, Sante writes in The Factory of Facts, the plan being “to pass myself off as entirely self-made” until the “mask merged with my skin”. After winning a scholarship to Columbia University Sante left without taking her degree; she fell in love with the sleaze of New York, worked in the post room at the New York Review of Books and was encouraged by Barbara Epstein to write. But not even this version of events is correct, because it fails to take into account the central fact, which was also the central secret, of Sante’s life. I Heard Her Call My Name suggests a further alternative: born in Verviers in 1954, Lucy lived for sixty-seven years as a self-loathing, twice-married heterosexual man until, during lockdown, her “egg cracked”, as trans people call the moment of realization, and the chaos and confusion of the past all made sense.

Sante’s “dam burst”, she explains in I Heard Her Call My Name, when she fed a photograph of herself into an editing device called FaceApp, which creates a simulation of ourselves as younger, older or a different gender. Luc, bald with masculine features, was returned as Lucy, with a delicate, unlined face and long, luscious chestnut hair: “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch”. She then fed into the app every photograph of herself she could find, including those from childhood. Each time the lonely boy was returned as the happy, pretty and relaxed girl Sante should have been. A parallel life was constructed on the screen and she crossed through the “portal” into “another dimension”. Since the age of eleven she had been carrying around a repressed desire “the size of a house”, which thirty-eight years of psychoanalysis had failed to uncover. The week her egg cracked, Sante says, “the fortification of secrets I’d spent nearly sixty years building and reinforcing … crumbled to dust”.

In a dual narrative, Sante’s present-day descriptions of coming out to friends, colleagues and her (former) partner, Mimi, are interspersed with simulated photographs of her younger self as a girl and recollections from her past as a boy, now seen through the lens of body dysphoria: the failed emigration, the failed relationships, the failed attempt to be the son of a pious and violent mother who never stopped grieving for the baby daughter who died.

The past, Sante says in The Factory of Facts, is “a notional construct, a hypothesis, a poem”. It is also a crime scene, and when Sante writes about the past her imagination takes flight. Her first book, Low Life: Lures and snares of Old New York (1991), was an electrifying biography of the youth and adolescence of the city she describes as “an accident corridor”, “an implausible character”, a ruin in the making, “a creature”, like Sante herself, in a constant state of transition. “I was already fascinated”, she says of exploring Manhattan as a teenager, “by the strange process whereby the glamorous city of the 1920s had become the entropic slum that was my home”. A further transition took place when the “dead city … as dazzling and remote as Nineveh and Tyre”, was cleaned up in the 1980s and “replaced”, as the architect Rem Koolhaus puts it, “by another city”. Her second book, Evidence (1992), was a meditation on fifty-five glass-plate negatives thrown away by the NYPD, showing murder victims sprawled in alleys and stairwells between 1914 and 1918. Sante teaches a course on photography at Bard College, and it is striking that her transition was triggered by a photograph of a woman who never was.

Sante’s interest in transition began long before she came out as a woman, and The Factory of Facts and I Heard Her Call My Name should be read as two parts of a single volume. The emigrant self, she argues in The Factory of Facts, is an “archaeological site” that she approaches with forensic levels of attention. We are also, she suggests, the accretion of the cultures that surround us: “the impact of things seen and heard and smelled and tasted and endured in those few years before our clay hardened”. The self explored in The Factory of Facts is a speck in the background, a series of accidents, a missing person, the sediment of a history that is partly imagined, partly reconstructed, partly film footage. The absence of an “I” in The Factory of Facts is explained in I Heard You Call My Name – which is loaded down with personal pronouns – as the result of not knowing “who I was”. The two memoirs might be retitled Lost and Found: the stillborn Luc is explained by the reborn Lucy, who, lifted from the rubble and dusted down, is presented on a pedestal.

The uncovering of Lucy involves the invention of Lucy, which means finding the right wigs and age-appropriate clothes. Sante, whose love of clothes is akin to her love of poetry, music and painting, has always had opinions about collars and cuffs, patterns, fabrics, colours, layering and design. In the 1970s she spent entire days shopping; during lockdown shipments of women’s clothes were delivered daily to her home in Ulster, New York. Wanting for the first time to be seen, Sante now discovers the dangers of empire lines and flouncy tops, and the pleasures of boat necks, scoop necks, cardigans, ribbed tights, maxi-length skirts and three-quarter-length sleeves.

All memoirs are tales of metamorphosis in so far as they describe the movement from one state to another: childhood to adulthood, drunkenness to sobriety, misery to joy, ignorance to understanding, failure to success. The escape from the family/ marriage/country that stifles our growth is called, in writing classes, the narrative “arc”, and the aim of the memoirist is to measure the distance between the newly completed self and the former discarded self. But in terms of the seismic nature of the shift involved, the transition memoir mirrors the conversion memoir, both of which tend to say both everything and nothing about the experience. “When I am asked about my conversion”, wrote Muriel Spark, who became a Catholic in the middle of her life, “I can only say that the answer is both too easy and too difficult”. Conversion is not, said Cardinal Newman, who also defected to Rome, “a thing to be propounded between the soup and the fish … Let them be to the trouble that I have been to.”

Sante, on the other hand, talks nonstop about her transition. Coming out, she says, has become “an addiction”, and she comes out to everyone, less because she wants them to know than to experience herself telling a story without ruptures or fissures. Only by repeating the well-rehearsed narrative can she confirm that this new life isn’t a “remarkable dream existence”. She gives little cultural context for the emergence of Lucy; Andy Warhol’s self-portraits (in drag) go unmentioned, as does Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy. What Sante says about her transition is largely sartorial. That her theme will be clothes is confirmed by her epigraph, from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes”. Now that Sante is living in clarity, complexity should be avoided. Nothing is therefore said about why her response to first seeing herself cast as a woman on FaceApp was sexual arousal, while the question of genitalia (she takes hormones, but has not had surgery) is dealt with in a throwaway sentence: “No, my dysphoria was never centred on or even especially concerned with genitalia. (Although it is extremely exciting to have tits.)”

Before she became a Catholic, Spark explained, she had written with “other peoples’ voices”, but “I speak with my own voice as a writer now”. After her conversion, Spark’s life was “a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings”. Sante, who describes a similar sense of wholeness as a woman, also speaks with a different voice: her writing before her transition was higher-voltage than it is in these pages. The Factory of Facts, which did none of the things a conventional memoir ought to do, is a thrilling and unpredictable read because it is fuelled by inner conflict. In I Heard Her Call My Name, which conforms to the rubric of “who I am and how I got here”, that conflict is resolved. Again and again in The Factory of Facts, as Lucy Sante circles round and round the vast unspeakable secret, her prose reaches breaking point, but once the dam has burst and the egg has cracked, there is little for her writing to do. Once you have become the object of your own desire, the story has come to an end.

Frances Wilson’s books include Burning Man: The ascent of D. H. Lawrence, 2021

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