Since childhood, the writer Lucy Sante — formerly Luc Sante — knew she was transgender. In a recent online message to librarians interested in her new book, “I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition,” Sante says she knew at age 9 or 10: “It was the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” As she puts it in the book, Sante’s “egg cracked” in 2021, when she wrote an email to about 30 friends announcing the news. “The fortification of secrets I’d spent nearly sixty years building and reinforcing had crumbled to dust in a little over a week,” she writes.

“I Heard Her Call My Name” is a two-tier narrative, bouncing between Sante’s experience of her transition in 2021 and the details of her entire life. Best known as a writer of essays on art and culture at the New York Review of Books and as the author of the wonderful “Low Life” (1991), about the less-glamorous corners of New York City at the turn of the 20th century, Sante recently retired after 24 years teaching at Bard College. This new book is about the often paralyzing cost of trying to live two different lives: as a man or a woman, but also as a human being and a writer.

Sante was born in 1954 in Belgium. Her mother had previously suffered the stillbirth of a daughter. “The death certificate is the only proof I have that she existed at all, but she was nonetheless a living presence throughout my childhood. My mother could not let go of her,” Sante writes. “Sometimes she was a phantom, sometimes she was my imaginary playmate and bedfellow, and sometimes she was me.”

When Sante won an Arbor Day essay contest at school as a 12-year-old, the winners appeared in the local paper. “I was the only boy,” Sante writes. “When a photo of the five of us was published in the New Providence Dispatch, I appeared in the caption as ‘Lucy Sante.’” A typo of momentous proportions. It seemed fated — and yet, what followed were decades of struggle, of half-life.

Sante writes: “I see how close my trans identity was to the surface in my adolescence and twenties, when I was completely befuddled about it, almost totally ignorant, and had no idea what to do but try to escape it.” Living in New York in the ’70s, there was little to dissuade Sante from pursuing that call from Lucy. But she was driven into denial by fear. Sante spent most of the ’70s at clubs like CBGB and Max’s taking amphetamine-based “black beauties” and rubbing elbows with Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis and Patti Smith. (“I was instantly in love, and I also wanted to be her.”) She describes passing through the same circles as “[trans artist] Greer Lankton and [trans model] Teri Toye, although I was too scared to ever talk to them; they seemed like mythological creatures come to earth.”

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But even if New York in the ’70s — the city of “ruins,” as Sante writes, “the ruins of ideals, of struggles, of the university, of the city, of housing, of transit, of expectations, of ambitions” — didn’t help affirm her gender identity, becoming Barbara Epstein’s assistant at the New York Review of Books gave her the greatest gift a writer can receive: “the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. It’s the reason I can write meaningfully on an array of subjects, without being an expert on any of them; it’s the reason I’m able to write this book.”

Diving headlong into adulthood, Sante got married, not once but twice, became a father, and used the tools she had learned “from the Jesuits” (“I was brought up in strict and even fanatical Catholic observance”) to act as her own judge, jury and executioner; her guilt, in the form of denial, self-consciousness and pure terror, would stifle any peep Lucy tried to make. As the writer Hélène Cixous puts it in “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing”: “Each human being’s story is always the greatest and cruelest of stories. We are the ones who reduce and annihilate them to nothing.”

Of course, coming out as trans is nothing less than earth-shattering, but most of Sante’s friends, at least the female ones, were not surprised. Less than two weeks after the initial email to friends, Sante wrote one retracting — or at least qualifying — her statement, saying she was “sticking with Luc for now” but would be “in daily conversation with Lucy.” She now calls this follow-up letter, which she never sent, a “desperate flailing attempt” to preserve a 14-year romantic relationship. “In a larger sense, it was caused by my inability to square my gender identity with my attraction to women.” There was also her reputation as a writer to consider. “Would I be risking my public identity as a writer by changing it?” And: “Do I deserve this?” Could there be a more devastating question than whether we deserve to live our lives as ourselves?

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Reading this book is a joy. Sante is funny and warm, and her new life (or her newfound ownership of her life) gives her journey, in retrospect, a rosy tint. But Sante is aware that a transition of gender identity isn’t as relatively comfortable for everyone. “Not only am I lucky to have had my egg crack at something close to the last minute, I’m also lucky to have survived my own repression,” she writes. “I suspect that many in my position have not.”

Sante is partly able to square her identity as a woman and a writer, she says, because her writing has never been about her gender. “I was still very much aware of the presence of Luc, whom I sometimes liked to think of as my sad-sack ex-husband. It would happen to me that if I had been writing … or had gotten into a conversation about books, say, I would suddenly look up and realize that I felt genderless. And that made sense because my work had always been my refuge from the rest of my life, hence divorced from gender.”

“I Heard Her Call My Name” has much to say about the trans journey and will undoubtedly become a standard for those in need of guidance. But the book speaks to a wider audience, too: for anyone who needs to break out of their self-imposed “prison of denial,” as Sante puts it, or to stop punishing themselves for wanting what they want. When Sante told a younger friend in an online forum that she had come out, the friend responded, “The sky out my window literally just brightened.”

Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif., and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”

I Heard Her Call My Name

A Memoir of Transition

By Lucy Sante

Penguin Press. 226 pp. $27

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