Lucy Sante made her adult life and literary fame in a freewheeling, bohemian Manhattan  full of drag festivals, iconic gay clubs, and, as she puts it, “seemingly thousands of wig stores.” A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books since her time as an assistant to editor Barbara Epstein in 1981, the Belgian American critic has written extensively on the Manhattan underground in books like 1991’s Low Life. Despite the countercultural circles she ran in, Sante repressed her private yearning for gender transition until the early months of 2021. After feeding her old photos into FaceApp’s gender-swapping feature, she found herself writing an email to close friends reintroducing herself as Lucy.

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of  Transition (Penguin Press, Feb. 13), explores Sante’s lifelong repression of her gender identity and the early days of  her transition. Our critic called it “an absorbing analysis of a long-standing search for identity in writing and in life.” Our editors have selected it as one of the best nonfiction books of 2024, and Sante recently answered our questions by email.

How did you approach the timeline of the book?

It was an engineering problem. I had two timelines of very different sizes—my first six months of transitioning vis-à-vis the whole panorama of my life. The only way to not have one outshout the other was to interleave them, which, incidentally, is an old trick for building suspense, by having two narratives constantly interrupt each other.

You write that you’d never kept a diary or journal until the “whirlwind” that followed your coming out. Did transition change your relationship to the written word?

It didn’t. It’s true that I Heard Her Call My Name was written much faster than anything I’ve previously done, but that’s all. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal because I’m lazy, and because in my teen years my mother would regularly raid my room and read everything she found, looking for sin. As I got older I realized something else: that writing down a memory seals the memory in the text. If it’s kept loose, it links to other memories organically and continues to bring forth forgotten details. If you’re going to commit a memory to print, be prepared to spend it, maybe once and for all.

In 1998, you published The Factory of Facts, a memoir that explored your relationship to Belgium. What was it like to revisit the genre through this new focal point?

It was an entirely different experience. Factory was intended to show where I came from, literally and in a deeper sense, so it was in effect a series of small histories that referred back to me but didn’t necessarily involve me. I Heard, on the other hand, was as urgent and as personal as you can get. Factory took six years to write; I Heard took two months.

Where do you do most of your writing?

In my basement office, in a 1920s oak rock-and-swivel office chair at a peeling green Parsons table that were given to me separately by friends in 1979—in and at which I’ve written almost everything I’ve published.

What were some of your favorite books published in 2024?

I get to things late, always, and all the more so as I’ve gotten older. I long ago lost the urge to keep up with culture as it happens. So just a few titles, [some of which] I blurbed: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, Do Something by Guy Trebay, Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane, and Candy Darling by Cynthia Carr.

Sasha Fox Carney is an Indie editorial assistant.