I Heard Her Call My Name

A memoir of transition

By: Lucy Sante

Narrated by: Lucy Sante

Brought to you by Penguin.

Lucy Sante has often felt like an outsider. Born in Belgium to conservative Catholic working-class parents, she was transplanted to the United States without ever entirely settling here. But a feeling of home finally arrived when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s amidst her fellow bohemians. Through those electric years, some of her friends would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and others would become jarringly famous. Lucy flirted with both fates, on her way to building a glittering career as a writer. But she could never shake that feeling.

When she was finally ready, Lucy decided to confront the façade she’d been presenting to everyone, including herself, over these years. I Heard Her Call My Name is the story of that confrontation, of a life with a missing piece that with transition, falls into place. This a memoir of grace and wit that parses the issues of gender identity and far beyond with unbounding humility and hope.

©2024 Lucy Sante (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

An astonishing, once-in-a-lifetime achievement, as two stories thread into one, from losing yourself in the lights, the sounds, the eyes of others, to the miraculous discovery of the language with which you can put yourself back together (Hua Hsu, author of Stay True)

Radical, humble, and wise, Sante’s account of discovery is the most generous of gifts — a book to treasure, and a memoir that will enter the canon of twenty-first-century greats (Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue)

I've admired the utter clarity and authority of Lucy Sante's work for years, and I was deeply moved by how she tunneled through the specificity of her experiences to create this vivid, encompassing, and compassionate book (Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X)

A generous, fearlessly revealing book, full of heart. Lucy Sante brings a reader through her transition, a story that moves across continents, time, and discovery. It is revitalising. Sante’s dedication to truth asks beautifully honest questions: Who deserves to be a woman? What do we contain? What is it to live, survive, to thrive? This celebration of womanhood is fresh air you will want to breathe in deeply (Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book and The Seas)