I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

About three years ago, Sante, a writer in her mid-60s known until then as Luc, sent to a few dozen close friends a piece of writing titled "Lucy," a tender, exact, joyful, and terrified confession and declaration that she, feeling "something liquefy in the core of my body," was ready to take a step she had dreamed of (when she allowed herself to) for nearly her whole life: to publicly transition to being a woman. It's a choice not uncommon now, but Sante brings to it the wisdom and regret and exhilaration of a decision made late in life, as well as the wry, frank, chiseled style that has long made her one of my favorite writers. She tells this story in parallel: the cracking of her egg, as the trans phrase goes, in the present alongside a memoir of a bohemian life in which almost anything felt possible, except what she most wanted.