Book Review: I Heard Her Call My Name

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante, A Poetic Memoir of Identity, Memory, and Rediscovery

Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name is a luminous memoir of transition at age 67. As a memoir by a respected cultural critic, it is also a profoundly human story of a trans woman claiming her truth later in life.

Sante’s narrative is a poetic memoir—not because it’s written in verse, but because of the lyrical structure, emotional precision, and distilled power of her language. She writes in fragments, memories, and vignettes, letting the story unfold with the rhythm and pacing of poetry. She describes gender dysphoria as “a faint high-pitched sound only I could hear”—a poetic rendering of lifelong identity dissonance. The narrative is non-linear, giving the book a musical, meditative quality.

Prior to publishing her memoir, Sante was known as a cultural historian and critic, authoring works like Low Life, The Factory of Facts, and Evidence—exploring hidden histories of power, identity, and belonging. In her memoir, she turns the lens inward. Known for her extensive research, here the archive she studies is her own life, and the obscured history is her truest self.

Sante writes about decades of impersonating a man, feeling estranged in her own skin. Her decision to transition in her 60s was the resurrection of a deeply held identity. The city of San Francisco appears several times in her book as an influence on her life. For Sante, it was part of her becoming; for my sister Martine, it was the last chapter. Lucy Sante’s memoir was recently reviewed in the Bay Area Reporter—San Francisco’s long-standing LGBTQ+ newspaper—on Sunday, March 9, 2025—offering a voice of affirmation in the very city where Martine’s voice was lost. (Read the review.)

When I read the opening line, “I was born in Belgium in 1954, and now I live in Ulster County, New York, and I am a woman,” I was taken aback. Martine was born that same year. They were girls of the same generation, though neither was allowed to claim that truth aloud. They were shaped by the same mid-century gender roles, Cold War fears, and the stark binaries of their time. They came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, decades simultaneously bursting with countercultural energy and suffocating in their hostility toward trans people.

Sante, raised in New Jersey, found her way to downtown Manhattan. Martine, raised in the Deep South, did not survive her 20s. She died in a single-room occupancy hotel in San Francisco in 1982. Sante’s memoir helped me imagine what Martine, herself a writer, might have written, if she had lived.

I Heard Her Call My Name is structured in a double weave, alternating between Sante’s recent transition as a trans woman in her 60s and the decades of her prior life. She narrates the audiobook. When I came upon a section in which she reflects on the burdens carried by transgender people their age, I began to think of her as Martine’s peer. When she began to describe her life beyond the age of 29, when Martine died, I considered what Martine might have similarly experienced, had she lived. Each time Sante interweaves her personal story with the larger social and cultural context, I find myself imagining Martine’s life in the context she describes. Sante writes about the "bohemian" circles where she associated with gay and trans individuals. The setting is mostly in New York, where she lived, but she also references these circles as they existed in San Francisco.

Some chapters take the form of essays or ponderings on particular topics: aging, which Martine did not experience; creativity, which Martine expressed as a poet, writer, and artist; and the nature of identity itself. Sante’s thoughts on the nature of identity resonated with and expanded my thinking about gender.

As Sante gives the history of the AIDS epidemic and her personal experience of losing people she cared about, I considered how I once thought Martine might have died of AIDS. However, I asked a coroner to review her autopsy when I was a hospital chaplain and was told she had no signs of it. She would have been at high risk for AIDS, living in San Francisco at the cusp of its emergence. 

I am inspired by Sante’s candor, empathy, straightforward and evocative descriptions, and the haunting way in which her story continues to live in my head and heart.