What To Read

From an award-winning writer, critic, and artist comes a powerful memoir which follows the arc of author's life but with a particular focus on her gender transition at the age of nearly 70.

As part of our First Dibs Editors Salon in January, we will provide Tertulia members with an advance preview of I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante, along with a few other notable forthcoming books, in an exclusive event featuring the editors who brought them to life. Learn more.

The book's acquiring editor, Scott Moyers (Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Press), selected this book for the salon and shared this personal note with Tertulia readers. 

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante (February 13)

A note from Scott Moyers (Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Press)

A number of years ago I was thrilled to acquire another book entirely by Lucy Sante, and was waiting for it with high anticipation. Well, I still look forward to that book with great anticipation but sometimes, life intrudes – an author has a major pivot that demands to be reckoned with. 

I had an intimation that this would happen for Lucy along with everyone else, when I read the beautiful personal essay she wrote sharing her decision to change her gender identity, in Vanity Fair. A bit later, when the other shoe dropped, and she and Joy Harris, her literary agent, broached her desire to write this memoir of transitioning, I was moved and delighted. My expectations were high, and she exceeded them with the book she wrote. It’s a work of artful method that reads like a letter to a friend, a beautifully controlled contrapuntal memoir in which the story of her transitioning is in dialogue with a second line that follows the whole life arc from a childhood raised by deeply Catholic working-class Belgian émigré parents, tracing her fumbling efforts to wrestle with her submerged identity in the larger context of her efforts to forge her own path as a successful artist, lover, friend, citizen. Mistakes were made, needless to say.

This book is a small but mighty engine for generating empathy, insight, and ultimately inspiration – there’s great pathos in taking on board how hard it is to be misaligned in such a fundamental way, and joyful admiration in seeing Sante finally, after all those years, grasp the nettle and do the hard, needful thing. We feel how that has made all the difference.  Obviously, the core experience is a specific kind of transitioning, and on that level this book is essential reading, but in a larger sense this is relevant to so many kinds of transitioning that are hard but needful, that require courage, even if few require this degree of it.  We all have our inheritance, and it’s on us to make sense of it, and choose what to do from there.  What are we waiting for? I love this book, and am so excited to be on the cusp of publishing it.

 – Scott Moyers, Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Press