September 1, 2023
Celebrated Belgian-born critic/author Sante is known for books like Low Life and contributions to the New York Review of Books. Then, in 2021, came the announcement that after living a lifetime cloaked uncomfortably in a male body, Sante intended to transition to being a woman. This memoir recounts her life overall while carefully chronicling the process of transitioning and the embrace of a new self. Prepub Alert.
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December 1, 2023
An award-winning writer chronicles her late-in-life gender transition. This memoir charts Sante's recent transition from male to female in her late 60s. Her commentary alternates between explaining the challenges of her decision and reflecting on earlier moments in a life marked by gender dysphoria. The author provides detailed and engaging descriptions of the process of transitioning, from choices about makeup, clothing, and drug therapies, to making connections with community support groups and handling the delicate protocols of coming out to friends and co-workers. Sante delivers sharply rendered sketches of bohemian New York, where the author has spent much of her life. At the beginning of the book, Sante describes how she experimented with FaceApp's "gender-swapping feature." Looking at the digitally altered images--many of them included here--produced "one shock of recognition after another" and the sense that what she saw was "exactly who I would have been" at various stages of her life, from childhood to middle age. In tracking her own long-standing self-evasions, Sante offers perceptive commentary on the psychological dynamics that led her to delay the process of fully assuming a female identity. A poignant irony, sensitively explored over the course of the memoir, is that her writing career sought to expose important truths in the social communities she inhabited, especially among those with nonconformist lifestyles, while privately she denied a fundamental truth about herself. Also insightful is Sante's broader societal analysis, which locates her struggles within a culture that seems to both covertly acknowledge and severely punish gender fluidity. The memoir concludes with a justifiable expression of hope that the author's experiences might be instructive to those seeking to understand transition and the personal and social complexities it can pose. An absorbing analysis of a long-standing search for identity in writing and life.
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January 1, 2024
At 66 years old, Sante was ready to tell her friends and family the truth about herself. In this poignant, arresting, and ultimately affirming memoir, Sante details coming out as transgender and transitioning from Luc to Lucy. From her challenging relationship with her mother, who always wanted a daughter, to the fits and starts of her writing career, Sante traces a lifetime burdened by her secret. She draws parallels between transitioning and the immigrant experience. After her family permanently settled in the U.S., she rarely thought about the relatives they had left behind in Belgium, even as she worked to translate between cultures and languages daily. Understanding her trans identity took years of navigating between self-knowledge and denial. Sante unpacks how this affected her friendships, her marriages to women, and the romantic relationship she was in when she came out as trans. She navigates everything from bad wigs and fashion choices to physically moving like a woman, finding the protective masculine behaviors vanishing, and removing the imitation of maleness she'd been performing all along.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from March 4, 2024
In this miraculous memoir, New York Review of Books critic Sante (Nineteen Reservoirs) recounts the story of her life in light of her gender transition at age 66. After passing a few photos through FaceApp’s gender swapping feature in early 2021, Sante recognized herself as the person she’d always been: a woman. This epiphany (or “egg cracking”) unleashed a flood of revelations, which Sante unpacks in parallel timelines—one covering her younger years, the other focusing on the days and months after her FaceApp-facilitated breakthrough. In the former sections, Sante describes her experiences as a child immigrating to the U.S. from Belgium in the 1960s, as a young adult partying and making friends in 1970s and ’80s New York City, and as a cultural critic. In the latter timeline, she recounts coming out to friends, colleagues, and the public, and depicts the strain her transition put on her relationship with her partner, Mimi, as she struggled through feelings of envy and shame. With piercing insight and a formidable command of language, Sante molds the material into a trenchant self-portrait that’s equal parts humorous (she wryly gives her coming-out email the subject line “A Bombshell”) and hard-nosed. This is a major achievement. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary.