Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis treatments she must undergo instead.
The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps.
I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.
Reading “I Heard Her Call My Name” sometimes put me in mind of a throwaway line from “Detransition, Baby,” Torrey Peters’s shrewd 2021 novel: “Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.” Sante’s wrestling with her vanity also brings out some of this book’s darkest moments. She is subject to intense moments of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. There is a bleakly funny moment when, on a friend’s Instagram, she sees a photo of “a wig atop an upright stick, and I felt an instant shock of recognition.”
Sante writes that, from nearly the beginning, she absorbed every cultural detail that had to do with “the matter of boys changing into girls.” She filed all this material away. “It was the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” Was it a sign that her first sexual experience, as young Luc, involved a trip to the emergency room because of a uniquely painful condition called phimosis, “a congenital narrowing of the opening of the foreskin so that it cannot be retracted”? (Talk of genitalia is otherwise mostly elided in this memoir.) She would go on to marry twice and to have a son.
The urge to transition became undeniable during Covid. In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.
