Making the Whole

The first time Lucy Sante’s name ever appeared in print was as a misprint in the New Providence Dispatch. Around the age of 12, Sante was the only boy among five winners of a school essay-writing competition. In I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, Sante commemorates this precocious feat by reproducing a clipping of the winners’ names with the y in “Lucy” scratched out.

Whether this erasure was performed by Sante’s own hasty hand is not elucidated. But clearly only one name would do when the writer, hitherto known as Luc Sante, decided to transition from male to female at the age of 66 and finally become Lucy.