Lucy Sante was an established and highly regarded author of nonfiction books and essays when she chose to transition in her 60's. The journey to gender transitioning or body dysphoria is difficult to understand. It's best understood when explained by someone who has transitioned what it feels to be born into a body that doesn't conform with one's self-perception. Sante's writing is powerful when describing her mindset of hesitation and determination to transition. "Gender dysphoria had permeated my life...there seemed to be no domain unaffected by it...There was not a second of my life when I wasn't pinned under the klieg lights of self-consciousness. Even when I was alone I was being watched." Sante felt too ladened with unnecessary information from decades past, overburdening and underwhelming the reader. She is most eloquent and poignant when emoting. "Once my egg finally cracked" and "the dam has burst. The weight of my secret could not be underestimated. I could fully measure its effects as they left me. I no longer felt timid; I didn't give a hoot about being judged. I felt like I owned my body, maybe for the first time." Unfortunately, she belabors the impact of her turmoil and detracts from empathizing with her emotional welfare before and after. As a critic, an award winning writer of nonfiction, contributing writer to "NY Review of Books" and editor, Sante's should have realized her writing required critical editing. Too much dwelling in her doldrums and detailing her either errant or non-existent social life makes the memoir excruciatingly arid. Her self-described Bohemian years spent among a few artistic celebrities felt forced and tedious. The memoir breakthroughs when she is expressing her heartfelt longing. "I wanted with every particle of my being to be a woman, and thought it was pasted to my windshield, and yet, I looked through it, having trained myself to do so." Sante has stated in recent interviews her concern for having come out now, it may be perceived as a ploy for publicity or as weakness on her part for waiting until public opinion to be more accepting. Her lifelong, obsessive worry of how she felt perceived overshadows her six decades, quelling her resolve. The photos depicting how she would have appeared had she transitioned over the decades were intriguing. Though I felt surprised, but relieved, her regret for years lost did not outweigh her current happiness ."It was what I should have been able to do long before, and at every point in between, but couldn't. Now that the world had shifted slightly, I was on the moving sidewalk at last. All the objections and hesitations-I was on the moving sidewalk at last; that I was too old; that I was dooming myself to loneliness;...that perhaps I didn't deserve to be a woman-faded away in the light of my resolve." I suggest reading Lucy's current interviews as they are more concise and enlightening than her over indulgent memoir.
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