Here She Comes Now

The writer Lucy Sante always tried to keep a safe distance from herself and her own desires.Until, at 66, she broke free.

- Carl Swanson

In the decades she lived her life before she came out as trans, at 66, the writer Lucy Sante constructed a sort of decoy self to get by in the world.

The aloof downtown intellectual, named Luc by her Belgian parents, is a poetic essayist with a magpie mind and a talent for archive spelunking. Her books-among them Low Life, The Other Paris, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times-are in many ways books made out of other books, close readings that conjure lost worlds. Sometimes she would lose herself: As she wrote in the preface to Low Life, her 1991 history of Manhattan's slums, and slumming, "At least once, late at night, and under the influence of alcohol and architecture and old copies of the Police Gazette, I staggered around looking for a dive that had closed 60 or 80 years before, half expecting to find it in mid-brawl."

But Sante never wrote much about her feelings. Her guard was always up, an observer. Photographs of the writer, from the '70s and '80s, in the prime of Sante's punk-flâneur cool, vibe a kind of reticent disdain-receding hairline, sunglasses, Gauloises-smoking, never, ever smiling.

It was, by all accounts, to her friends, colleagues, students, and romantic partners a mostly convincing presentation, difficult in some ways to untangle from her writing. Certainly, it inspired many readers to admire Sante's unsentimental erudition and seek to emulate it.