Good morning!
To start this week’s newsletter with some exciting news, Time Sensitive has been named a finalist in the Interview/Talk Show (Individual Episode) category in the 2024 Webby Awards, for Ep. 102 with the novelist Min Jin Lee. If you’ve been enjoying the show, it would mean so much to us if you’d take a moment and vote for us here. (I’m also thrilled to report that Time Sensitive was named an “honoree” in the overall Arts & Culture Podcast category.)
For our latest episode, I sat down with the writer Lucy Sante, whose new book, I Heard Her Call My Name (Penguin Press), pieces together the first six months of her recent gender transition, at age 66, with various piercing moments from throughout her life. It is a radical work, and may be the most fearless, searingly self-reflective memoir I’ve ever read. As much a meditation on time, family, and ancestry as it is on her transition, the book contemplates lost time and what it was like for her to carry around this secret—her womanhood—for six decades.
In preparation for the interview, I read a stack of six more books by Sante: Low Life (1991), Kill All Your Darlings (2007), Folk Photography (2009), The Other Paris (2015), Maybe People Would Be the Times (2020), and Nineteen Reservoirs (2022). Collectively, these texts prove Sante to be one of the more roving, imaginative minds of our time, someone unusually adept at exploring and uncovering vanishing—or almost entirely vanished—worlds of yore. For example, Low Life looks at the history of New York City’s underbelly between the years of 1840 and 1920, Folk Photography examines the emergence of the photo-real postcard in the early 20th century, and Nineteen Reservoirs investigates the story behind the network of reservoirs and aqueducts built across a million-plus acres in upstate New York between 1907 and 1967. Her journey from Low Life to Folk Photography was “a result of immersing myself in the world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” she tells me on the episode. “I practically lived there for about twenty years, actually.”
It would not be a reach to describe much of Sante’s writing as “time travel.” Which makes me think of something she notes in the introduction to Low Life, about living on the Lower East Side in the 1980s while researching and writing it: “I would almost lose track of what year it was outside. 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 sixty or eighty years before, half expecting to find it in mid-brawl.”
Firmly rooted in the past, Sante’s writing illuminates so much about who we are and how we got here—but also, in roundabout ways, where we might be going. Her next book will focus on the 1960s—“a kind of magic time,” as she describes it on the episode—through the lens of The Velvet Underground. I can’t wait to lose myself in it.
—Spencer
