Transcript for Writing Our Lives: Natasha Trethewey & Lucy Sante on Memoir Writing
Episode details can be found here.
Transcript:
Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road podcast and I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I'm a co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.
The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917 and, since then, a lot has changed. To reflect shifts in journalism, literature, drama, and music, the Prizes have expanded. That first year, they gave out just four Prizes. Now we have 23 categories. And one of the Prizes we've added since I joined the board is Memoir or Autobiography.
When we decided to add this category in 2023, it was because we noticed the growing genre of first-person stories. And we felt like these stories deserved their own recognition separate from the Biography Prize.
So on today's episode, I'm excited to share a conversation between two authors who have written memoirs, Natasha Trethewey and Lucy Sante. Natasha's acclaimed 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, was a New York Times Bestseller.
Natasha Trethewey: The reason that I wrote Memorial Drive was that I was really tired of parts of my story being told for me.
Lucy Sante: Oh, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Or about me. If someone wrote a newspaper article about me, the facts of my trauma of losing my mother. You know, my mother was murdered when I was 19. She would be mentioned as an afterthought, just sort of this murdered woman. And was sort of being written out of the story of me becoming a writer.
Lucy Sante: Mhmm.
Natasha Trethewey: That's what made me decide to write it.
Nicole Carroll: Lucy Sante's book, I Heard Her Call My Name was a 2025 Pulitzer finalist for Memoir.
Lucy Sante: If I'd grown up today in a culture where the matter of being transgender was something known, I would've known, at least by age nine, that I was trans. In any case, there was something that I couldn't name because I thought I was the only person in the world that ever experienced this for years, but I had to keep living my life. But you know, the fact is that I'm perfectly prepared to reveal everything.
Nicole Carroll: While both Natasha and Lucy have written memoirs, their work spans across multiple literary genres. Natasha is an award-winning poet and Pulitzer Prize Board member. She served twice as the U.S. Poet Laureate. And in 2007, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book, Native Guard.
Lucy Sante is a renowned cultural critic and the author of ten books, including Low Life – which is a history of New York – and a previous memoir called The Factory of Facts.
Since Natasha and Lucy's work moves across multiple genres, we thought they would be a great fit for a conversation we hosted at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference – also known as AWP.
AWP is a nonprofit literary organization and their annual conference attracts about 10,000 writers, students, educators, and publishing professionals from around the country. This year, the conference took place in Baltimore, Maryland.
Here's Natasha Trethewey in conversation with Lucy Sante.
[applause]
Natasha Trethewey: Welcome everyone. I'm Natasha Trethewey, and for those of you who've not read Lucy's gorgeous memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, I wanna tell you a little bit about it. Revisiting her past through the lens of her present, Lucy tells a moving story of metamorphosis and the years of thinking and feeling that preceded it. She reflects on her years of gender dysphoria alongside other sources of unhappiness, unease, and discontent, rooted in self-doubt, her parents' class anxieties, immigrant experience, and the residue of her Catholic upbringing. A significant thread pulled through I Heard Her Call My Name begins with an app. Lucy uses a face app that can take a photo and give back a different gender. In Lucy's case, showing her an aspect of her true self, the woman she has always felt herself to be. The life she could have been living even before she was able to merge the inner self with the outer. The transformation of her appearance in the photos the app gives back is akin to looking in a mirror and finally seeing your inner self reflected there. It also spoke to me as a memoir of aging. Lucy transitions later in life at the same time that mirrors begin to give back images that don't necessarily coincide with how we see ourselves, the younger selves still inside us. From the beginning, I was struck by the intimacy of the voice, the kinship it created. It was as if I was reading things about myself. So similar were a lot of our experiences. It's a compelling journey of selfhood and of becoming, and it taught me things that connected me to my own very different experience of becoming.
Growing up [as a] mixed-race, Black girl in Mississippi and Georgia in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties, I had a kind of double consciousness. I wanted to be seen for who I was on the inside, the content of my character. In a time and place entrenched in troubling ideas about race. A place where most white people, including my beloved father, harbored or could not fully unyoke themselves from deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference and hierarchy. Which meant that they saw me through that lens based on their perceptions of Blacks, of women, a cause of some of my own childhood dysphoria. Beyond the immediately compelling voice and elegant prose, I love this book because it made me think about the nature of being. To what extent and at what point do we truly know ourselves? How many transformations do we undergo throughout our lives? What parts of who we are do we keep hidden? What is the role of denial in the creation of the self? What masks do we wear and who might we become if we allow the mask to slip? How many of us find, as Lucy puts it, proof of an essential truth about the self, wherein self-doubt falls away? Lucy, I'm so delighted to be here with you, and I'm wondering if you would start us off by reading a passage from this book?
Lucy Sante: Sure. Thank you, Natasha. That was lovely.
"For months, I was preoccupied with the matter of my name. I knew perfectly well that my name was Lucy. Over the decades, I had occasionally toyed with alternate names. I liked Louise, Betty, Julie, Collette, Simon, Florence. I thought of just dropping my first name in favor of my middle name assigned at birth, Marie, but Lucy stuck. It had nothing to do with any Lucys I had met, but went straight back to my appearance as Lucy in a picture caption typo in a small suburban gazette when I was 12. The name had taken root in my brain and defeated all comers. That wasn't the problem. What concerned me was my byline. I'd been chatting on the phone with Jamie, a painter and filmmaker I'd known for 40 years, and who had transitioned a few years before me. She told me that her gallery had decided that her work would have to be keep being exhibited and sold in her name James, since a mid-career switch would confuse the market. The decision was rescinded a bit later, but before I was aware of that, I fretted for months about over whether I should do the same. I asked everybody I knew for their opinion. I thought of the strange attributions one sometimes found on detective novels. John Creasey writing as Michael Halliday. In my notebook I even wrote out a speculative opening for my memoir, should I ever write one. This book is by Luc Sante, although it was written by Lucy Sante. I wasn't so much worried about the market and its possible confusions as I was worried about the continuity of my writing, by which I really meant the continuity of myself. A one letter alteration might at worse make people think the byline belonged to a close relative, maybe. My family name, which does not mean health, and in fact is not even French, it's Walloon and it comes from the Walloon for Alexander. It's extremely rare and all bearers of it, unless they change to it from some less wieldy name (another language) can trace their ancestry back to my hometown. As far as I've been able to determine, I'm the only person in the world to bear either my current or my former name, so nobody would remain confused for long. My own confusion had more to do with the arbitrary line between public and private selves. I published my first professional piece of writing in the New York Review of Books in 1981 when I was 27. I'd been writing since I was a child and had published poems and stories in little magazines since my teens, but suddenly being paid for writing was something else again. It was an actual profession and I had to learn its protocols. My first 10 years were an apprenticeship. I published various kinds of literary journalism and magazines and newspapers, and rigorously avoided the word 'I.' The act was something of an impersonation. I was playing a character more worldly and sophisticated than I actually was, so I had to keep my real self tightly buttoned up. Parens, (when I first began submitting work, fruitlessly to Rolling Stone and other magazines when I was 14, I made sure to sign the cover letter, 'Mr. Luc Sante', so they'd know I was both male and adult.) [laughter] Naturally I was all but overcome by imposter syndrome. Even when I did start writing about aspects of my own life, I was careful to keep the rest curtained off. In the late 1990s, I published The Factory of Facts, an actual memoir, although I tried to absent myself from the story or at most to depict myself as the squiggle in an architectural elevation. I wanted to show my whole background presenting the history of my family, the history of my native town, the history of Belgium, the history of Belgian immigration, and so on. But actually rendering my own face and my own emotion would, I claimed, reduce and standardize the narrative. I thought this demurral was a measure of my seriousness, but of course I was dodging self depiction because I didn't want to be seen. And I didn't wanna be seen because I didn't know who I was. I don't know how much I let myself be aware that the duality of nationalities and cultures mirrored another duality within, but I'm sure I never surmised that metamorphosis would be something I'd experienced more than once." Thank you. [applause]
Natasha Trethewey: Thank you, Lucy. I wanna talk a little bit with you about beginnings and also about the impulse to actually write a memoir. I had to teach a class once, a graduate course on life writing, is what I called it. And I think we — you and I both have a little bit of anxiety around whether we use the term memoir — but I was calling it life writing. I'd never done this before. Never taken a class like that myself. So I had my student, I decided to focus on beginnings and the first thing I had my students read was the beginning of The Factory of Facts. And I asked them to do this prompt. I wanted them to write. Several paragraphs and each one was a factual origin story. A counterfactual origin story. An origin story that might have been, but for some random occurrence that changed the course of history. An origin story you have fantasized about or wished for, instead of your actual origins. An origin story that is factual and highlights different elements of the story. A true origin story that is not necessarily factual. The Factory of Facts makes me think about all of those things because in the opening chapter resume, each paragraph begins the same way with some version of these words, "I was born on May 25th, 1954 in Verviers, Belgium, the only child of Lucien and Denise Sante, following the bankruptcy of my father's employer, an iron foundry that manufactured wool carting machinery." But each paragraph tells a drastically different origin story. And what interested me about this beginning is the way that it establishes the speaker as either a fabulist, an unreliable narrator or someone very much wanting to create a version of the self based on which particular story is told. Assuming that each one has some kernel of truth in it. And what echoes the idea of The Factory of Facts, the idea of invention, the way a writer chooses the particular details while leaving out others in order to tell a particular story. So I'm wondering, after all of that that I just said, can you talk a little bit about the idea behind those beginnings—
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —In The Factory of Facts before we move back to the beginnings in this one?
Lucy Sante: Oh, sure. So I set out to write this book about, you know, where I come from, my immigration story, but all the weird things about it. I had no idea how to start and I took a nap and I woke up in this kind of dizzy state and I was writing something completely different at the time on the side. And I was very, very much fascinated by the notion of the folk lyric. That is these lines that exist in songs in blues and country and folk that just drift from song to song. And at the same time, I was remembering an assignment that Kenneth Koch, my poetry teacher at Columbia, gave us once, which was to write a boasting poem. And somehow these two ideas merged, but their offspring was something very different. And each of those nine versions of the tale, of which the first one is correct and the eighth others are fictional. But what they do is, and you know, this is, I didn't, I can't claim responsibility for this. This is my subconscious that arranged all this. It turns out that it chooses our immigration to United States as a pivot. And then all the other variations represent hopes and primarily fears that were ambient. I was too young at the time to have my own thoughts about the subject, but these are things that I felt reflected off my parents. I kind of gave voice to my parents' worst nightmares and a couple of their fantasies.
Natasha Trethewey: And you come back in I Heard Her Call My Name and almost use that same opening again.
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: I was born in 19, you know, again, but then tell another version that we'd not even seen before.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: So, can you talk a little bit about that, about writing more than one metamorphosis story?
Lucy Sante: Right. Well, you know, it's been spooky. I mean, this, through this whole process, thinking about passing, for example, I mean, I shouldn't be concerned with that in my ancient age, but I do because we're human. And I remember how my childhood was spent passing, I mean, when we were, we first came to the United States when I was not quite five, but then we went back and went back and forth and then, you know, finally settled here when I was around, like, eight. And right away, I mean, I started American school not knowing a word of English. Um the nun told me that it was hot and I should take off my sweater. I didn't understand and she started taking off my sweater and I only had a shirt collar dickie underneath. You know, it was like all these misunderstandings and then it felt like, and in some ways, you know, even at my advanced age, it sometimes still feels like I'm trying to figure out how the Americans behave and behave accordingly and I was always measuring myself against that. There were those nuances I would never get. And uh, as I was transitioning, these parallels, which were not quite exact, of course they mean different things, but there was still a kind of habit of thought that just carried over. And, you know, it made me feel like my whole experience of life was really, coming into, well, I mean, everybody comes into the world naked and learns how to adapt, but I came into the world naked twice and um, had to figure it out all out by myself. You know, my parents were no help and even though I didn't, they were, they've been dead for a while now, but they would not have been a help [in] this transition either. I didn't have a rule book. I, you know, I just had to invent.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm. You know, you mentioned passing, and that's another one of those things that I feel like we have in common.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: My first poems when I decided that I was going to write poetry were actually about passing—
Lucy Sante: Hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —Um, trying to. And the the kind of shame that I felt—
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: bout it. My first poem was called one of them. And, um, it was about the experience of when I started eighth grade at a new school. It was the high school and my grandmother had come up from Mississippi 'cause this was, you know, exciting starting the new school. And she and my mother drove me to the school on the weekend for the orientation. And this was a school that I was being bussed into. Uh, in Atlanta, we still had this, uh, bussing program called, uh, M-to-M, and it was Majority-to-Minority. So if you lived in a neighborhood where your race was in the majority, you could choose to be bussed to one where you were
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: In the minority. And a lot of kids from my neighborhood chose this white school. Simply because it had better resources.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: It was brand new. And so we drive up to the school and I jump out of the car and I run in trying to put distance between me and my grandmother and my mother thinking that I'll go into this new school and they won't know what I am. It was a tremendous source of shame.
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: And it took a long time to, to get over that and trying to write about it, um, in the very beginning. It's a thing that I have not returned to in quite the same way in poetry. But it is a thing that I will return to now that I'm at work on another memoir.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: Now that is a different story.
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: That I will tell than my previous memoir, Memorial Drive. So beginnings, in I Heard Her Call My Name you begin with the text of an email attachment—
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: That you sent to your closest friends. It was about your moment of reckoning that was set off by that face app that you did, and you called it Lucy. When you were writing that letter, I, I'm assuming that that's the first writing that you did about the transition or about deciding.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: Um, but did you know at that moment that you were going to write a memoir?
Lucy Sante: No.
Natasha Trethewey: Or at what point did you decide that?
Lucy Sante: No, I did not. Actually, the thing is when, well, one thing in the book, if you haven't seen it, is it's interspersed with photographs because really what cracked my egg was passing photographs from entirety of my life really through this thing called Face App, where we could change genders photographically. And I realize it's an AI tool, probably. But anyway, when I was doing this, my first thought wasn't even, 'Holy shit, that's me.' My first thought was, 'I've gotta make a book of these photographs.' Before I thought of writing a memoir, I thought, the photo part of me thought this. And then in, in the summer of, uh, when was it? Summer of 2022, I realized I'm gonna write this memoir and I wrote a first chapter that was all apologetics. It was all, well, I know I'm old and I know that I'm imperfect and you know, I'm not in step with the youthful trans community and, and on and on and on and on. And I showed it to my friend Darryl Pinckney, good friend for 53 years now, my first reader for a long time. And he said, "Forget about it. Just print that letter you sent to everybody." And I thought, wow, it's, I almost didn't do it because it felt so raw. That was a communication. It's not writing. How can I begin a book with something that's not writing, you know? But I did. He was right. It was, it was the perfect preamble. It told the whole story right there.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And you know, and there are things that I kind of wish weren't in there because they're kind of ugh or cringe or something, but you know, I had to be true, so...
Natasha Trethewey: Okay. So you, you'd written this whole other part, the one that Darryl said no.
Lucy Sante: Yeah, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Okay. Um, did you think that that was the beginning? Did you think that that's where the memoir was going to begin? Or were you just writing — I guess what I'm trying to ask is, I'm one of those people who I can't, uh sort of proceed with writing a, a memoir. Or even, you know, when I was in school I couldn't proceed with writing an essay or a paper unless I had the beginning. 'Cause the beginning for me—
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: —Just sort of created a little bit of a map.
Lucy Sante: Totally.
Natasha Trethewey: Even though I didn't know exactly where I was gonna—
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: —End up, it still told me that.
Lucy Sante: Yeah, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Are you like that or can you just write the middle and then figure it out?
Lucy Sante: Oh, no, no, no, no. I have to write from top left corner to bottom right corner.
Natasha Trethewey: Okay.
Lucy Sante: Absolutely. And you know, this was. Well, I mean, I realize now, you know, or I realized soon after that it was just clearing my throat, but I had to get all my primary anxieties out of the way and I had to write them, you know, [it's] probably ritualistic. And if I'd been writing on paper, I would've ceremonially burned them in an ashtray, you know, that kind of thing. I had to write it and, you know, then no longer worry about it for the rest of it.
Natasha Trethewey: Right. Having never taken classes in, you know, trying to write memoir, I realized that when I did it, and even now as I'm trying to do it, I'm teaching myself how to do it, you know?
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Every time. And one of the things that was most useful to me, in writing Memorial Drive was Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story. I mean, it was there that I learned something about the necessity for creating of the self, a character.
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: Because that character was going to be responding to everything. And so who was I? What, what was his character going to be? And the other thing that has stayed with me is this: she writes, "Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or the circumstance. Sometimes the plot. The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer. The insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say." It was easy for me after I read that to make two columns on a sheet of paper and in one column I wrote the situation and the situation for me was growing up in a household of domestic violence, escaping it, then losing my mother to it, despite our attempts to get away. But I had no idea of the story—
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —That I was going to tell. That was the hardest part because the story isn't just the chronology of those events. Um, and so trying to figure out that beginning did show me a kind of direction that I could follow. In your email that became your beginning, how did it show you where you were going, what your story was going to be?
Lucy Sante: Hmmm. Well, like you, I didn't really know until I was writing. Um, it was a matter of engineering really. Because I had realized I had two timelines, uh, which was a) the first six months of my transition and b) the whole entire panorama of my life. And I did like think like, well, should I tell the transition story first and go backwards into my life.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: No, the obvious thing was to interleave them.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And, you know, I'm, one thing I've learned from the surrealists among other people is the importance of constraints and the importance of using mechanical means to keep the conscious mind playing a good game. You know, it's like the cops in your head are so busy playing skittles that your unconscious mind can travel around untrammeled. So it became a matter of interweaving alternate chapters and at a certain point, actually partway through the book, it becomes that every one of these sections, 'cause the book doesn't have chapters, it just has sections. Every one of those had to be seven pages of typescript. And that means, like, ding a bell went off and I'd go switch tracks. But the other great thing is that, seven pages meant that when I was writing about my past, I had to compress furiously. When I was writing about those first six months, I had to expand furiously. And that gave it a dynamic right there. And you know, again, this is a gift from the unconscious.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: You know—
Natasha Trethewey: Which you trust very much.
Lucy Sante: Totally.
Natasha Trethewey: Yes.
Lucy Sante: It's, you know, it's my spirit animal, my subconscious.
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah. Right, right. So are there other personal narratives that served as models or teachers for you?
Lucy Sante: In my second year at Bard, I think, or third year at Bard, I decided on, I was gonna teach a course called Experiments in Autobiography. And I had a whole reading list of basically deflections of memory, like, you know, things that — books that involved memory and told whole stories about lives, but did so in a kind of hyper deflected way. You know, like there's a book by a Swiss Fluxus artist named Daniel Spoerri where it's, it's called An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, and it begins with a photograph of his breakfast table. And his breakfast table has been visited by dozens of people who've left cigarette packs and you know, empty bowls of muesli and, you know, just all sorts of crap. And he talks about every single object. And in doing so, he talks about his life and the lives of all the people who surround them. Or a very anguished memoir, but it's not about the author although it is Peter Handke's book about his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. You know, it was all books like that.
Natasha Trethewey: You made me think about, I'd forgotten this one, but I think it was by Lawrence Suton. It's called A Postcard Memoir—
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —And it's all of these, uh, postcards with photographs on them—
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —That I think he collected from junk stores.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: So, you know, he doesn't know the people in the photographs, but he uses them as a prompt to write his own—
Lucy Sante: Oh, wow.
Natasha Trethewey: Family stories—
Lucy Sante: Huh.
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah. But it's other people's pictures that he uses.
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: I'm wondering also about both silence that is, that speaks volumes because of what we're holding back in a different way than denial.
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: So you write about the denial that plagued you—
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —In writing The Factory of Facts. But in this memoir, you were trying very hard to be honest and to tell the truth and it feels so open because of it. I think that sometimes that might confuse people because, it's as if, if something seems so honest and open and raw that there's nothing held back.
Lucy Sante: Hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: That there's no silences too. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about that. Where this comes from for me, both as a poet and then, you know, a memoirist, uh, I, I write um, autobiographically all the time.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: And you know, even when I would just stand up and read poetry, there'd always be, you know, moments where people in the audience would come up to me and say, 'Wow, you, you just reveal so much. I don't know how you can just you know, reveal so much.' And it's always sort of funny to me because I'm thinking, well, yeah, but I've shaped it all in a certain way too. The language is doing something that shapes it.
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: It doesn't reveal everything. It's as if you know, there's, there's no uh, reservoir of the self.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm. Um, I'm five years into my transition now, and it continues being true that the sudden lightness begins to overset one, which is actually a line that John Berryman wrote about Stephen Crane. The sudden lightness tends to overset one. And for me it was the lightness of like not having any secrets anymore, and that was incredibly liberating and it's carried on. I mean, I'm, I'm still a shy person. I still will tend to, you know, head for the farthest couch at any party I go to, but I am not hiding anything. You know, and one of the things really, I mean, maybe, possibly my primary reason for writing a book about this, well, I mean, I did want to encourage young people and all that kind of stuff, but for me, the, uh, intellectual curiosity part had to do with my fascination with my own internal Stasi, you know?
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: This repressive mechanism that kept me, you know, I knew that I, really, I mean, if I'd grown up today in a culture where the matter of being transgender was something known, I would've known at least by age nine that I was trans. In any case, I, there was something that I couldn't name because I thought I was the only person in the world that ever experienced this for years, but I had to keep living my life. And so I built in, you know, all these layers of internal surveillance and suppression and denial and, and it's really, really intricate, you know, systems built to, you know, cover up other systems.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: I had an entire central intelligence agency in my own head, you know, and that proved to be actually something kind of difficult to write about, you know, because so much of it is fleeting and uncertain and, you know, too many cobwebs in the corners. But you know, the fact is that, yeah, I'm perfectly prepared to reveal everything, you know? I mean, especially at my age, fuck it. I have nothing to lose, you know?
Natasha Trethewey: Right.
Lucy Sante: I wish it had started earlier—
Natasha Trethewey: Mhmm.
Lucy Sante: But what do you want? It's — you play with the cards you're dealt and here I am.
Natasha Trethewey: I was about to ask you about regret, which you just addressed at the end of there. But also, it's the moment when you talk about how that denial just sort of poisoned everything.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm. It did. And it's fascinating now to re-experience. I mean, well there was a whole big wave of, you know, when I was coming out and I'd see or talk to whole waves of people, but it keeps happening. I had lunch [the] day before yesterday with a high school friend who lives in Baltimore, who I hadn't seen in at least 20 years. And it was amazing to be like, I mean, this was a good friend, somebody I really, really, really liked. There was nothing concealed. I mean, I wasn't a secret crush or anything like that, but even so, I was able to experience the full emotional aspect of our friendship for the first time ever because those kinds of things, you know, I had to hold my tongue at all times. And there were a lot of things I wish I could have said to people, but I couldn't say them because for one reason or another, those things were stuck behind some kind of wall of silence that I had built.
Nicole Carroll: We'll be back after this short break.
Lucy Sante: One thing I wanted to ask you about your memoir, by the way, is I noticed there's one chapter. I don't know if there's more than one, but I noticed one in particular, it's all written in the second person.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And I watch a lot of like true crime TV stuff. And there's this fascinating show called, The Devil at Home or The Devil Who Lives Here, or something like that. And it's all people who've had a family member turn toxic, right?
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And I've been observing how they talk and they'll say, 'Well, yeah, I did this and I did that.' But when it comes to the really hard part, they say, 'You know, you walk into that room and then you think' they slip into the second person.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And was that like conscious when you did that?
Natasha Trethewey: Yes. I think when I first wrote that chapter, I wrote it from the first person. But then, you know, the more I looked at it, the more I thought that to really sort of enact, have the language enact that sort of feeling of being separated from the self because of trauma that I needed to to say it in the second person. I think the chapter ends with something like, you know, look at you. Even now you think you can distance yourself—
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —From that girl you were. Write in the second person as if you weren't the one to whom any of this happened.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: And that's exactly, you know, what I was, I was hoping that it would show that kind of split, and then I felt like I backed myself into a corner once I was writing in the second person, and I had to get out of it.
Lucy Sante: Right.
Natasha Trethewey: So the next chapter, is called 'Dear Diary', and it is about how writing allowed me to kind of—
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: —Reclaim the self and to be I again.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah.
Lucy Sante: One tremendous gift that transitioning gave me—
Natasha Trethewey: Hmm.
Lucy Sante: —Was it gave me a lens through which to look at my life because, you know, this represents a condensed version of my life. It leaves out a lot. And, you know, I wonder like, well, how did I get to talking about this thing, but it's actually like looking at my life with the lens of transition, certain things stood out.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And those were all the things that made it into the book. And there's things that are in other ways that are just as important to my life that don't make it into the book because they were not involved in this mechanism of denial.
Natasha Trethewey: Right. Right. It's the same life, but what details you choose—
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: —Become the story that you're telling.
Lucy Sante: Right.
Natasha Trethewey: And, you know, I think all the time about how someone else telling the story of my life might pick out very different details.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: And there's a moment in Memorial Drive that I quote Orson Welles saying, 'If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop your story.'
Lucy Sante: Yes.
Natasha Trethewey: And the reason that I wrote Memorial Drive was that I was really tired of parts of my story being told for me.
Lucy Sante: Oh, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Or about me.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: You know, if someone wrote a newspaper article about me, the facts of my trauma of losing my mother. You know, my mother was murdered when I was 19, she would be mentioned as an afterthought, just sort of this murdered woman. And was sort of being written out of the story of me becoming a writer.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: That's what made me decide to write it.
Lucy Sante: Oh, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: And I think now, you know, there's moments where, and this goes back to the sort of poison thing and regret, you know, I think people are certainly well-meaning. But after a reading, sometimes people will come up and say, 'I would not wanna have your life.' [crowd reacts] And it is a terrible thing when someone says that.
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Because it's, it's filled with this kind of pity. And it also assumes, and I think sometimes they say this too, your life was ruined and I don't feel like my life was ruined.
Lucy Sante: No.
Natasha Trethewey: The writer Aminatta Forna has talked a lot about this, that, you know, having gone through, you know, a war people will come and say, 'Oh, your life was destroyed. Your life was ruined.' And you, you're supposed to sort of go on thinking, you know, how do I exist inside of a ruined life? But it doesn't feel like that at all.
Lucy Sante: Yeah. Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: And I remember telling I think my agent at some point that if someone said, 'Do you wish that never happened?'
Lucy Sante: Mmm.
Natasha Trethewey: You know, 'do you wish that your mother were still alive?' And it's not a simple yes or no answer—
Lucy Sante: Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Because I'm not who I am without her death.
Lucy Sante: Yeah, yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: And I actually like the life I have, but it is predicated on a tremendous loss. So do you feel that way? Can the regret have shaped you in a way that, I mean, you did say that you wish you had done this sooner.
Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Trethewey: There's a, there's a life you would've had that would be totally different.
Lucy Sante: Exactly. Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: If you had done it sooner.
Lucy Sante: I mean, um, you know, and if I ever do a PSA, it will be like: Parents, if your kid says they're transgender, believe them because it's not — [applause] it's not a choice.
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah.
Lucy Sante: It's not a choice. And, you know, it's something that essentially your body tells you, like your, or something in you tells you. And even if you're four years old, you know, when you have a headache, well this is the same kind of thing, you know? And, yeah, of course I wish I'd been able to have that life, but you have to imagine a whole different universe—
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: —Where I could have, you know, changed my gender when I was, you know, in my teens, which was pretty much unheard of. I mean my time in the trenches, you know, the trenches of denial and the trenches of self-doubt of trying to fit in, of trying to re-engineer myself. I mean helped form me as a human and as a writer, and, you know, that's an education I wouldn't have had. And as I write in the book, you know, I imagine what it would've been like being my parents' daughter.
Natasha Trethewey: Mm-hmm.
Lucy Sante: And, it was difficult enough being their son. If it I'd been their daughter, they would've like kept me under lock and key until I was 26. I mean, it is crazy. Yeah.
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad that you have lived the life that you have.
Lucy Sante: Thank you.
Natasha Trethewey: And I'm glad that we have you here to talk about it.
Lucy Sante: And what a pleasure talking to you.
Natasha Trethewey: Thank you, Lucy.
Nicole Carroll: That's it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road.
Thank you to Natasha Trethewey and Lucy Sante for joining us.
If you're interested in writing and enjoyed this episode, I highly recommend you check out some of our other episodes, like the one we did with Jayne Anne Phillips and Viet Thanh Nguyen and another we did with Barbara Kingsolver. You can find links to these episodes in our show notes.
For more details about the work of all Pulitzer winners, please visit our website at pulitzer.org.
Next week, on our final episode of this season, I'll be joined by Pulitzer winners and my fellow Board members David Remnick and Carlos Lozada to talk about the Pulitzer judging process, how we think about excellence in the context of Joseph Pulitzer's vision for the prizes, and how the history of the prizes really reflects the history of our country. We'll be pulling back the curtain a bit, so you won't want to miss it. That's next week on Pulitzer on the Road.
Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll.
Our senior producer is Justine Daum.
Our engineer is Davy Sumner. Mixing by Davy Sumner and Jason Richards.
A special thank you to Colleen Cable and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.
Thank you to James Bittel and Anthony J. Mangone at Columbia Journalism Broadcast Technology. And thank you to Alex Kosiorek and Anna Williams at Central Sound Studio.
Music licensing by APM and Epidemic Sound.
Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. Marjorie Miller is our executive producer.