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- [00:01]
Debbie Millman
This episode of Design Matters originally dropped in March of 2024. For more than 55 years, I lived in a state of denial that kept my gender quandary suspended as if pickled in a jar. I passed through periods of indulgence when I would give in and daydream. I had a range of stock fantasies that I rotated and embroidered upon. Cast as a girl to school play, then persuaded to go out into town in costume, hired as an assistant by a wealthy society woman who amuses herself by dressing me up as a girl. New roommate assigned to me in college has been dressing as a girl for years and has a full wardrobe, but they were transvestite fantasies to my thinking, ultimately sterile. Then I would have periods of repudiation when I would banish any such thoughts and diagnose my situation as a fetish. An unhealthy ideation, a neurosis that I imagined might be cured by a good relationship with strong woman would fully bring out the man in me. In both of these states, I kept my assorted gender questions and fixations scattered around different regions of my consciousness, refusing to accord them coherence. Thoughts about appearance went over here. My various failures to fulfill a male role went over there. The more existential questions were thrown on a shelf from the TED Audio Collective this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 19 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Lucy Sant talks about changing genders. Late in life, I knew it was real. I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak, I knew this was real, foreign.
- [02:03]
Lucy Sant
And now a next level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep day. You've got AT and T5G so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T5G lets you deal with any issues with ease so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly. Especially you. ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and device coverage not available everywhere. Learn more@att.com presents the INS and outs of caring for your home Out Uncertainty, self doubt stressing about not knowing where to start in plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done out Word art Sorry Live laugh lovers in knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download thumbtack today. Plan the most flavorful Easter ever now at Whole Foods Market with the Spring and Bloom sales event. You'll find everything you need along with some great deals. Save on our crowd pleasing bone in spiral cut ham and bone in leg of lamb. Complete your spread with brunch favorites like whole pressed orange juice, smoked salmon, bacon, fresh berries and vibrant flowers. Want help in the kitchen? Let Whole Foods Market cater your Easter spread. Just order by the 18th. Go big and save at Whole Foods Market.
- [03:28]
Debbie Millman
How can advertising on TikTok help jumpstart sales for your small business?
- [03:32]
Lucy Sant
Thanks to TikTok ads, I was able to open up a business with my childhood friend, get a warehouse, and even hire employees. My name is Julian and I am one of the founders of the Snacks Lab. We are an exotic snack company. We had over $100,000 in sales from our TikTok ads in the first month. So our orders went from five a day to over 250 orders a day. You definitely have to use TikTok ads and you gotta start now.
- [03:54]
Debbie Millman
Head over to get started.TikTok.com TikTok ads.
- [04:02]
Lucy Sant
Before her latest book, Lucy Sant had written, edited or translated a shelf full of books, fiction and nonfiction and a mountain of short pieces for magazines like the New York Review of books. In 2021, at the age of 66, Lucy shared an announcement that she had joined the other team and was transitioning and that her pronoun, thank you very much, was she. We should consider ourselves lucky for all of the above because she has written about the experience and her life both wittily and magnificently in her new book, I Heard Her Call My A Memoir of Transition. Lucy Sant, welcome to Design Matters.
- [04:47]
Debbie Millman
Hello Lucy.
- [04:49]
Lucy Sant
I understand you consider the 1942 book American Thesaurus of Slang by Lesta Berry and Melvin Vandenbark to Be youe Bible. I'm wondering, what do you like most about that book?
- [05:05]
Debbie Millman
Well, it's a thesaurus of slang. It's not a dictionary, it's a thesaurus. So things are grouped in categories, which is very useful for research. You know, if you say are writing a crime novel set in 1938, you can imagine what the, you know, the boss butcher at the slaughterhouse would be called by his men and you know, stuff like this. But also for me, for just a writer, it's this treasure chest of words and expressions. You dive into it and it opens all sorts of doors in your head.
- [05:45]
Lucy Sant
What kind of slang were Americans using back in 1942?
- [05:50]
Debbie Millman
There were slangs for all Kinds of individual professions and settings and sociological groups of various sorts. You know, it was still a time. You can see it in movies from the 20s and 30s. People spoke very fast. And the demonic, you know, well, you could write a book about the sociology of it, but it was at a point where people were becoming city slickers. You know, they come in from the country, but they were refashioned as sophisticates of a certain kind. Newspapers. There were many newspapers, daily ones, and they all had columnists and they were all polishing up their verbal acts. So it was a period of particular verbal invention on the printed page as well as in the street.
- [06:41]
Lucy Sant
You said that the book helped you open the doors for language and that you used to use Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce for that too. And Ulysses is one of my all time favorite books and has been so for most of my life. But I find Finnegan's Wake impenetrable. How do you decipher it?
- [07:03]
Debbie Millman
Well, I had a brilliant college professor, Michael Wood, who's now retired, but he writes for the London Review of Books, and he gave a reading of a section of Finnegan's Wake in an Irish voice because he's like Anglo Irish or something, but he knew he could read it in the brogue. And suddenly it became three dimensional. It popped into relief, like just reading it off the page. Never had. And so for a few years, I was able to recreate that experience in my head when I opened to a random page and kind of heard Michael reading it spectrally.
- [07:44]
Lucy Sant
You were born in Viveres, Belgium. In your 2012 memoir, the Factory of Facts, you describe yourself as quarters peasant. Why is that?
- [07:57]
Debbie Millman
My father's family has been in the same town. I was born in Verbier, since at least the 13th century. I mean, we're there in the very first census, so we don't know how far back it goes before that, very localized. And a city. A city. As far back as it was a, you know, it was a Roman villa, but it was a city of some kind. By the Middle Ages, my other three quarters, my mother's side and my father's mother's side were all from people from the country, people from the Ardennes, and my mother's side and my paternal grandmother's side from Luxembourg, which is like, you know, basically like another state, you know. And so they were farmers working the unforgiving land of the Ardennes, which is very stony and has a very short growing season. And they did that for hundreds of thousands of years.
- [09:02]
Lucy Sant
At the time, your Father worked in a foundry and have stated that your mother seemed to have two modes. In one, she was tearfully, clingily, cloyingly affectionate, cooing and caressing and kissy kiss. In the other, she was a rattlesnake. Do you think a lot of this stemmed from the stillborn daughter who preceded you?
- [09:28]
Debbie Millman
Oh, it had a lot of causes. It had that stillbirth of my older sister, one year and one month older than me, whose names I inherited in inverted form. But that was only one component. It was also. She was treated very badly by her own parents. She was the idiot of the family. And she was profoundly destabilized by the move to the United States. Never really made her peace. Her social orbit was. Her cousins, they were in the country. Even moving to the city shattered her world. And every remove after that broke it some more. So she was this compounded mass of pain. From various sources.
- [10:13]
Lucy Sant
You mentioned moving back and forth to Belgium, from Belgium to the US four times. And started first grade without knowing a word of English. And you picked it up quickly and have written that your instruction was vivid. And I'm wondering in what way was your instruction vivid?
- [10:32]
Debbie Millman
Because I picked up so many words from seeing them on packaging, painted signs, in storefronts, billboards, sides of trucks, all kinds of places, as well as books and newspapers. But it was all around. You know, I can. I could still see the word delicatessen as it appeared on this shop front in some in New Jersey, you know, or the penguin in the. The penguin decal in the door, the glass door of the drugstore advertising cool cigarettes and noticing that they spell it with a K and it's not normally how it's spelled. You know, all these kinds of things and I. They still live in my head.
- [11:17]
Lucy Sant
It's so interesting. I was also somewhat captivated by the cool cigarette packaging logo because I love the way that the O's were entwined. It's so interesting how these things are deco. Exactly, exactly. And it's my fascination with things like that that's give me the sense that that's ultimately why I went into making logos for a living.
- [11:40]
Debbie Millman
Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah.
- [11:42]
Lucy Sant
You've written that you were pretty much the only immigrant kid around and that the other kids hated that you read books for fun and knew the answers in class. What kinds of books were you reading at that time?
- [11:55]
Debbie Millman
When I think back on, especially having had a child myself and having to learn about American children's literature, I had no guidance. So nobody told me about Charlotte's Web, you know, I. I didn't know any of the classics and didn't really know what to read. Read insipid fiction that turned me off for the most part. And really I. That's when I started reading history. There was a series called Landmark books about American history. I read them all. Also a neighbor did give me the Hardy Boys and, and some. And Nancy Drew. I read all of those. Did not read Tom Swift. Yeah, the scientific boy wonder. That did not appeal.
- [12:41]
Lucy Sant
You described yourself as an imaginative and fearful child who saw omens everywhere. What kinds of omens?
- [12:51]
Debbie Millman
Oh, golly. I mean the. Everything was a portent, you know, everything could be like step on a crack, break your mother's back. But often it had to do with life and death kind of stuff. It was all about, you know, my death, the end of the world, you know, a lot to do with. I write in the book too, about how, you know, I was completely filled with my parents wartime memories. The most traumatic stuff just imprinted itself on me. You know, I did think that planes were going to drop bombs on the house. A shell had just missed my maternal grandparents apartment house landed in the courtyard next door. So this stuff, even though I was born nine years after the end of the war, it still permeated my childhood.
- [13:45]
Lucy Sant
When you were 12, the principal of your school, who was also a nun, scheduled a consultation for you with a psychologist. Why?
- [13:54]
Debbie Millman
Because I was in fights every day. I was obviously unhappy. I had no friends at all of any sort for three years. I was deeply alienated. She took pity on me.
- [14:07]
Lucy Sant
Did, did that help? What was, Was a diagnosis made?
- [14:11]
Debbie Millman
No. I don't know what happened. I will never know. They. The shrink gave me all these tests, then called in my parents. My parents were both furious by what they heard, but they wouldn't tell me what it was. I. I wish I'd asked my father before he went lapsed into dementia. My mother would never have told me.
- [14:32]
Lucy Sant
When you were very young, your mother searched your room on any pretext and read every bit of writing she found. What. What were you writing at that time?
- [14:43]
Debbie Millman
Well, I wasn't.
- [14:44]
Lucy Sant
What, what was she looking for?
- [14:46]
Debbie Millman
She was looking for sin. She was looking for smut. She was looking for anything morally wrong because she thought that everything in the world was morally wrong. And you know, Satan was like nipping at my trouser cuffs and, and she was going to find out the dirt on me. That's why, you know, I. I did not write anything down. I did not and I still don't. You know, this is carried over Although I don't have that paranoia anymore. But I just never got the habit. So I've never kept a diary, which I'm actually grateful for.
- [15:20]
Lucy Sant
Why? Why?
- [15:22]
Debbie Millman
Because if you write memories down, your memory will be inherent in what you've written and you lose the actual memory. It just gets transferred. So my memories are still wild. I can still roam around in there. They're not fixed.
- [15:40]
Lucy Sant
Now, when you're writing, when you're actually. Because you write for a living, do you do drafts or do you sort of pull it all from your head into the writing in that first attempt?
- [15:52]
Debbie Millman
Yeah, I only do one draft, then I work it endlessly. For me, it has to. The thought happens on the page. Oh, I can't do it. I can't do it in my head ahead of time. I may think like the sentence, but once I write it down, it's not going to be the same as what happened in my head because I was just getting the thought and not the words. And the words are what really structures the thought, and that can only happen on the page.
- [16:21]
Lucy Sant
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
- [16:24]
Debbie Millman
I was in fourth grade. So, yeah, I was nine. So many things happen around age nine. I don't know which came first, but I remember that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gibbs, told me I had talent as a writer, and I wrote a composition on what do you want to be when you grow up? And I wrote about how I want to be a writer with a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson on the COVID.
- [16:54]
Lucy Sant
Now, I understand you also drew an underground comic for your school paper. Were you also interested in becoming an artist?
- [17:03]
Debbie Millman
Well, becoming a cartoonist is almost a Belgian national profession. You know, I mean, the golden age of cartooning was at its red hot peak when I was a child there. And, you know, everybody here knows Tatin or Tintin and Le Strump, otherwise known as the Smurfs. But there's a whole lot more to the Belgian cartoon world. And kids aspire to be cartoonists the way American kids in my generation aspire to be rock and roll stars. And so, yeah, I tried my hand at, Yeah, I wasn't very good, but I had a strip called Neanderthal Man. He was a superhero.
- [17:41]
Lucy Sant
Around that time, you won an essay contest in your school for Arbor Day. What was that essay about?
- [17:50]
Debbie Millman
It was Arbor Day. It was an essay about why Arbor Day is great. You know, they're always really. Why I like trees. I like trees for many reasons.
- [18:01]
Lucy Sant
You know, there was one winner from each of the schools in your town. And at the time, you were the only boy. When a photo of the five of you was published in the New Providence Dispatch, you appeared in the caption as Lucy Sant, not Luke Sant. How did that make you feel?
- [18:23]
Debbie Millman
Oh, very weird. You know, I. You know, that's. It's a pretty. Again, it's pretty distant for me to capture the exact emotional pitch, but it was, you know, thrilling and embarrassing, and my mother, you know, immediately kind of scratched it out with ballpoint. But, yeah, I mean, it took up permanent residence in my head, that's for damn sure.
- [18:48]
Lucy Sant
And I heard her call my name. You write that you can't say with certainty when the idea that you might or should be a girl first took hold. But it was probably around age 9 or 10. How did that manifest to you?
- [19:04]
Debbie Millman
How did it first start? I saw myself as a girl. I thought about looking like a girl. I thought my interests were pretty much a girl's interests. Although, you know, well, they were, like, artistic, you know, not very domestic. And I didn't really know any girls. That was another component. So I had really nobody to measure myself against. But it crept in, and very soon it was a very strong emotion that I immediately started at one, the same time indulging in and trying to suppress.
- [19:41]
Lucy Sant
At the time, you thought you were the only person in the world who had ever wanted to change genders. You said at the time that you prayed for Jesus to turn you into a girl overnight in your sleep, but don't remember whether Jesus proposed this or if you requested it and wrote, there it was, and it wouldn't leave me alone. I trembled from both desperate wishfulness and naked fear. What scared you most at that point?
- [20:09]
Debbie Millman
Oh, gosh. Well, I was young enough to still believe in a certain kind of magic and thought that something dramatic like that could actually happen. And how would my life change? I was just entering the period that never stopped really, of conflict with my parents. And this seemed like an additional point of conflict. So I was very wary of it. I desired it. But I also knew it was an impossibility, except that I believed in magic. You see all the contradictions, right? Yeah, I was very confused. I had no guidance of any sort and didn't for many years afterward, even though a trickle of news items would come my way. And I realized, no, I'm not the only one. But there are like, 48 of us, you know, something like that, really.
- [21:06]
Lucy Sant
You know, you were admitted to Regis High School when you were 14 on the basis of a written exam, which is a very prestigious private School, you'd never heard of it. A nun who taught you in eighth grade suggested it. You got in and commuted two hours from New Jersey to the Upper east side in New York City and write that that experience, being in Manhattan changed your life. How so?
- [21:32]
Debbie Millman
Well, it just took me out of the immediate constant supervision of my parents for about eight hours a day or more. And I was in this big city and everything seemed available. I didn't have any money. But you know, like I read all the underground newspapers, they only cost a quarter. And things were, in general were so much cheaper. So I could go to the movies, I could buy books on this very, very small allowance I had. So it wasn't that. But I had a universe open to me. The only place that presented me with that much of a range of options previously was the library. I went from the library to Manhattan, which is like hyper library. So it showed me the world outside. I must have started thinking of my family as a prison very early. I'd already had this vision of this fleeting vision of New York City as we were about to go back to Belgium the first time and didn't know that we would ever be coming back. And already New York City had established its symbolic function in my mind because it was Halloween and you know, something nobody has seen in 50 years, just massive crowds of kids running in costume, running on chaperone through the streets. So when I was admitted to high school and I started commuting and I'd leave the house at seven in the morning and not be back until six or seven in the evening, I had autonomy during those hours.
- [23:11]
Lucy Sant
There was a line in your book that really touched me. You said for the first time, the jail door was briefly left ajar.
- [23:22]
Debbie Millman
Yep.
- [23:23]
Lucy Sant
You went on to get a full scholarship at Columbia University. And in your first year there, you got into one of Kenneth Koch's poetry classes. And you've written that you felt that he pinned poets wings on your lapel. It was the only class you always attended fully prepared and not stoned. And its influence was such that the writing classes you later taught for 27 years were always modeled on it. Can you share some of how you taught, how he taught you how to teach?
- [23:54]
Debbie Millman
I don't, I still don't know how other people teach writing. Right. I never really. I mean I took poetry classes with, with Kenneth and with David Shapiro and I took a translation class. And those are the only writing classes I've ever taken. But in any event, I taught an assignment based class. It wasn't workshops. I would Every week I'd assign a reading excerpt and then a writing assignment that would be related to that reading. My emphasis was on voice, on style, on rhythm. And these are very hard concepts to get across, especially to undergraduates. But I tried anyway. You know, I was formalistic, but that's just a means to an end. I strongly believe in taking a conceptual approach. I mean, my book is an example of that. Right. It's structured in a very particular way, which gives the voice room to move. The fact that it's a kind of formalistic device does not it. It unleashes the emotions rather than restricts them. That all goes back to Kenneth. And so, yeah, I attempted to convey these thoughts to students for all those years. You know, graduate students at Columbia and the New School, and then for 24 years, the undergraduates at Bard.
- [25:22]
Lucy Sant
You felt that he pinned poets wings on your lapel. But about a year or so later, it dawned on you that you actually weren't a poet. Why?
- [25:35]
Debbie Millman
Well, the second year, I was in his prosody class, and I realized that. And here's the paradox. I'm vitally interested in rhythm in my writing, but I could not bring myself to care about prosody or about verse form. You know, like cutting off lines seems arbitrary. I just want to go, so I'm a prose writer.
- [26:00]
Lucy Sant
What did Kenneth think of your writing?
- [26:02]
Debbie Millman
Beats me. You know, years later, I mean, I went to a reading that he gave not long before his death. He'd already been very sick with cancer, but he had a brief burst of energy and he gave a little tour. And I went to see him with Jim Jarmusch, who'd also been a student of Kenneth's. And Kenneth saw Jim and was like, oh, my God, you're here. And who are you? He didn't remember me at all.
- [26:31]
Lucy Sant
After you left Columbia, you felt that writing was your only real talent. But you write that you had no idea what to do with it. Sometimes you wrote reviews you intended to submit to the Village Voice, but then you'd lose your nerve. You got a job as a clerk at the Strand Bookstore. Within a couple of weeks, you were promoted to head and sole employee of the paperback department. And while you were there, you started a magazine called Stranded and published four issues. Who did you publish? How did you publish? And what was the reaction to this zine? Essentially, one of the, you know, there wasn't the word then. But that's, I think, what it was.
- [27:12]
Debbie Millman
No, it's exactly what it was. And we. Well, we borrowed it from this venerable Brooklyn based magazine, which no longer exists, called Hanging Loose, which gathered individual sets of pages from writers. In other words, you don't just submit your poem. You submit 200 or 300, whatever, copies of your poem. And then we collate. So there was no editing involved. Anybody who wanted to submit that many pages got in, and then I packaged them and it went for four issues. It was mostly, but not exclusively Strand employees. Kathy Acker's in there. In fact, actually, the fourth issue is highly sought after because Jean Michel Basquiat has a contribution in there. And he never worked at the Strand, so it was some very interesting stuff. All kinds of. There's bad poetry, there's interesting Xerox graphics people collecting, like, the top 10 all time favorite record lists of everybody who worked at the Strand, Stuff like that. You know, all kinds of stuff. Oh, and also great long beefs, you know, my argument with X.
- [28:30]
Lucy Sant
How did you first meet Jean Michel Basquiat?
- [28:33]
Debbie Millman
I met him with some friends of mine, and we can't figure or they seem to think we met him at a party. I thought we met him at the Mud Club somewhere around late 78.
- [28:43]
Lucy Sant
And I think I read in your book that a friend of yours, he painted on the refrigerator door, and she sold that. And also I think there are a couple of different things that he painted on friends of yours.
- [28:55]
Debbie Millman
Well, the bathroom door and a fresco in the bedroom, which was only. She only had that taken out and sold about 10 years ago. They lived together. They were not a couple exactly, but shared a residence. And he left all kinds of stuff with her. She still has a really substantial amount of bus. Not there. So in storage. But you know that he just left there because he was a young man on the go. I mean, he left behind artwork all over town, and actually, some of it got tossed. No, I remember this great. And one friend's apartment. There was this great accumulation of abstract expressionist sweatshirts he'd made with, you know, spray paint. And they were kind of chaotic, and they eventually just got tossed.
- [29:48]
Lucy Sant
Oh, that breaks my heart.
- [29:50]
Debbie Millman
Wow.
- [29:51]
Lucy Sant
You got your first job at the New York Review of Books in the mailroom. How did you get that job?
- [29:57]
Debbie Millman
I had a friend, Noah Shapiro, whose father was the business manager. I'd known Noah since freshman year of college, and I ran into him on the street, and bingo, I had a job.
- [30:10]
Lucy Sant
After a year there, editor Barbara Epstein hired you as her assistant, where you realized you were wildly ignorant of the world and its ways. And I understand you didn't know how to make a reservation at a Restaurant.
- [30:26]
Debbie Millman
I'd never heard of such a thing. I didn't know that it existed. My parents never would have occurred to them to go to make a restaurant reservation. They probably didn't know it existed either, you know. And in general, the job involved being social in a way, you know, just like not entertaining with a glass in hand, but social in the sense of being connected with other people in ways that were completely unfamiliar to me. And it was both the fact that I came from this working class immigrant family, but also that I was suspicious and resentful of the entire adult world. And Barbara, bless her soul, understood this, and she basically explained the adult world to me.
- [31:15]
Lucy Sant
What do you think Barbara saw in you at the time? She basically handpicked you out of the mailroom into her life. What do you think she saw in you?
- [31:26]
Debbie Millman
I still don't really know because, I mean, did she read anything I'd written? I mean, I guess she probably just. She talked to Lizzie Hardwick, whose house I've been to a bunch of times with my friend Daryl Pinkney, and I don't know, like, the cut of my jib.
- [31:43]
Lucy Sant
You've written that Barbara Epstein gave you the most important gift you've ever gotten from anyone shy of life itself, the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak. And I'm wondering, how did you do that?
- [31:59]
Debbie Millman
It happened little by little. It's really hard to say at what moment it tipped over. But I went from. Well, I went from being as much of a wallflower on the page as I was in life, feeling that, you know, I can't review this book because I'm not an expert on every detail concerning it, you know, that kind of thing, to realizing that, yeah, no, I have an angle. I mean, I read this book that gives me the right to have an opinion about it and proceed from there. Not just books, but all kinds of situations that, yes, I was there. I'm a witness. I don't need a graduate degree in the subject to express what I think.
- [32:41]
Lucy Sant
So do you feel like she gave you some confidence to be a writer?
- [32:46]
Debbie Millman
Exactly. Yeah. That's the whole point. Yeah. This confidence that I found very hard to come by otherwise, you know, given everything.
- [32:55]
Lucy Sant
You published your first professional piece of writing in the New York Review of Books in 1981, when you were 27. Do you remember what that essay was about?
- [33:04]
Debbie Millman
It was about Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis Presley, which I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and I was immediately struck by how false it was. I really believe in the lie detector. Functions of prose, all kinds of syntax, word use, whatever will tell you if this is genuine or not. I mean, it's not foolproof, obviously, but a rough sketch. And his book just reeked of falsehood. There was nothing sincere about it. He's whipping up this kind of tabloid fable to sell books and that's it. And you know, Albert Goldman was not nobody. He was pretty respected critic. He wrote a really good book about Lenny Bruce, but he hated the younger generation. That's the thing about him. It's like anybody who came in, like post Beatles was trash because they weren't following this kind of 50s great man, author kind of thing. And he took his revenge, first with the Elvis book and then with the John Lennon biography, which I also reviewed for the New York Review, which was in many ways even worse. And I don't even know if those books were in print, but they were really pretty, you know, they were hatchet jobs, more sophisticated hatchet jobs than you usually see, because he was not a dumb guy. Nevertheless, that's all they were.
- [34:32]
Lucy Sant
What was the reaction to your criticism of these books in your writing?
- [34:38]
Debbie Millman
Well, Bob and Barbara accepted it. It was published. My friends were happy, and I never heard from anybody else.
- [34:45]
Lucy Sant
Did you ever feel nervous about being critical of other writers in print?
- [34:52]
Debbie Millman
Not exactly. I mean, sometimes I was always worried about getting things wrong. That was my great terror, you know, especially like getting something big wrong, like the intended meaning of this phrase, whatever. So I would, you know, I was belt and suspenders when it came to stuff like that. But that's the point. Barbara gave me this authority, so that didn't matter. I. Yeah, the fact that I was, you know, whatever young person and had no publications under my belt, criticizing somebody much older with a whole library of volumes out, I could do it. I was. I was allowed.
- [35:32]
Lucy Sant
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- [38:14]
Debbie Millman
The 80s coming after the 70s when everybody was beneath visibility, you know, all my friends, you know, it took years for the bands and CBGB's to be recorded. It's hard to credit now how isolated we felt in lower Manhattan at that point. We we had our own little world and the rest of the world was completely indifferent to us. But the 80s people suddenly became rich and famous. It was crazy. Jean Michel first and eventually Nan and Jim and I was pretty close to all three of them. And I mean I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn't ready. You know, I Hadn't produced anything. But it really hurt because I felt like, and I mean, in some ways I still feel like if you're going to succeed, do it when you're young. Because like at my age it's great having the success, but it's not the same thing as when you're young, you know, when you can profit in all kinds of ways from this. All I can do is have a quiet satisfaction now. But when you're young is when you know you're tasting things, you're. I don't know, the world of the senses is open to you. And that didn't happen to me. And I thought, well, there goes my chances forever. Because I also had no consciousness of existing past age 40 or whatever. Right. And the 80s were, you know, people were treated into. Not their shells. Well, some people retreat into their shells, but class system established itself among the artists which had never existed. And some people were just up there on one shelf and, and there were various succeeding shelves and I was maybe down here until I published a book. I was 37 by the time that happened. And you know, I'm still sad that I didn't like, enjoy the high life of my peers back then, partly because at that point one's audience was one's immediate contemporaries, one's actual peers, and it felt very valuable to be valued by those people. And it's wonderful being valued by younger people now. But it's not quite the same secret handshake thing that goes on among contemporaries.
- [40:39]
Lucy Sant
Despite all of your longing, as I would put it, maybe you've won a Whiting award. You published your first book, Low Life Lures and Snares of old New York, IN91. This was followed by Evidence, a volume of crime scene photographs, in 92. Your first memoir, the Factory of Facts. In 1998, a super famous collection of essays titled Kill all your darlings. In 2007, a collection of essays and occasional pieces, the Other Paris, which serves as a sort of bookend to lowlife in 2015. You're included in several other books by way of anthologies, introductions and so forth. You taught at Columbia University School of the Arts, the New school, beginning in 1999 until your retirement at Bard in writing and the history of photography. So yeah, you've had a pretty amazing career. Maybe not as star studded as you would have liked, but I think anybody listening and viewing this would think she's pretty fucking cool.
- [41:43]
Debbie Millman
Well, my greatest achievement is that I really only wrote about stuff I was actually passionate about. Yeah, I mean, I did A lot of work for hire, but there's very little that I would not embrace. I mean, not that my writing was always tip top, right? But I mean, in terms of I never had to shed my soul in order to do my job.
- [42:08]
Lucy Sant
You wrote that during this time you were writing and you did a lot of work for magazines and newspapers like Interview and Wig Wag and New York and Spy. But throughout, you felt like you were playing a character more worldly and sophisticated than you actually thought that you were. So you had to keep your real self tightly buttoned up. Is that why you avoided, at that time, writing more in the first person?
- [42:33]
Debbie Millman
Well, yeah, I was hiding. I mean, the gender thing was only part of it, right? I was also hiding the fact that I was this nobody from nowhere, you know, a dropout and with no inherited educational status in my family. And I really had a major case of imposter syndrome for so much of my life. Do you still now it's shifted. The imposter syndrome is actually. Well, it's termed dysphoria, as opposed to gender dysphoria, the umbrella term. Having a bad attack of dysphoria means having this imposter syndrome as applied to gender presentation.
- [43:19]
Lucy Sant
You wrote about yourself in the book about this time in the following way. It's so beautifully written, I just want to read it out loud. You wrote, I pretended to myself that what I was trying to conceal was my inferiority to the character I tried to create in writing and in life. I was boring, clumsy, nebbishy, unsexy, squirrely, pedantic, useless, feeble, no fun, eternally on the B or even the C list of even my best friends. To be sure, this self portrait was not strictly a byproduct of gender dysphoria. My parents, class anxieties, the immigrant, immigrant experience and the residue of a Catholic upbringing contributed as well. Lucy, I felt like you could have been writing about me. I love this paragraph so much. I'm wondering if this sense of yourself was why you started your first memoir with a series of make believe versions of your early childhood.
- [44:21]
Debbie Millman
No, that's not why. Why is. Because I saw this event, that is the bankruptcy of the wool trade in Velvier and therefore the shuttering of my father's foundry which made equipment for these factories. I saw that as the pivotal moment of my life. And I want to see how, explore how things might have gone had it not followed the path that it did take. You know this. So my. My versions are based on family fears and obsessions of one sort or another, right? Spun out by me.
- [45:01]
Lucy Sant
I loved the sort of conceptual quality of providing those various fictional or semi fictional possibilities for your early life. It felt very Eugene Ionesco in a lot of ways, and I loved it. I loved it in retrospect. You've written that you were dodging self depiction because you didn't want to be seen, because you didn't know who you were. And I'd like to talk more about your beautiful new memoir I Heard Her Call My Name First I'm wondering if you could read a passage about what happened on February 16, 2021 On February.
- [45:43]
Debbie Millman
16, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone just for a laugh. I'd had a new phone for a few months and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape or hairstyle, I was specifically and exclusively interested in the gender swap function. I fed in a mugshot style selfie and in return got something that didn't displease me. A picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I'd seldom allowed myself such graphic self depiction. Over the years, I'd occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman, but had always immediately destroyed the results. And yet, I didn't delete that cyber image. Instead, over the next week or so, I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12. Snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see laid out before me on my screen the panorama of my life as a girl, from giggling preteen to last year's matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman, I could now see, was a coherent phenomenon, consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn't there.
- [47:27]
Lucy Sant
Would this be when you say you'd cracked your egg?
- [47:30]
Debbie Millman
Yes. And by the way, people keep asking me how I came up with that phrase, but I didn't. It's. It's. It's common in trans world.
- [47:41]
Lucy Sant
I hadn't heard that phrase before. What happened after you cracked your egg?
- [47:46]
Debbie Millman
The whole process of digging up these photographs and passing them through, it wasn't a single moment. It transpired over about 10 days. And then I came out to my therapist, and then to my partner, and then to my son. And I wrote this letter that I sent to about 30 people who were my. My closest immediate friends.
- [48:07]
Lucy Sant
You write that you're grateful to whatever force cracked your egg before it was too late that you were saved from drowning. Do you really think it was the Face App photos, or do you think the Face App helped you manifest the courage you needed to take this next step in your life?
- [48:25]
Debbie Millman
Oh, it was the. The FaceApp photos were transforming. I mean, because I'd never seen what I look like as a woman, it was like seeing a movie of my alternate life. It was very, very, very powerful. Furthermore, on the mechanical end, it took me long enough to round up all these photographs. You're scattered all over my house that it broke. And I didn't realize I had this. I had an internal time lock. I was terrified. After wanting so much to go to the other side, I was terrified of it happening, you know, so I've guard against it. And I didn't realize I had the system where if I thought about. If I fantasized, etc. It could only be for an hour or two, and then, bang, it would stop. And that was a safeguard. And looking for these photographs just burst through that ceiling. And that really, like, opened the floodgates. So it was both seeing the photographs and the act of looking for them.
- [49:27]
Lucy Sant
Weirdly, had you ever shared with anyone in your life prior to your egg cracking that you felt like you were a female?
- [49:37]
Debbie Millman
I came close only once in my whole life, and that was when I had this wonderful therapist in the late 80s named Paul Pavel, who, by the way, was also Art Spiegelman's therapist. And he appears as a character in Mouse 2. He was a great man, a wonderful person, and to him, I admitted that I tried on my mother's clothes. And we never quite got back to it because not long after I shared that memory with him, he died of a massive heart attack 20 minutes after I left his office. Wasn't that same day, but it was not long thereafter. I don't know. I mean, if Pavel had lived, might I've come out 30 years older, earlier than I did? It's not entirely impossible.
- [50:29]
Lucy Sant
I didn't come out until I was 50. I'm 62 now, so it's only been 12 years. And it's a very different life internally in terms of the amount of freedom that I feel to be who I am. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, you know, even being lesbian was almost a ticket to a very different kind of life. And I already felt so othered that I didn't want to be any more othered.
- [51:02]
Debbie Millman
Bingo.
- [51:03]
Lucy Sant
Yeah. After you sent the letter to your friends and came out to your partner and your therapist, what made you almost send another letter to your friends taking it all back?
- [51:17]
Debbie Millman
There were really. I mean, after. You know, obviously when I was a kid, it was different story. But when I became an adult, there were main two major impediments to my acknowledging my trans nature. One of them was my ambition. The other was the fact that I am attracted to women romantically, sexually, exclusively. And I thought it would at worst disgust them and at best, you know, get. Get me sympathetic hearing, but shut the door to romance forever. And so I knew that my relationship, which had gone on for 14 years with somebody who's. We're still very, very close, but I knew the romantic part was gone. She would not have. Want to keep going down that road. So I was trying to talk myself. I was so loath to lose her or in fact, to lose the prospect of love, that I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.
- [52:25]
Lucy Sant
Before you came out, you wrote that your absorption of transgender lore before the Internet was a matter of seeing things out of the corner of your eye and mentally photographing them, filing them away in the vault marked X. Did you. Did remembering any of those images help you claim who you are as you came out? I also had a file that I hid. The Joy of Lesbian Sex became, you know, a book in my library that was backwards, so you couldn't see the spine. And in it were, like, these articles from the Village Voice that I'd read in 1980 about, you know, Ann Bannon book. Did you have an actual stash, or was it all just mental?
- [53:06]
Debbie Millman
Oh, it was mental because nobody could find out this, you know, it was deeply secret to everybody in my life. Did it help me actualize? Well, it's hard to say, really. It took me until the Internet before I even read about people who were specifically like me. I mean, I'd read about drag queens, or I'd read about famous sex changes, you know, like Christine Jorgensen or something. But I. It did give me. Start giving me this panoramic view of the trans universe, which is so it, you know, much larger and more. Much more various than almost anyone suspects. It did help me realize I wasn't alone, except that being alone is so ingrained in me for other reasons already that I was reluctant to shed the aloneness.
- [54:00]
Lucy Sant
In a way, looking back on it now, you write how your Secret poisoned your entire experience of life and that there was never a moment when you didn't feel the acute shame of being you. Did you continue to have shame as you were coming out? And has that shame abated at all?
- [54:20]
Debbie Millman
No. I mean, it's funny, but when I started coming out, aside from the specific point of my. My letter and the two letters in the book, there's the one letter I didn't send, and the one letter I did send. I was trying to put myself back in the closet in the second letter, too. But I abandoned that idea within 10 days because I knew it was real. I mean, the minute my egg cracked, so to speak, I knew this was real and that I had better get behind it. You know, I better claim it. I had better walk proud. I had no choice. And I mean, I. It wasn't like it was a debate. I was proud. I was a little afraid of how it might be received or what people would think, but I was, you know, and just remained unchanged to this day. This is who I am, and if you don't like it, tough. It's the truth. I am manifesting the truth.
- [55:25]
Lucy Sant
You are now who you've described as the person you feared most of your life. And you stated that you genuinely like who you are and that you're turning out better than you imagined or feared. But you also said that you're unwittingly benefiting from a bad thing, the invisibility of older women. And I wanted to tell you something. I read that line to Roxanne, my wife, and she said lesbians and trans folks aren't invisible to each other at any age. And I realized it's right.
- [56:04]
Debbie Millman
Right.
- [56:04]
Lucy Sant
And I love that, and I really wanted to share that with you. You said, you're not only lucky to have had your egg crack at something close to the last minute, you're also lucky to have survived your own repression. And for anybody that's feeling their own repression, whether it be coming out, as in any LGBTQ+ manner, is there anything that you might say to them to help them face that repression?
- [56:33]
Debbie Millman
Well, it really helps if your identity is not entirely bound up, you know, if you have, like, I had an ambition. And while it did retard my coming out, it also acted as a counterweight to the fear, you know, because I had this thing I was doing, I had the author to present as a shield. So it really helps if you're not doing this for a living, you know, if you've got another identity with which to present the world in your Book.
- [57:07]
Lucy Sant
You quote your friend Darryl, who years ago declared that he was not a gay writer, but a writer who is gay. And you state you are a writer who is trans. How do you feel about your bylines pre transition? I do see most of them now. Read Lucy Sant, right?
- [57:26]
Debbie Millman
Yeah. Somebody changed my Wikipedia entry within half an hour by coming out on Instagram and the New York Review of Books had changed its entire archive going back to 1981, like within a couple of days. It's cool. I mean, you know, obviously I lived as Luke for 66 years. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't there. You know, I'm not like a younger person who is trying to erase the experience of schoolyard bullying that held happened a decade or so beforehand. For me, I'm far away from all that stuff. So I don't care that people know that I had this former name. And I, I mean, I don't like looking at the pictures, frankly. You know, I'd rather if those went away. But the name and you know, and my standard joke is my dead name will never die. Not as long as we still have back inventory. You know, please buy those books, even if they've got the wrong name on them.
- [58:24]
Lucy Sant
You write about yourself pre transition as a walking byline and are still very much aware of your pre presentation self who you sometimes like to think of as your sad sack ex husband. I laughed out loud at that line. Do you have affection for your sad sack ex husband?
- [58:43]
Debbie Millman
Sometimes, you know, I mean, I get impatient and I get retroactively embarrassed sometimes.
- [58:53]
Lucy Sant
Why?
- [58:54]
Debbie Millman
Well, because he said and did dumb things, that's why. I'm not very patient with dumb things, you see. But in any event, I recognize this is this, you know, I had a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn over the course of my life. And I realized that no matter how much I would have liked to have been a rock star when I was 24 years old, it was never going to happen because I still have to build a self and gender transition is only one part of that. There was so much unresolved, so much that was damaged by experience that I had to rectify. So much that I, I was naive about that I had to learn, you know, it was a big, huge process. This is the irony of it is when I was a kid, I remember I wanted to be a precocious child, you know, I wanted to be a wonder. But actually I'm a very late bloomer. You might even say I'm only blooming now, even though I've been at it for a really long time. You know, everybody's rhythm is different.
- [60:04]
Lucy Sant
Yeah. I have one last question and then a request. You are now nearly 70. Towards the end of I Heard Her Call My Name. You state that transitioning is not an event but a process, and it will occupy the rest of your life as you go on changing. How do you envision Lucy Sant at 80?
- [60:29]
Debbie Millman
I don't go there. I don't think about the future. In fact, thinking about the future always freaks me out, and it goes back to that childhood superstition thing. So I'm not going there. Maybe I'll be alive then, who knows? But probably not. I imagine the way the world is going in general.
- [60:48]
Lucy Sant
Well, I hope so. I hope you are. My last question is really more of a request. Would you read one last excerpt from I Heard Her Call My Name?
- [60:58]
Debbie Millman
You bet. My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn't feel the acute shame of being me, even as I denied to myself that my secret had anything to do with it. I might feel proud of things I'd done, might even be able to summon the will to entertain ambitions, and might ascribe such things to an idealized self I sometimes tried to make myself believe in. But eventually I was going to catch sight of myself in a mirror, and that would destroy me for an hour or a day or a week. I've been in therapy for 38 years, but because I was guarding my secret, even in the therapist's office, no diagnosis ever came close to identifying the cause of my malaise. At some point in the relatively recent past, I came upon a citation from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
- [62:03]
Lucy Sant
One of the lines in your book that is now imprinted on my soul is this. And I wish it for everyone listening today, when there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom. Lucy Sant, thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself. Thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on design matters.
- [62:25]
Debbie Millman
Thank you so much, Debbie.
- [62:27]
Lucy Sant
Lucy Sant's book is I Heard Her Call My A Memoir of Transition, and you could read more about her@lucysant.com that's L U C Y S A N T E dot com this is the 19th year we've been podcasting Design Matters, and I'd like to thank you for listening and remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
- [62:59]
Debbie Millman
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyman.
- [63:26]
Lucy Sant
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