My Heart & I Agree

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Lucy Sante (I Heard Her Call My Name), a new collection of essays and reflections, mixing memoir with incisive writing about photography, music, literature, and film.

Here she learns to dance by watching Soul Train, dissects the image of the cowboy, reads the telephone book, visits famous writers, tours dead factories, wonders whatever happened to the revolution, plunges into the vast sea of discarded snapshots, asks whether "surrealist photography" might be a redundancy, imagines Andy Warhol's unmade movie, traces how Bob Dylan wrote his songs, observes the transience of all things with the Kinks.

Many of the pieces here were written on commission for magazines, publishers, and art catalogs, yet Sante's writing always coheres around an enduring set of concerns: cities, social progress, photography, the semi-popular arts, and the detritus of daily life. Beginning with poems and concluding with fiction and memoir, the collection is divided into segments based on affinity. The first stretches back to the night of a century and a half ago; the second traces the long fall of utopian hopes over the last fifty years; the third observes great narrative travelers on their roads; the fourth is all image and flash; the fifth has a rhythm track running under it. There are hit singles here, as well as album cuts, non-LP B-sides, import-only EPs, and at least one bootleg.

Lucy Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, in 1954. Her most recent books are I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir/Autobiography, and Six Sermons for Bob Dylan. She is also the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, and Nineteen Reservoirs. She has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), and an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography. Sante has contributed to the New York Review of Books since 1981 and to many other publications. She taught writing and the history of photography at Bard College for twenty-four years and lives in Ulster County, New York.