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Here She Comes Now
The writer Lucy Sante always tried to keep a safe distance from herself — and her own desires. Until, at 66, she broke free.
She told TheParis Review that a riff from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell — “I loved maudlin pictures, the painted panels over doors, stage-sets, the backdrops of mountebanks, old inn signs, popular prints; antiquated literature, church Latin, erotic books innocent of all spelling, the novels of our grandfathers … inane refrains and artless rhythms” — “was virtually the template for my entire life!” As Sante recalls in her new book, “We ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel, wore clothes with shoulders that extended three inches past that corner of the body, were always onto the new thing six months before the general public, went in on group summer-house rentals in eastern Long Island, went out for brunch and tried fad cocktails and knew the names of liquor-company publicists.” As Sante wrote in its preface, Low Life could “be seen as an attempt at a mythology of New York,” one “not tied to commerce or public relations but resident in the accumulated mulch of the city itself.” At least two generations of well-educated post-suburbanites planted in it some idea of themselves and the reason they’d moved to a crappy tenement in the East Village.
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