Fresh Air - Writer Lucy Sante On Transitioning In Her Late 60s

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Lucy Sante has been writing books since the 1980s, exploring everything from photography to urban history. In a new memoir, she shares her story of transition from male to female at 67 years old. "I am lucky to have survived my own repression," Sante says. "I think a lot of people in my position have not." The book is titled I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition.Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new Apple TV+ series Constellation.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Who am I? is a question writer Lucy Sant has been asking herself for the better part of her life.

As she writes in a new book titled, I Heard Her Call My Name, A Memoir of Transition, Sant describes how she found herself in the unlikeliest of places in 2021 through a gender-swapping feature on FaceApp, which allowed her to turn pictures of herself as a man into a woman. Throughout her life, she says, changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of her mind for the better part of 67 years. Lucy Sont, who was assigned male at birth, is known for her incisive criticism and cultural commentary for the New York Review of Books. She's also written

nine books that explore subcultures and urban history, including Low Life, Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, a collection of rarely seen New York police department evidence photographs taken in the 1900s, and The Other Paris, a look at the French capital's underbelly. Saint recently retired from Bard College, where she had been a visiting professor of photography and writing for over two decades. Lucy Sant, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Tanya. Glad to be here.

Can I have you take us to February of 2021, when you wrote to around 30 of your closest friends in an email with a subject line that read, a bombshell. Can I have you read the first page of that letter? Of course. The dam burst on February 16th when I uploaded FaceApp for a laugh. I had tried the application a few years earlier, but something had gone wrong and it returned a badly botched image. But I had a new phone and I was curious. The gender swapping feature was the whole point for me, and the first picture I passed through it was the one I had tried before, taken for that occasion. This time it gave me a full-face portrait of a Hudson Valley woman in midlife, strong, healthy, clean living. She also had lovely flowing chestnut hair and a very subtle makeup job

and her face was mine. No question about it. Nose, mouth, eyes, brows, chin. Barring a hint of enhancement here or there, she was me. When I saw her, I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning. Lucy, thank you so much for reading that. You uploaded these photos of yourself on February 16th of 2021, and less than 12 days later, you were essentially ready to let the world know about this big life-altering thing about you. What do you think it was about those altered photographs that unlocked this intense need to come out and let everyone know? Because at this time, you were about 67 years old.

Yeah. Well, it was seeing, you know, I had to collect these photographs from all over the house. They were in boxes and albums and baskets here and there. Not that many pictures. I've always been camera shy. But, well, first of all, it took all this time to collect them. And that's the point because I realized – this is something, a realization I came to very recently. I had a time lock on my trans ideation. You know, if I,

I mean that I would think about it for an hour or two, fantasize, whatever. And then some internal mechanism would force my thoughts in a different direction. And, you know, because I spent so much of my life trying to avoid, I mean, I never like cross-dressed because I knew it was going to be a one-way trip. And when, but when I saw these pictures that represented my whole life, really beginning around age 10 or so. though. And furthermore, in this eerie kind of way, the app seemed to know what my fashion choices and hairstyles would have been all those years. It was uncanny. And I was given this evidence. It was irrefutable. Plus, I'd broken through that time limit, and I had no choice. I came out to my shrink 10 days later. Wow. So yeah, it took you quite a while to compile all of these photographs. We're going to get to that term one-way trip because I want to talk a little bit more about that. But when you uploaded these photos on FaceApp, it also did something else for you. You not only saw yourself in them,

it allowed you to go back in time and revisit these memories of what it would have been like, those moments in time, had you been a girl. Essentially, rewriting memories. Well, yeah, heavily rewriting them. Total alternative timeline because, as I also point out in the book, if I had, in fact, been born female, my life story would have been very different because, you know, my relation with my parents would have been different. My first, I had a very difficult family situation and I was happy to escape. And my escape was provided by a scholarship to an all-boys Jesuit high school in Manhattan when I was 14. And that would not have happened if I'd been a girl.

I mean, at the time that you wrote that email to your closest friends, you also came out to your wife, your partner, and your son, and then quickly walked it back. How come you walked it back when you had such a resolve to let everyone else know? Well, I knew that my romantic relationship would not survive this. We're still best friends, but I knew that the romance part was not going to survive. And furthermore, I felt, and this had been a major inhibitive factor for decades, which is that I like girls, and I figured that this would repel them. And since I had been given the proof of this repulsion by my partner, I was trying to talk myself back into the closet.

How was your relationship with your son? How did your son react to it? He was totally chill because he's Gen Z. My son is now 24. He is, as I'm fond of saying, straight as a highway in Texas, but he's known trans kids since he was 11. He went to middle school in Woodstock. He did LARPing, live action role playing, which really brings out the trans kids. So he didn't bat an eyelash. His only concern was what he should call me. What does he call you? Nothing.

He refers to me as Lucy to other people. He's never called me that to my face. And but he, you know, in fact, when I came out to him, I said, I just keep calling me dad. You have a mom, you know, I don't want to go bother that, that particular relationship. But quickly, I mean, within six months, it was no longer calling me dad was no longer really tenable. When you first transitioned, you worried that somehow the name change from your dead name to Lucy would change your reputation for those who knew you by your dead name, which we often refer to as the former name of someone who has transitioned. I like the term dead name a lot. People are freaked out by it, though.

But it was a preoccupation, and it seems so weird to me now. Why would I think that this would present any kind of difference in my career? I mean, for one thing, my name is so unusual. My last name is rare, you know, and I'm only changing one letter. But the fact is that that was a kind of cover for a deeper existential reckoning with myself, you know, this unstable personality because, well, first of all, having come here as an immigrant child and learning to speak English, being the only immigrant kid around, trying to pass myself off as an American, trying to speak English and speak, learning English, and then trying to get rid of my accent as quickly as I could. Because your family was from Belgium, yes.

Yeah, my family was from Belgium. So that was, you know, my first attempt at passing, as it were. And I guess there's always been a kind of unstable relation between my inner self and what I show the world. And so changing my name, rather than changing my gender per se, is changing my name that set off this weird kind of existential freefall, like, who am I? You know, this bizarre uncertainty that manifested as this completely ridiculous fear. There were a flood of memories that came to you, which is the basis of this book, that really showed you that all along you had been subconsciously aware of your being. And I'm curious, though, in 1998, you wrote a memoir called The Factory of Facts.

And in it, you take the reader through your family's history in Belgium, the language, religion, your parents, your childhood, your career. You are there on the page, but you dodge, as you say, self-depiction. How do you look back at that memoir? It's an interesting piece of writing. You know, the first chapter is the one that became well known and which I present the pivotal experience of my family when the bottom dropped out of local industry in our hometown in Belgium and we're faced with this choice. And so I present nine different versions, one of which is the true one, and eight fictitious resolutions to this problem. But for the rest of it, I was dodging self-depiction. And it's clear to me now, and it's a weakness of the book. And the fact is that, you know, I mean, I've recently realized

from writing this book, in which most of my close friends make appearances, and I'd never really been able to write about people before because somehow there was a chain of constraints beginning with the fact that I was trying to hide the secret also prevented intimacy. And that even included intimacy on the page. So everything I wrote was, you know, was nicely written, deeply researched, blah, bitty, blah. But it lacked that personal quality because I was unready to face who I was. You say you didn't want to be seen because you didn't know who you were. That's right.

Did you ever think that maybe maintaining the secret, though, was an opposition of your profession as a truth teller. Well, yeah. That's, you know, I told myself regularly how I was being a hypocrite. And I'm not in favor of hypocrisy as a general rule. You know, I make a practice of being honest. And, well, the interesting thing is that since I've transitioned, I've become brutally honest. I can't lie anymore. I tend to speak my mind sometimes a little too loudly and indecorously. But in any across many topics, photography,

reviving worlds that have been lost with time through photography. And you write about these subcultures and the underbelly of society. Do you think your writing might have been different had you transitioned earlier? Your approach, the subjects that you take on, and of course, as you said, maybe people on the page. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that latter fact especially, that's crucial. You know, I'm still not sure I have a very good sense of story, but I definitely would have written, I think, more intimately, more about people, fictional or otherwise, had I transitioned earlier? That's quite possible because, yeah, I mean, probably my preoccupations might still be the same, which is I'm deeply preoccupied with memory and time above all. Those are the two subjects that run through all my writing. And that might have still been the case, but they might have been a little refocused, maybe warmer and less distant than they are. You were also in the company of emerging artists and creatives that we've come to know, the likes of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, for instance. And there was also a transgender population that was visible during that time period. How did you view and interact with them? It's funny because I was closer than Ann Golden. We actually dated for about a week. And when Greer Langton, the artist Greer Langton, who was trans, became her roommate, I was terrified.

I avoided her. The idea of an actual trans woman just scared living daylights out of me. They were going to take me by the hand and pull me across the line. And I wasn't ready. And oh, my God. But you were aware, because that's interesting. That takes a certain amount of awareness to know that that fear, that's the reason why you feared it. Or is that a pun reflection? No, no. This was happening at the time. And then actually, when I was writing Low Life, I had an office a block away from Tompkins Square Park.

And at that point, every year there would be a thing in Tompkins Square Park called Wigstock, which was celebration of all things gender bending. You know, trans women, drag queens, there wasn't that much of a distinction made in those days. I could hear the festivities from my office, but I never – I'd wait until everybody had gone home before I'd slink back up the side of the park to my apartment. I was scared. I – you know, I – the Pyramid Club was half a block from my office, and that was the epicenter of all things drag and lower east side at the time. I never set foot in that club, not once. It was really like a big, big job of avoidance that I was doing in those days. Was it part of that thing you described that, what did you call it, one-way ticket or like a point of no return?

Yes. I mean, and, you know, of course, the irony is that I simultaneously yearned for that. I yearned for somebody to come along and take my hand and pull me across the line, even though I knew people who I was terrified that they might do that. You know, this is the kind of internal war that just raged in me for decades. You describe yourself as never really one of the guys. It always felt like a performance, and yet you didn't have a lot of women friends. Most of them were romantic. So what kinds of male friends did you connect the most with? Well, I mean, I really had very few friends of any kind until I was in college. romantic. So what kinds of male friends did you connect the most with?

Well, I mean, I really had very few friends of any kind until I was in college. I did not start meeting girls until my middle teens. I went to Catholic schools where generally the genders were segregated. I didn't have any girlfriends in the neighborhood, you know, playmates. And, of course, I had no family over here at all. And for guys, well, you know, I'd occasionally meet some other guy who also read books. It happened. And it really took until I was in college when I suddenly started meeting people with backgrounds very different from mine, but somehow we had something crucial in common. And I've had this friend cluster since 1972 pretty much. I mean some people added in the next few years. But, you know, my crowd is like, it's probably fewer than a dozen people held together by sensibility, something like that, because we're men and women, gay and straight, black and white.

And yet we all have something in common that I don't think any of us could really define. And that's what I needed from life. Has it opened up maybe a sense of intimacy with these friends that you've had for a long time, but they didn't really know you? They didn't know the core of you because this fundamental part of you, you were keeping a secret. How have your friendships changed? Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, there are definitely people with whom friendship has blossomed in the last couple of years. And people from my past who've come back partly as a consequence of all this. You know, two women who I was very close to in high school, I'm very close to again now after many years of not really communicating.

And I can feel that there are tensions in friendships that have relaxed all of a sudden. And I'm just better at talking to people now because I'm not hiding anything. I was inhibited from real intimacy with really anybody because at any moment I could blab the wrong thing. It's like my terror of talking in my sleep, my terror of inadvertently, you know, starting a subject line that might somehow lead to the doorway of gender. This haunted me for all these decades. So I think I'm probably a better friend with all of my friends than I was here before this. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, we're talking with writer, critic, and artist Lucy Sant. She's written a new book called I Heard Her Call My Name, A Memoir of Transition. We'll be right back. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you're already a Fresh Air Plus supporter, you may have heard Terry talking about the first daily national broadcast of the show in 1987. It was still like making a national debut both to the audience and to program directors because we weren't on that many stations to start with. Dave Davies talking about his job driving a cab.

This is a fascinating city of many diverse neighborhoods. It was fun to just tool around in a cab all day. Or archival interviews with people like Arthur Miller, Nina Simone, and Audrey Hepburn. Timing you can't rehearse. It's an instinct. Especially comedy. I mean, that's what made Carrie unique. That's why there haven't been a whole lot of Carrie Grants. Are you not a Fresh Air Plus supporter yet? You could be. Subscribe on plus.npr.org

or on Apple Podcasts. Today, we're talking to writer, critic, and artist Lucy Sont. Her latest book is called I Heard Her Call My evidence, a collection of rarely seen New York City Police Department evidence photos taken in the 1900s, and the other Paris, a look at the underbelly of the French capital. In 2022, Sant retired from Bard College after teaching there for 23 years. I thought you wrote so clearly the differences in how you feel in a group or in the company of men now as your true self versus was an armor that you had to put on. And can you describe that and then in contrast to what it feels like now for you? Well, yeah. I mean, being around guys, except for certain select guys. And in fact, I had a lot of gay male friends, many of whom died of AIDS,

like half of them at least. But most guys, if I went into a room of football fans, I was, you know, I was on my, I was on my guard. I did not feel comfortable. And now it's a different matter because, well, I'm an old woman, so most guys do not register me at all. And I'm able to observe them at my leisure. And what I see, you know, what used to be a kind of constant chiding, you know, this constant demonstration of how I was falling short.

This is how guys behave and you're not doing that and this is why girls don't take you seriously, whatever. Now, I look at men performing and all this behavior that goes on, this making themselves more manly than they might actually be. It's really very funny, but it's such a completely different experience. You know, like I say in the book, it's like reading a familiar text in a different language, perhaps the original. Yeah, I don't know how better to say it than that. I'm seeing and experiencing things I've seen and experienced a million times, but with a completely different lens now. to know about the messages and letters you get from men because after you went public you heard from all sorts of people with various reactions and some of the interesting ones all of them i'm sure are very interesting but you get you receive some uh where you call them secret sharer notes

from cis men who said they have also felt like this too, and they're repressing themselves too. Yeah, there's a range. I mean, I know a couple of cis men who've said, oh yeah, when I was younger, I used to cross-dress all the time. And somebody said, you know, I've thought about doing what you're doing, but I can't. You know, so there's a range. And, of course, they might be expressing very different desires or they may be couching the same desire in different clothing, you know, as it were, different guises. It's, I didn't want to push them, you know. Plus, this was, I was getting these messages at a time when I was getting, you know, maybe even more reactions than I'm getting these days from the book. Because I started hearing from all kinds of people from my past.

Once the, well, it happened in three waves, you know. I started hearing from all kinds of people from my past. Well, it happened in three waves. It's happened when I sent the letter out and then started sending it out to concentric rings of people. And then again when I published the first piece about my transition in Vanity Fair two years ago. And then now with this book. So this has awakened all kinds of submerged feelings in all kinds of people. You were born in Belgium and immigrated twice to the United States. You all came here and then went back to Belgium and then came back. And you grew up in New Jersey and New York. Your parents were working class.

You were also your parents' miracle child because your mother had, she actually had given birth to a stillborn baby girl before you were born. You write about this in the book, but how do you think that impacted your relationship with her? Well, my stillborn sister, it was a year, exactly a year and a month before I was born,

and she was named Marie Luce. And when I came along, and my mother was warned, you know, when I was born not to try it again. So I was born an only child. And when I was warned, you know, when I was born not to try it again. So I was born an only child. And when I was born, they reversed her names and gave them to me from Marie Luce to Luc Marie. And they actually bought or leased because this is Belgium. There's limited land. You don't just buy it. Unless you're very rich, you don't buy a cemetery plot.

You lease it. So they leased a cemetery plot for 10 years for this tiny body. And my mother never got over it. I can hear her voice saying, la petite, the little girl, and mourning her but also conflating her with me. And my mother called me by female diminutives all through my childhood. She also dressed you in blue, which at the time was a girl's color in Belgium. That's right. My father's birth announcement was pink, and blue was for girls, but for my mother, it also stood for the Virgin Mary, which may be a good part of the reason why blue was for girls over there.

But she dressed me in blue and apparently, you know, just raised eyebrows, but she defended it because of her devotion to the Virgin. And when I was in Belgium, maybe not for one of our immigrations, but my mother and I went back for both her parents' illnesses and death. So I I spent my second and third grades of school were split evenly between American and Belgian schools. And, and on one of these trips, she bought me a bicycle and we brought it back and it was get this a unisex bicycle. It had the bar halfway up and I got so much flack from the neighborhood boys that I put the bicycle away and never rode it again. And to this day, I'm still kind of awkward on bicycles. when parents didn't reveal sometimes their inner self. You and your mom had a very contentious relationship. There's this line that you say that stopped me in my tracks

where you say, I hated her, she hated me so much that it was almost love or like love or something to that effect. Yes. My mother and I had a very, very difficult relationship that lasted right up to her death. Um, she, um, she hit me every single day between the ages of 13 and 18. She probably hit me before that too. But that's when puberty is really what set off her enmity, which never lapsed, even though

she stopped hitting me when I became an adult. Um, my, my mother just never approved. Part of it was religion. She was completely unimpressed by my career. You know, she wasn't a reader, for one thing. But when I, I think it was when I, either my first book was published or when I got my first prize. And I proudly announced this to my mother. And she didn't say great or congratulations or good for you. She said, remember that he that corrupted the morals of the young should have a millstone tied to his neck and be thrown off a bridge. That was her entire response. She was one of those, you know, European pagan

Catholics, didn't know a thing about theology. It was about medals and amulets and statues and scapulars and rituals. She wanted a child who she could mold to be like herself, and that included someone who wouldn't know any more than she did. If I used a French word that she'd never heard, she would deny that it was a word. And she kept doing this into my adulthood, mind you. Let's take a short break. If you're just just joining us we're talking with writer critic and artist lucy sant about her new book i heard her call my name a memoir of transition we'll continue our conversation after a short break this is fresh air you don't see yourself being like a spokesperson but you know that you are just by virtue of you telling your story,

that people are looking to you for that, especially during this moment where trans rights are at the top of the conversation. That's right. I know a lot of trans writers, but I know some who write for a trans audience. They've given up trying to write for a general audience, which is not just a trans problem. It's today, you know, there being no big stage and everybody's writing for their own share, their own little pool. And in my case, I, you know, I'm trying to take on the job of explaining this to cis people who are well-meaning but do not understand, which is most cis people, frankly. They just don't get it. They have no idea how, especially, I mean, to this day, people who are very, very close to me and love me, they don't understand how I could have had these feelings for so long and kept them hidden.

And it, well, it bruises some egos that like, you mean you carried on this deception for 50 years and we never knew? And that reflects back on them, right? Anyway, so, but they have no idea what the mechanism, how this feels. You know, I had a very close friend write to me after reading my discussion of men and women, you know, where I say, like, you know, with women, I feel at ease. I feel like I don't have to hold down an arterial position. With guys, I feel like I'm in a struggle I didn't sign up for, you know? And I had a very close friend write to me and say, I feel the exact same way as you do, but I've never wanted to be a woman, you know? So I have to explain that to people and explain to the parents of, you know, children who've expressed their transness that, no, this is not a passing fancy. I mean, it's a moment of liberation.

Across Generation Z, people are getting permission from their peers to come out. And so it's this great moment of release, which, of course, the right wing is trying to stomp on as hard as they can. But, you know, I want to explain to the parents, this is not a will of the wisp. It's not going to go away. And, you know, I am lucky to have survived my own repression. I think a lot of people in my position have not. You write about how, or you have written about how, at almost 70, slight worry that people will think you're jumping on a trend. But is that really how you feel?

Because, I mean, your friends tell you that they're seeing you smile with your whole face now. People have known you for 50 years and have never seen you smile. Yeah. No, that's true. I mean, well, I never opened my mouth in a grin. I never showed my teeth. And I used to think that, well, how did I even phrase it to myself? I think it made me look too vulnerable or something. Well, I mean, it made me look too feminine because it's, you know, I mean, I look distinctly better when I'm in a good mood and I look most feminine when I'm smiling or grinning or laughing or whatever. I mean, the things seem, those two things seem to, happiness and female appearance seem to be intimately connected for me. It's really kind of inexplicable, but there you have it. I want to go back to one of the things you mentioned that you struggled with, and I'd like to know if you still struggle with it.

Your attraction to women and fearing that women would not like you as a woman, do you still feel that way? I don't know. anyone, let's put it that way. In any case, I do have to, you know, there is a flip side to all of this, which is that it's, you know, transitioning has shown me whole new landscapes of loneliness that I didn't even know existed before. Oh, wow. Now that's, yeah, are you lonely? You know, I'm, it's, you know, I'm lonely in that I'm – well, I'm a love junkie, always have been, and suffer from withdrawal when I don currently 26 and in graduate school, so I don't see her very often. But I don't know many trans women. And, you know, and I live in this upstate town where it's I've been living there for an embarrassing amount of time, considering how few people I know around there. You know, sometimes when the mood is wrong, I can feel like I'm living on my own separate planet, far away from anyone else.

And yet it's been worth it. Yeah. And yet, at the same time, one of those whole series of paradoxes here. And one of them is the fact that while I'm extremely lonely much of the time, I'm also much happier than I've ever been. Explain that one, you know, but there it is. Lucy Sant, thank you so much for this book and thank you for this conversation. You ask wonderful questions. Thank you so much for this book, and thank you for this conversation. You ask wonderful questions. Thank you so much. Lucy Sant's new book is titled, I Heard Her Call My Name, A Memoir of Transition. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the first three episodes of the new Apple TV Plus series, Constellation.

This is Fresh Air. Today, Apple TV Plus premieres the first three episodes of its new eight-part drama series, Constellation, starring Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks. The remaining episodes of this science fiction story, in which Rapace plays an astronaut on an ill-fated space mission will stream weekly. Our TV critic David Bianculli has seen all of them and has this review. Constellation, the new drama series streaming on Apple TV+, starts in outer space with an astronaut struggling to survive and return safely to Earth after things go horribly wrong.

This has long been familiar film territory, from the orbital collision in Apollo 13 and the deadly stowaway in Alien, to the twisting perceptions of reality in Gravity. Constellation, created and written by former Doctor Who writer Peter Harness, borrows a bit from all of those. It's a very tricky story to follow, but in the end, and by the end, it's a very moving one. In Constellation, the International Space Station, with a handful of astronauts aboard, is in orbit when it collides with an unidentified object, crippling most of the onboard systems. That's the Apollo 13 part. An emergency evacuation leaves a single astronaut waiting behind to repair and pilot the craft, while time, space, and memory seem to shift, as does reality itself.

That's what Sandra Bullock's astronaut went through in Gravity. And finally, there's something mysterious and otherworldly on board, something potentially lethal. So there's Alien, sort of. But in Constellation, while the space-bound scenes are thrilling and creepy, there's less frantic action in this series overall, and more underlying tension. It's a slow build, and takes several episodes to establish what may or may not be really going on here. But the clues make more sense as you go along, and the more you watch this

constellation, the more profound and disturbing it becomes. Noomi Rapace from The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo and a previous outer space thriller, Prometheus, stars here. She plays Jo Erickson, an astronaut on the space station, who in this early scene is communicating with her 10-year-old daughter Alice, who's back on Earth. Their conversation is a jumble of perspectives, the daughters as well as the mothers, interspersed with scenes of previous chats between the two. The daughter asks the mother to read her a story, and it's very personal. Hi, I'm Johanna. I'm an astronaut. And I work for the European Space Agency.

I live on the International Space Station. I'm going to be up here for a whole year and I got a very special bedtime story. It's called The Little Rocket Girl. Do you want me to read it? Yes. So it goes like this. Up and out in space, it's very cold. The stars move fast and the sun burns hot just to try to stay warm. Up and out in space, it's very quiet. But the worst thing about up and out in space is that it can be very, very lonely. That exchange, where Joe admits to being very lonely in space, happens before the orbital collision that rips everything apart. The daughter, Alice, is played by twin actresses,

Rosie and Davina Coleman, who rotate in the role, so I don't know which one acted in that scene, or in the other scene I'm about to play. But that's fascinating to know here and somehow fitting, because after a while, Joe the astronaut begins to suspect that her daughter isn't the same little girl she left behind. And Joe isn't the only one with suspicions or identity issues. Jonathan Banks from Breaking Bad co-stars as a former astronaut named Henry Caldera, who is now a scientist with a top-secret experiment aboard the endangered space station.

At times, he acts like two different people, and there may be a reason. Psychologists in the space program believe that both Joe and Henry suffer from high-altitude psychosis, which explains, to them, the astronauts' post-mission bouts of confusion, memory loss, and paranoia. But Henry is seeking another explanation, one he explains, slowly and patiently, to Joe's daughter when they finally meet. Have you ever heard of quantum physics? Yes. I don't know what they are. Would you like to?

Sure. For a long time, the way that we understood the world was governed by what is called classical physics. You know what that is? Kind of. It is a basic way of measuring and predicting things. Then along came people, people like Albert Einstein. Have you heard of him? Yeah. Yeah. He started to look into really small things like atoms, subatomic particles, waveforms. And it

began to look like classical physics didn't apply anymore, which is mysterious. It's not predictable in ways we currently understand. For example, the same thing can be in two different states at the same time. You could have a particle, for instance, the exact same particle. There's a world in which that particle is black and a world in which that particle is white. And there's a kind of point of liminal space between those worlds where the particle is black and white at the same time. And they don't seem to want to decide which state they'll be until someone looks at them.

Complicated? Absolutely. Over the eight installments of Constellation, perspectives change, stories change, even people change. Scenes that look one way and mean one thing in episode one are turned inside out when they return in episode six or seven. It's a story full of unreliable narrators and a TV show where the images are more important and revealing than the dialogue. And because the visuals are crucial throughout, the directors of this series are crucial too. Oliver Hirschbegel and Joseph Seder

direct the later episodes stunningly. But the mood and look are established in the all-important first ones by Michelle McLaren, who directed some of the most brilliant episodes of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Watching Constellation takes commitment, patience, and attention, but you'll be rewarded for that effort with a haunting story that at its center is about the love between a mother and a daughter.

It really touched me. At least it did in this universe. David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed Constellation, the new series on Apple TV+. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, New York Times journalist Alan Foyer joins us to break down the mounting legal challenges of former President Donald Trump. As Trump seeks to gain the Republican presidential nomination, he faces 91 felony charges across four states and several lawsuits,

many with dates in court that run right up to the presidential election. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.