For T’s new issue, I tried to create a portrait of Greer Lankton — whose doll sculptures, to me, capture all the glamour and pain of being a New York City artist in the 1980s — by speaking to nearly 20 of her surviving friends and family members, each of whom, in the decades since her death, are left holding their own, often conflicting memories of her. Lankton, who died at age 38 of a cocaine overdose, has emerged as an unlikely hero: an endlessly imaginative mind who, like her peers Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, created a distinct identity for herself as an artist; a transwoman persevering in a narrow-minded world; a survivor, not just of discrimination or neglect but of history’s attempts to minimize her contributions to contemporary art. Now, she’s getting her due: This month, the photographer Nan Goldin, Lankton’s friend and roommate for about a year beginning in 1981 (who declined to be interviewed), and the editors Jordan Weitzman and Francis Schichtel released “Could It Be Love,” Lankton’s first monograph, published by Weitzman’s Magic Hour Press. Others are working on their own books about their time with her. And in the next year or so, her diaries, which she kept from age 17 for most of her life and excerpts from which appear in the piece, will be published by University of Minnesota Press, giving Lankton the opportunity, at long last, to tell her own story.