She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

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I think he's standing in front of a mirror," she said. "And it's like he's this person cut in half, you know, it's like he's got this half of him that everybody thinks is cool, like he's Mister Fun Hog, but in fact he's totally scared of everything. It's like he's got this person he's invented and then there's this other person who's really him and he's trying to talk to this other person, trying to like, convince him to get the hell out of there."

Nolan, Emma (July 8, 2020). "Trans Author Jennifer Finney Boylan Recants 'Cancel Culture' Letter Signed by J.K. Rowling". Newsweek . Retrieved 30 August 2020. Ashley LaPierre had dropped out of Colby in the middle of that semester, which broke my heart. I remembered she'd been a fine writer though, shining in both my class as well as in Richard Russo's fiction workshop.

With or without free will, there's quite a story here. Ms. Boylan tells it with disarming humor and a sharp eye for some of the absurdities of her situation. Thinking as a woman, she ends phrases in timid question marks (''I'm Jenny Boylan?'') and starts thinking she ought to lose weight. Taking both estrogen and a drug to lower her testosterone level, she explains: ''Well, one pill makes you want to talk about relationships and eat salad. The other pill makes you dislike the Three Stooges.'' I wanted to know why Boylan always identified with women, even though she was born male - the deep psychological reasons. Was her father not home enough? Not loving enough? Did she have an especially close relationship with her mother? Was there some kind of traumatic experience? Or did she always feel that way? There Mr. Russo makes the good point that his friend's sex change and fiction writing may be fundamentally at odds. The James who became Jennifer, feeling that this was her destiny, might bring a different set of imperatives to her work. ''Novelists continue to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions,'' Mr. Russo writes. ''This is the fiction writer's manifesto, because without it, there's no story.''

Boylan has a central problem in her life as a man: she lives her life as a lie. Boylan writes, "As I walked through the woods, sometimes, I wondered on the 'being alive' problem. I'm still transgendered, I thought. Even though my life has been transformed by love. I still feel like a woman inside. At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie. It was there on the tip of my tongue as I taught my classes; it was there as I made meatballs for the woman I loved; it was there as I took the car through the car wash and shoveled the snow and built the fires and played piano and flipped pancakes. It was fair to say that I was never not thinking about it." Boylan points out that throughout her life, before crossing from male to female, "for much of the year I felt like a chalk painting dissolving in rain."

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Coming," said Lee, and opened her door. I thought, is that what she calls herself now, Lee? I still wasn't sure it was even the girl I had known.

Jennifer spent the first 43 years of her life as James, the noted author of novels The Planets and Getting In, co-chair of the English Department at Maine's Colby College, and best friend of Pulitzer Prize–winning scribe Richard Russo ( Empire Falls, Nobody's Fool), who contributes a touching afterword. Boylan begins her frequently self-deprecating and humorous tale with James's Philadelphia Main Line boyhood, then moves on to girlfriends and college; blissful first years of marriage to his wife, Grace; and the birth of his two sons.

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Boylan plays keyboard instruments as well as the zither [23] and describes playing in various bands in her autobiography. The other thing that troubled me about the book is the level of fictionalization. In her note at the end, the author admits that “certain moments in it have been gently altered – by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary.” Particularly notable to me, after having read Tim Kreider’s essay about accompanying Boylan to her surgery, was the fact that nowhere in either of the accounts of that trip in this book was he ever mentioned, an omission that makes the journey seem lonelier and more intimate than it apparently was in real life. How many other friends were also present and unmentioned, and how many other changes did the author make?