She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
It may be voyeuristic curiosity that first prompts you to crack the binding of Jennifer Finney Boylan's first-person story of gender switching. But as you tuck into this amazing memoir, you'll find yourself transfixed less by the before-and-after photos than by an affecting, impossible-to-put-down narrative.

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.

It's against the backdrop of this achingly "normal" life that James comes to terms with the realization that he was born transgendered. "It has nothing to do with a desire to be feminine," Boylan writes, "but it had everything to do with being female." With hormones and surgery, James becomes Jenny, now a female faculty member of Colby College, a "sister" to his wife, and "Maddy" (that's Mommy+Daddy) to his children.

"The problem, as this memoir illustrates, is that the transgendered person's experience is not really 'like' anything," writes Russo -- which explains why this story is so startling. While Boylan's charm and wit endear him to the reader, we can't help but wonder about the untold memoirs in his story: the wife who lost a husband, a mother who lost a son, and two children who lost a father. Sallie Brady

FROM THE PUBLISHER

She's Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story. Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. She's Not There is a portrait of a loving marriage - the love of James for his wife, Grace, and, against all odds, the enduring love of Grace for the woman who becomes her "sister," Jenny.

She's Not There explores the dramatic outward changes and unexpected results of life as a woman: Jenny fights the urge to eat salad, while James consumed plates of ribs; gone is the stability of "one damn mood, all the damn time."

While Boylan's own secret was unusual, to say the least, she captures the universal sense of feeling uncomfortable, out of sorts with the world, and misunderstood by her peers. Jenny is supported on her journey by her best friend, novelist Richard Russo, who goes from begging his friend to "Be a man" (in every sense of the word) to accepting her as an attractive, buoyant woman. "The most unexpected thing," Russo writes in his Afterword to the book, "is how in Jenny's story we recognize our shared humanity."

As James evolves into Jennifer in scenes that are by turns tender, startling, and witty, a marvelously human perspective emerges on issues of love, sex, and the fascinating relationship between our physical and our intuitive selves. Through the clear eyes of a truly remarkable woman, She's Not There provides a new window on the often confounding process of accepting ourselves.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Although this story is by no means pain-free (one friend commits suicide), Ms. Boylan places her emphasis elsewhere. What she accomplishes, most entertainingly, is to draw the reader into extremely strange circumstances as if they were utterly normal. It's easy to feel, as Mr. Russo apparently did, when being told by his friend's doctor that sexual reassignment surgery and novel writing require similar precision. — Janet Maslin

The Washington Post

Boylan's depiction of femininity, as James becomes Jenny, is fascinating and often hilarious.—Judith Warner

The New Yorker

James Boylan grew up feeling that he was a woman trapped inside a man’s body; in his early forties, he chose to risk everything, including his marriage, to pursue another identity. This journey is the subject of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. How could James—who renamed himself Jennifer—explain to his wife, Grace, and his best friend, the novelist Richard Russo, that he hadn’t felt at home in his own skin? The most moving parts of the book are the e-mail exchanges with Russo that Boylan reproduces verbatim. As much as Russo wants to believe his friend’s account of himself, he doesn’t find the character of Jenny credible: “Here, you insist, is THE REAL ME, the me I’ve kept a secret all these years. And yet [it] seems mannered, studied, implausible,” Russo writes. Russo misses the old familiarity: now, he explains in the afterword, he guards against small slips (“he” for “she”) that reveal how much he wants James back. Noelle Howey remembers her father, Dick, as a distant presence in her childhood; he would come home, fix a drink, and retreat to his corner of the living room. So Howey feels that she gained rather than lost a parent when Dick divorced her mother and became Christine. As Christine, she was “kinder, nicer, tidier, better with children, interested in flowers and birds and chick flicks,” Howey writes in Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's and Mine. It was “like the transformation of Mr. Hyde into Miss Jekyll.” Yet she wonders, “If all these wonderful traits were inside my father all along, why was gender the only means to let them out? Why wasn’t loving me—or my mother—enough?”(Kate Taylor)

Publishers Weekly

Boylan is 45 years old, but for more than 40 of those years she was James Finney Boylan. A Colby College professor and author of four books of fiction, Boylan has a good comic ear, and that humor keeps the book, which tells the story of Boylan's passage from male to female, on track if somewhat trivialized: most scenes are breezy and played for laughs. When Jenny is attacked by a drunk outside a bar, it goes largely unremarked upon; how does the man who always wanted to be a woman feel when suddenly assaulted for being just that? And when the reader is given an insight into Boylan's feelings, the news is often delivered secondhand: during a conversation with a therapist, in a letter sent to colleagues or during frequent visits with her best friend, novelist Richard Russo (who also provides a touching but similarly lightweight, afterword). Boylan's friends and colleagues pat her on the back for her courage, and yet we get hints this is only half the story: Boylan's adoring mother is mentioned often, while a disgusted sister warrants only a short mention within a brief paragraph. Boylan may be choosing to accentuate the positive, but this leaves the story feeling incomplete, which is odd given the book's striving to feel whole. The book is frequently poignant ("As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves"), yet those moments don't cut to the quick of the story it has to tell. (On sale Aug. 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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