She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

She's Not There is one of the best transgender biography titles written to-date. It will appeal somewhat differently to the transgender and non-transgender populations because the latter will take Jenny's treatment as somewhat light in tone, while the transgender population will read and recognize considerably more of the realities behind her account.

Jenny Boylan is a remarkably able storyteller. She weaves circumstances over time together in deft fashion. A story, a comment, a thought, a seemingly minor theme described at one point in her life and story becomes a point later on, a pattern repeated again and again. This is life with meaning, described as a whole. Most people feel this way about their lives. Few can describe connectedness in such evocative fashion.

The topic - gender identity at the level of transsexuality - is life and death. That applies to Jenny and it applies to Grace, James/Jenny's wife, whose personal transition is also described. Jenny lays life itself on the line as she comes to terms with living an authentic life. If the tone sometimes appears light, one should appreciate that by the time a transgendered person moves toward transition, much of the emotional crisis has already passed, even if the circumstances of life are put at risk. Jenny describes this well - and also well-describes, through Grace's own transition crisis, how that same point is just the beginning for a spouse.

The second half of the book is taken with transition, including hormones, surgery, and social transition to female presentation and full-time living. Grace's perspectives weigh in here, as do those of close friends, particularly Richard Russo. Russo's letters to Jenny are incredibly personal, revealing, and direct and could easily serve as required reading for anyone interested in how interpersonal dynamics are challenged and change with transsexual transition in the picture. Russo also provided the afterword, and it's a brilliant piece of writing, worthy as a standalone piece.

Great writing, great story. Real. And readable! Absolutely 5 stars.

I read this book after I read the novel Mad Honey, which Jennifer Boylan co-authored. I found the novel’s dive into transgender issues heavy handed and preachy. (Not the parts by this author). But the half written by Jenny intrigued me, and led me to this 20 year old memoir that was fantastic and eye opening for a cis gender female like me. I am so grateful to Mad Honey for leading me here, and now I’m excited to read some of Jenny’s fiction. But first I’m going to read Empire Falls by her BFF Richard Russo

Besides being a powerful love story, well told, Jenny provides a poignant, witty, and very honest portrait of what it is to be transsexual. I found much in common with her experience because I am a transsexual woman myself, BUT others who are not can also identify with Jenny for her courage to be who she truly is - she speaks universally.

I was also impressed with the perspectives Jenny provided by including the thoughts of those close to her, most especially Grace (her wife and now partner), and Russo (her best friend both before and now after transition).

I was moved with Jenny's transformation, descibed as a "runnaway freight train" by Grace, and how Jenny found herself slipping into her true self, almost being pulled by a force of nature. And Grace's experience of loss and her "reinventing herself" as her beloved James became something beyond a "sister" even as they remained married, bound by love that transcends any physical relationship. Likewise, Russo had to reinvent himself and his friendship with (now) Jenny. And we catch glimpses of how children perceive and relate to transgender parents: we are not simply told these things have happened, we see these people transform even as we witness James become Jennifer...

...ALL these things haunt my own transition as I try to make fuller sense of the freedom, joys, pains and losses I have been experiencing as I "become". And especially important, the pain and losses my transition has already induced in the lives of those close to me, AND and what the future may hold for my own various relationships...There is hope that what is becoming will be better than what was before, and that my own story will be found to be a love story also.

I have read the book more than once, and it is the sort of book that grows in depth and richness as one revisits it.

One of the amazing things about Jenny's writing is how I can be laughing at one sentence and crying by the end of the next - THAT is how powerful this book is!

Other, non-trans, friends to whom I have recommended this book have encountered their own epiphanies and grown as a result: in the case of one, who has had difficulty accepting my own transsexuality and transition, he is now better able to understand my and my spouse's experiences and our shared humanity.

Please read this book, it is worth your time and emotional investment!

My psychologist suggested I look into this Jennifer Finney Boylan account of her transition 'later in life'. A tenured English professor leaving her thirties. Her strong family commitment yet unwavering need to correct this troubling imbalance. I was encouraged as a sixty year old grandfather to be in the light. To stand in defense of this woman 'me' as I have for all women that I have seen wronged. Ms. Boylan has followed with two more essays on her journey with her wife into the following phases of normalization in life as a woman. Please start here with her odyssey to the gender confirming surgery. Her following work, Stuck in the middle with you, deals with her life as a parent of teenagers and continuing in her professorship.I'm looking through you takes us back to various periods in her life where her home has a presence of it's own. As transgenders we often reflect on our lives with jagged memories, my girl self in constant fear of detection, the nine year old 'boy' finding an article on Christine Jorgensen and later, Wendy Carlos and Rene Richards always 'being her' but only to and with myself. If gender dysphoria is a part of your life or someone close to you, these works will provide spirited enlightenment and much needed humanity and humor. Even if this condition hasn't touched your life, understanding others is enlightenment.

I like the author's sense of humor and her talent for writing. She was able to tell us what it was like for Jim to live for many years in a body that had some sections that did not fit with her true identity. I believe Jim was a good person who lived a lie for years because he anticipated the hurt that the truth would cause the people he loved. This book might be a good reference for legislators and others who are deciding what is "correct" for families with Jim's dilemna. They could get a better picture of how the patient and the patient's family are affected. Perhaps a shorter version of the book could be provided. As always I would have preferred that the f-bombs had been replaced by #%&*(@, the comic book version, and I wish Jim and Jenny could enjoy a nice glass of water to replace so much alcohol. Yet people often turn to alcohol to temporarily escape the worries in their lives. I wish Jenny, Grace, their sons, and other loved ones much happiness and peace.

I was attracted to this memoir because I read a very good essay by Jennifer Finney Boylan in the New York Times Magazine. I appreciated the fact, that like Jan Morris, Ms. Finney Boylan is a writer, first and foremost. I read CONUNDRUM and also Christine Jorgensen's book. I've always been interested in this topic. I believe Ms. Boylan wrote a heartfelt and honest autobio that was poetic at times, however, was also curiously amateurish for a seasoned writer. Sometimes there was too much extraneous detail about the activities of the family, too many dates and facts, no one but a schedule book needs to know; often the faux pas made by an amateur. Also, Ms. Boylan kept repeating how known she was for her humor, but I didn't find the book particularly funny. I totally empathize with her and her life struggle, and believe she has successfully accomplished her mythical hero's quest to find her true identity. But I felt deeper insights and nuance were lacking. I also think it was a major mistake to ask her friend Richard Russo to write a chapter from his point of view. This felt like a distracting intrusion. Unfortunately, Russo's prose was so much sharper and philosophically penetrating than Boylan's, that it made Boylan's pale by comparison. I get that they are super friends, but it's not a good idea to invite your friend to enter your book and then steal it. Also, I don't think Russo had anything particularly new or insightful to say. He reacted rather typically. It's just that he expressed this so well. All in all, the book raised interesting conundrums visa vie gender and identity. It would be a good text for a course on this subject, though I still think Morris said it deeper and better.

I swore after my last outing with this author that I wouldn't read another, but I'd forgotten that I'd ordered this book from the library, so I gave it a whirl in the hope that it would be better than Stuck in the Middle With You which I reviewed negatively back in October 2015. It wasn't!

This one just arrived at my excellent local library, and so, hoping it would be more focused upon what I was interested in, I plunged in. The problem was that this was just like the other (or that was just like this!). It was just as dissipated, random, lackluster and as meandering as the other one was. This disappointed me. Like the other book, this one was all over the place, starting in 2001 with a random encounter with two girls, one of whom had been a student of the author's when she was a both a professor of English and a he. This had taken place two years before the publication of the book. The second chapter referred us back to 1968. The third jumped up to 1974, then there was a weird interlude, after which we're off to 1979, and then to 1982. No. Just no!

I confess I don't get this "Nauseating Grasshopper" technique which, as a martial art, would undoubtedly be a deadly and disorientating fighting style, but which is nothing but irritating and off-putting as a literary conceit (and I use that last word advisedly). It's the same kind of thing which was employed in the other book and at a point just 50 pages in, I started to realize that I had little interest in continuing to read this despite the engrossing and important topic. I only ever had two English professors (post high school) and both of them were great in their own way. How this English professor can write a book about a n important and fundamentally interesting topic, yet make such a pig's ear out of it is beyond my understanding. Perhaps it's precisely because it was written by an English professor that it's so bad. Perhaps you have to have a certain distance from the language in some way I can't quite define, to be able to execute a story successfully in it.

If the skipping around like a cat on a hot tin roof had revealed anything, I could have maybe got with it, but it didn't. This wasn't a coherent story, not even remotely. It was an exhibition (and I mean that in the most derogatory sense) of miniatures - of impressionistic paintings in water colors that were so lacking in definition that they were essentially meaningless stains on old, discarded canvasses. They conveyed nothing, and I can no more recommend this than I could finish it. I wanted to learn just what had gone on with this guy who was really a girl, and I wanted to hear it in her own words, but I couldn't because she's not there.'

This review first appeared on Ian Wood's Novellum