A late-breaking review from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, by Peggy Townsend:

I liked Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir “I’m Looking Through You” Broadway Books, $23.95 even before I started reading it.

First, there was the author’s bio which usually includes chest-puffing accomplishments like where the writer got their MFA or how many times their other books were on the bestseller list. In Boylan’s bio was the notation that she had played herself on “All My Children,” making her life apparently soapy enough to be included in the same TV space with voodoo, bomb scares and sudden memory loss.

Now that’s a reason to read a memoir.

Then there was the author’s note in which the professor of English at Colby College reminded us that memoir should not be considered a photograph, but an impression.

“This story,” she wrote, “contains occasional elements of invention, in keeping with the facts of my life, not in order to shamelessly bamboozle the reader but in order to fill in gaps in the narrative, or to dramatize scenes I did not witness first hand.”

In a publishing world speckled with college-educated young women who write of growing up in a gang neighborhood in South L.A. or of being raised by wolves during the Holocaust, this was a refreshing acknowledgment and a clue that Boylan would handle her story without hand-wringing and overwrought drama, but with humor and grace.

And that’s exactly what Boylan delivers. This talented writer gives us a refreshing, funny and thoughtful look at growing up as a boy trapped in a woman’s body.

Boylan, who wrote an earlier memoir of her transformation from James to Jenny called “She’s Not There,” began this story when she was 13 and her family moved into a crumbling old house in Pennsylvania, which was apparently haunted by ghosts only the young James could see.

There was a gauzy middle-aged woman who sometimes appeared in a room the family called “the Monkey Bathroom” for the chimpanzee named Jesus who had once lived there and the young girl who had purportedly drowned and haunted the upstairs room where the author slept.

And then there was the ghost that lived inside the thin, awkward James himself: the girl Jenny who would lie in bed with a halter top stuffed with grapefruits reading Betty Friedan or sleep in a negligee usually kept hidden behind a secret panel in her third-floor bedroom.

How is it, Boylan writes, “that some people manage to integrate their lives, and live in the moment, while others become stuck, become Exes, haunting their own lives like ghosts?”

That is a question for all of us to consider. How many of us are stuck in our own pasts?

Deliciously, the book is also populated by a strange and wonderful cast of characters: the kimono-wearing Grammie who tells fortunes with an upturned fishbowl and whose philosophy of life includes the advice that a woman’s pizzazz “comes from your bosom,” the fierce and independent sister Lydia, the sweet, clueless father who keeps advising James that he will one day be “the man of the house” and even the high school teacher who “stood in front of the room, saying ‘Settle down, settle down,’ over and over again, although it was not clear whether he was speaking to us, or whispering, desperately, to himself,”

I found myself devouring this book, laughing out loud and, at the same time, feeling a kind of protective understanding of this boy-girl. Exploring issues of gender, of living with secrets and of coming to peace with the person we are — not the one we are expected to be — this book is a fine, literary undertaking.

I found myself not only setting Boylan’s book on my nightstand to be read again, but going to her Web site to watch the “All My Children” episode and a video tour of that big old house where she grew up, which halfway through caused that dreaded spinning color wheel to appear on my screen and mysteriously shut my computer down.

Hmmm.
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Ten Money Questions for Jennifer Boylan
Posted by: Nina at Queercents blog

Jennifer Boylan is a best-selling author and professor at Colby College in Maine. Her new memoir is I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, which is about growing up in a haunted house, and about what it means to be “haunted.”

Until 2001, Jennifer published under the name James Boylan and while she now has a perspective on “a life in two genders,” she also provides an interesting view about the financial realities of transitioning. Skip to Question 6! Or start from the top as Jennifer gets personal with all things money.

1. What are some preconceived notions about money that typically get associated with gender?

In my family, you’d go to my mother for small amounts of money, and she’d say no. Like, you needed five dollars for the school trip. She’d ask you why you needed five dollars, grill you about the whole thing. Then maybe, if you were lucky, you’d get two. You’d go to my father if you need a lot of money, like a hundred dollars for a new amplifier. And he’d always say yes.

2. Are there any money lessons in I’m Looking Through You?

Well, there’s a chapter where I’m the world’s worst bank teller. I was so dreamy then. I’d give people six thousand dollars when their check was for six hundred. Or I’d just lose tens of thousands of dollars in my drawer because I hadn’t counted it right, or left a wad of thousands by the coffee machine. Eventually they put me on “probation”, and my supervisor, Mrs. Muhammed, had to watch me like a hawk. That helped, but not much. Nothing they could do would make me less dreamy.

3. What was your very first job? How did it teach you the value of a dollar?

I mowed lawns when I was a kid. A very male job, I guess. I liked the constant drone of the engine and the smell of the freshly mown grass and the gasoline. I liked the clank the mower would make when I ran over a rock. Or you’d mow right over a mound of dog poop and it would all spray out the side. Good times.

My first job in college was working at Lenny’s Hot Dogs in Atlantic City during the summers. That was a whole other trip.Working the night shift with my friends. It felt kind of like being in a play, every night, making hot dogs, burgers, fries, corn on the cob, frozen yogurts. We’d get off at five or six in the morning and walk down the beach and look at the stars. Minimum wage, but a great job.

When they gave me the W-4 Exempt from Withholding form at the beginning of the summer, I had no idea whatsoever what this was. Withholding? What’s withholding?

4. As a college professor, have you seen a shift in the financial values of students throughout your years of teaching?

Colby students come from a pretty wide swath of financial backgrounds, but a lot of them have spending money. My students, like people across the country, have gotten used to having more disposable income over the last 25 years.

5. Do good grades typically translate to higher earnings in one’s career?

Depends what you do, I guess. If you’re out to become a fiction writer, or a journalist, good grades might get you the job, but the job of a writer is one that almost always guarantees financial hardship, at least it is if it’s your only income. Or unless you get very lucky.

6. Did changing your gender have any impact on your financial status?

Well, I changed genders right as we were going from parents of toddlers to parents of grade school kids. So there were lots of strains on us financially at the time. Going from male to female is expensive, at least if you go the whole nine yards and include all the therapy and the surgery and the electrolysis and the hormones. Plus having to buy mostly all new clothes. And moistureizer, for gods sakes. I probably spent over 20,000 bucks in the process, over five years. People going from female to male can spend four or five times that. And of course, none of this is covered by insurance.

This is one reason people transition in mid-life; it can take that long to have the financial resources to get from one place to another. I know plenty of genderqueer people are happy being in the middle, and I respect that, but I wasn’t happy there.

Issues of privilege and income (which are related anyhow) are wedded to trans issues in a way that makes them a world apart from the issues for gay and lesbian people. If you are trans and hoping to make a complete transition, then you will come up against the financial realities of it. You don’t need twenty-thousand dollars to come out as gay or lesbian. But if you embark upon a transition path as trans, you’re going to need that. And where will it come from? Do you ask your parents, at age five, or fifteen, or twenty five, “Say Mom, I need twenty thousand dollars for one a them sex changes?” Young people don’t have that kind of money. Plenty of older people don’t have it either.

And so people with privilege in the culture– whether it comes from race or sex or class or education– are more likely to have the financial resources to go through the process. Which means that plenty of people without those resources, who feel the issues just as intently, are left without a means to move forward. And so people’s lives get desperate, and they resort to whatever they can just to get by. Which means their lives are very, very hard. And that’s not right.

Money enables people to “pass,” and passing is a highly charged and volatile issue for trans people. The more you look like everybody else in normative culture, the easier your life may be. And people with deep pockets can buy the surgeries that enable them to blend in with everybody else. The tyranny of passing, of “having to look like everybody else” is often financial at its root. And so this is another thing that trans people have to struggle with.

When I counsel young people about how to move forward, often I give them the advice they least want to hear, which is, finish your education, get a degree if you can, and try to attain some sort of power in the culture, because it can take resources to overturn the cultures rules effectively.

Either that, or be prepared to live totally outside of society’s rules. “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

7. What is your most significant memory about money?

I remember being a young writer in NYC, and I was broke as can be. I made 300 dollars a month as a writer for a magazine. My rent on 108th street was $175 a month in 1980. So I had $125 for everything else. I asked my mother if she would send me a winter coat, which I figured cost $75; I was wandering around New York without a coat. My mother mailed me $25, and said, “Well you’ll have to earn the money for your own coat. But here is some money for the sleeves.”

My parents had the money– but they believed very strongly that you have to support yourself– especially if you’re going to do something deranged like become a writer. So they wanted me to learn the value of earning my own income. Which I did, but it still annoyed me. I mean, hello? You sent me money for the SLEEVES?

This is an example of the time I should have asked dad, instead of mom, for the money.

8. Which is your preferred way to make a living: writing or teaching?

They each have their pleasures. Teaching can be really hard, because you have to figure out how to reach each student differently. Sometimes there’s a nice matchup between what I know and what students need. Other times, I can’t figure out how to get through to students, and I don’t know what it is they need. Writing is more familiar to me, and I usually only have to answer to myself.

9. How does money play a role in the trans movement?

(See above.)

10. Do people in academia pay enough attention to finances?

Well, to become an academic means a series of acts of financial suicide– all the money you spend on tuitions for undergraduate and then your graduate work. You can easily wind up twenty-six, twenty-seven years old without every having had a job besides teaching and research. And then, if it’s a tenure track job, it comes down to getting tenure, or not. If you don’t, maybe you can get a job somewhere else, or maybe not. Sometimes people wind up in their late twenties without any prospects and an enormous personal debt. And only then do they have to start figuring out what to do next.

For people who are tenured, they sometimes then commence living inside of a bubble; education can be one of the few recession-proof industries. Which means that teachers can obtain a certain distance from the realities of the world, including the realities of the lives their students are living. Which means that if you want to stay relevant and connected to your students’ lives, you have to stay on your toes.

More about Jennifer Boylan
I’m Looking Through You Jennifer Finney Boylan is a widely praised author and professor of creative writing and American literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of 10 books, including She’s Not There, which was the first bestselling book by a transgender American.

Her new memoir, I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, was just published by Broadway/Doubleday (Random House). While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus is on what it means to be “haunted,” and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human.

Author Jennifer Finney Boylan emerges as public face for transgendered

Jerry Harkavy, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published Tuesday March 25th, 2008

BELGRADE LAKES, Maine - Jennifer Finney Boylan never set out to be the
public face for the transgendered.

But the novelist and English professor at Colby College was thrust
into that role by her 2002 best-selling memoir about the transition to
womanhood that freed her from the decades-long torment of being a
female trapped in a male body.

With three appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” two on “Larry King
Live” and numerous other interviews and public appearances, Boylan,
49, has become a sunny-faced activist for the transgendered and one of
the most widely recognized transsexuals of recent years.

“Activism for me takes the form of living a normal life and doing so
very publicly,” she said.

Boylan’s public schedule is getting busier with this year’s
publication of her second memoir, “I’m Looking Through You,” a
poignant but laugh-out-loud story about growing up in a Charles
Addams-like Victorian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

The author, then named James, concealed her conflicted sexuality,
hiding her stash of lingerie in a secret panel in her bedroom. The
spooky old house, with footsteps in the attic, clouds of blue mist and
a ghostlike figure of an old woman in a mirror, serves as backdrop for
an adolescence haunted by gender issues that forced Boylan to keep the
nature of her true self hidden. In so doing, she became something of a
ghost herself.

“As I wrote the book, it became clear to me that the Scooby Doo
ghosts, as I call them, were less interesting than the metaphorical
ghosts,” she said. “While not everybody believes in ghosts, everybody
knows what it means to be haunted.”

The inner turmoil about which she wrote is now ancient history for
Boylan, who detailed her 2000 sex change in the earlier memoir, “She’s
Not There.” Today, she lives with her spouse Deedie, their two boys
and two Labrador retrievers near the lake on which Henry Fonda and
Katharine Hepburn starred in the 1982 Academy Award-winning film, “On
Golden Pond.”

James Boylan had met Deedie (named Grace in the two books) while in
college and only told her of his secret about a decade ago, well after
they were married. Boylan had hoped that their love would be enough to
keep the gender demons at bay. They remain legally married.

Boylan said she didn’t go public with her life story to become a role
model or a poster child for the transgender community,¼¼ but rather
because writing and storytelling is what she does.

“A lot of good is done simply by being public, by being visible and by
telling stories so people can see that a life like mine, a family like
mine is familiar and it’s normal, and that it’s a lot less
extraordinary than it seems,” she said.

She hopes her story will help to reshape the public’s image of transsexuals.

“We think of transgendered people as living in a big locked house
somewhere. They never show their faces, or when they do show their
faces they seem tortured and unknowable,” she said. “When people see
me and they see my family, they see something that’s familiar.”

Now in the midst of a year-long sabbatical, Boylan juggles her writing
and family chores (she’s both a soccer mom and a