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 It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know" |
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"A book to laugh with, devour, and explore"A late-breaking review from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, by Peggy Townsend:
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. Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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© 2007 Jennifer Finney Boylan site design by bettypageisablonde |
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