She's Not There

April 21, 2003
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.

July 1, 2003
Can someone who is not transsexual understand the thoughts and emotions of a person who is? In this revealing autobiography, Boylan (English, Colby Coll.), an acclaimed writer of such novels as The Constellations and The Planets, hopes to convey these complex feelings to the public. With bluntness and sincerity, Boylan opens up about the 40 years she spent living as a man, about being trapped in the wrong body, the awkwardness of never feeling appropriately dressed, the desire to live outwardly as the opposite gender, and the overwhelming longing to fit in with the mainstream. This, as she points out, is especially true when the majority of the public's knowledge of transsexuals comes from "the small fringe of the community that feels driven to behave badly on The Jerry Springer Show." Boylan names each chapter after a significant moment in her life, highlighting momentous occasions or episodes of self-discovery. Often humorous and illustrative and always enjoyable and enriching without being preachy, Boylan selflessly offers the reader all the painful details of her life as sacrifice for a better appreciation of what it means to be transsexual in today's world. Her book will do more for raising awareness of the transsexual experience than Jan Morris's Conundrum. Recommended for all libraries and special collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/03.]-Mark Alan Williams, Library of Congress

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2003
Boylan, English professor and author of the critically acclaimed novels "The Constellations" (1994), "The Planets" (1991), and "Getting In" (1998), began life as a male named James Boylan. In this autobiography, she details her lifelong struggle with her burgeoning femaleness and the path she followed to become a female, both physically and mentally. For 40 years, the author lived as a man, seemingly happy and even marrying a woman and fathering two children. At a certain point, though, she realized that she couldn't suppress her desire to live as a female and so eventually went through all the steps to become female, including sexual reassignment surgery. There is something troubling about Boylan's lighthearted tone, and while she hints at it, there is no really clear depiction of the havoc this transition must have wreaked on her married life (Boylan's wife was clearly devastated) and on her children (who at times refer to her as boygirl or maddy). But Boylan's well-written and informative book is a worthy contribution to the body of work on this subject. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2003
The story of how novelist James Finney Boylan (e.g., The Constellations) became Jenny. "Going from male to female is easy," she writes. "What's hard is going from being a person with a secret to a person without one."

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.