Post #76 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Memoir Book Review of
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
Reviewed by Tracy Kauffman-Wood
James Finney Boylan had everything – an award-winning career as a writer and teacher, a warm and satisfying relationship with his wife, two great kids and an incredible secret – in his heart he knew he was a woman.
This is the memoir of Jennifer Finney Boylan who faced her fears and finally emerged at age 43 as a transsexual male to female. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
Allowing our outer choices to reflect our inner voices would be a formula for a happy life, if it often weren’t so damn hard and fraught with heartache. Therein lies the conflict of this story. How do you cross such a deeply defined line while still retaining the love, respect and solid relationships you’ve earned in a lifetime?
This conflict is reflected in Jim Boylan’s voice as a new father.
“I woke up from a nightmare, covered in sweat. Moonlight shone down on the snow outside.
I asked myself, in the softest of voices, You don’t still want to be a woman, do you?
And I said, Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You do.
I got back into bed. The baby lay asleep in the bed between Grace and me. I put my arm around them, mother and child, protecting them. They were warm.”
Boylan’s sense of being female began at the age of three. Her vivid descriptions of everyday life with just one thing wrong (one very important thing) instruct the writer of memoir on the importance of including the details.
“…the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind-never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time. Still, this conviction was present during my piano lesson with Mr. Hockenberry, and it was there when my father and I shot off model rockets, and it was there years later when I took the SAT, and it was there in the middle of the night when I woke in my dormitory at Wesleyan. And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don’t be an idiot. You’re not a girl. Get over it.
But I never got over it.”
This awareness brought her to the brink of suicide at age 29 and finally to gender reassignment surgery at 43.
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s story bears a lesson for anyone who has wrestled with a secret, which means all of us. If the voices in your heart can’t be silenced, listen! They’re trying to tell you something.
This story of a seemingly impossible dilemma, told with humor and anecdotal charm, has a happy ending. The tony private boys school Jennifer attended as a boy has finally brought this award-winning alumna in to speak. “After all, she’s been on Oprah twice,” a young male friend who happens to be a student at her alma mater told me. This can only mean one thing. Jennifer Finney Boylan has not only arrived. She is definitely there!
