She's Not There

Starred review from June 15, 2016

Originally published in 2003, Boylan's groundbreaking memoir chronicling her transition from James to Jenny was updated in 2013. "Man, what you don't know could fill a book. I'm unique, however, in that the book filled with the things I don't know is an actual book," her tenth-anniversary foreword states with the same wry humor found throughout. With the transgender community's growing media presence, an audio version makes a timely debut three years later. For more than four decades, Boylan was a son, brother, husband, and father; the fateful falling in love with Dierdre Finney was supposed to be Boylan's "cure" to the "illness" that made Boylan want to be someone else. Their love indeed cures but in ways surprising and bittersweet, tender and revelatory, and, finally, authentic and whole as Jenny becomes her true self. Narrated by Boylan, the audiobook offers a unique gift impossible in print: Boylan's best friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, who undergoes his own evolution in understanding and accepting Boylan's transition, reads the afterword he wrote; the last word, most fittingly, belongs to Boylan's wife, Dierdre (called "Grace" throughout the memoir). VERDICT For listeners who enjoy resonating, illuminating life stories. ["Recommended for all libraries and special collections": LJ 7/03 review of the Broadway hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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.