I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Broadway, 270 pages, $23.95
The memoir, often the ultimate “Wish you were here” postcard to our former selves, by definition invites wistfulness, but when your former self is of a different sex, the stakes are even higher.
Jennifer Finney Boylan burst onto the personal-reminiscence scene in 2003 with “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders,” the first best seller by a transgendered American. Her follow-up book, “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted,” explores the same territory: Life is not easy for a boy who believes himself to be a girl.
Other boys often mistook the young male Boylan as gay and delighted in calling him names, but as Boylan explains, “It’s probably worth mentioning — just in case this still needs to be said — that the thing I felt didn’t have much to do with being gay or lesbian; it was, even then, not about who I wanted to go to bed with, but who I wanted to go to bed as.”
By exploring an overarching theme, in this case the commonplace presence of ghosts in our lives, Boylan’s new book distinguishes itself from the many memoirs that organize themselves around a concrete period of time, most often childhood. As a woman who used to be a man, the author is the personal embodiment of an absence and a presence, and so she comes to this conceit with a rare understanding.
“The world,” she writes, “is full of Exes, of Priors and Formers, people who can never quite live in the present.” She fears that she, too, might be one of those “vaguely comic figures, people who are so completely defined by what they Used To Be that we are unwilling, even irritated, by the prospect of seeing them As They Are Now.”
If you are going to claim to have had a haunted childhood, it helps to have grown up in a certifiably creepy house on the Main Line in Philadelphia, a gawky, misshapen dwelling with creaking staircases and a shadowed past. That home, known as Coffin House, provides a nifty metaphor for the author’s inner turmoil. Boylan felt that in order to survive she had to become a ghost and keep the nature of her true self hidden: “And so I haunted that young body just as the spirits haunted Coffin House.”
If you are nurturing secrets it also helps to have hidden panels in the walls, which Boylan used to store forbidden lingerie. The desire to don female clothes reaches its tragicomic apex when it drives the author, while still a boy, to wear his sister’s wedding dress and then flee into an attic when he hears his father’s footsteps, nearly getting trapped there for who knows how long.
Helping to keep Boylan out of the social fray and engaged in something appealing and distracting as a teen was his decision to embark on the never-ending task of translating Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kroeger” from German. Boylan’s other defense was to take refuge in a state of near-constant dreaminess. For someone of Boylan’s disposition, there could probably be no worse summer job than as a bank teller, yet that is the job Boylan has in one of the more-hilarious segments of the book. Boylan chronically fails to balance out at the end of the day, at one point misplacing a wad of cash by a coffeemaker (How much? Oh, say $10,000), creating a near panic.
The new memoir revisits some of the material in the first one, including the turning point at which Boylan meets his soul mate, a woman named Grace Finney, while they are students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and yet the new book builds on the earlier work by creating a better sense of their relationship. “In my experience,” Boylan writes, “straight women like it when a guy has a feminine sensibility, an enthusiasm that goes right up to — but unfortunately does not quite include — his being an actual woman.”
Somehow Grace is the exception, an answered prayer, making Boylan feel as if he can be a man, and it is she who most stirs his deepest guilt about failing to reveal his secret until nearly reaching age 40. In a work that can be praised throughout for being piercing and direct, this one section takes a special prize:
“I hadn’t told Grace my secret when we got engaged.
“I think the expression people use is My Bad.
“I can tell you I should have. I don’t think there’s much question about that.
“But let me ask you something for a change.
“Would you have told her, if it had been you instead of me? After all those years of petitioning the Lord with prayer, praying desperately that love would cure you? Would you have looked Grace in the eyes and told her that until the day you met you suspected you did not exist, that you had spent your whole life up to that point like some kind of sentient mist?
“Would you have had the courage to turn to the one person you loved, and to speak the words you knew might well make her turn her back on you forever?
“Maybe you would have. Maybe you’d have found those words, somewhere within you. In which case, you are a person of integrity and courage, and I can only say I wish I were more like you.
“But then, I’ve wished that I were more like you from the beginning.”
Some people in this book will be familiar to readers of “She’s Not There,” including a goofy fortune-telling grandma who can always be counted on to be inappropriate and who ended her days as a cadaver at Jefferson Medical School.
” ‘Cadavers,’ ” says Boylan’s mother. ” ‘What’s next?’ ” to which Boylan suggests there isn’t anything next. “Once you reach Be a cadaver on your to-do list, your work is probably pretty close to being finished.”
Humor is a hallmark throughout. One of my favorite lines in the book is inspired by a dispute over whether an incident from long ago had actually happened. ” ‘Just because it never happened, doesn’t mean I can’t remember it,’ ” Boylan says, encapsulating in one short sentence the thicket of ethical dilemmas that beset any memoirist, who has to rely for a guide on memory, the most skittish of search engines, made up, more often than not, of fog, quicksand and mist.
Places will be familiar, too, including Coffin House. At least part of the narrative concerns hiring a paranormal investigator to search the old family house for “cold spots” and other evidence of unhappy spirits. As amusing as these moments are, what really shines through is Boylan’s desire to make amends for the betrayals that nature’s betrayal forced on her; the excursions into the netherworld have less appeal than Boylan’s struggles.
When the decision is made to become a woman, Boylan is amazed to find a great deal of support from Grace and their two young sons; from Boylan’s boss, the president of Colby College, where Boylan is an English professor; and from old friends and other family members. But one person is missing from this lineup, a key influence on Boylan’s life, and in the end this book is a love letter to that person, a plea to be seen in the round and to be forgiven the deceits that inevitably preceded the final coming out.
Memoir is as much a blood sport as any other form of writing. As such, it is not for the faint of heart to write one, and the author’s decision to address the missing person, who will not speak to her in person and has declared Boylan to be as good as dead, is dangerous and daring and beyond brave.
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Madeleine Blais is the author of the memoir “Uphill Walkers” and a professor in the journalism department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
