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I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir

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A quick glance of Jennifer Finney Boylan's latest memoir, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU, would give the impression that the book focuses on growing up in a haunted house. But a closer look reveals, as the subtitle states, that it is about "growing up haunted." This is an important distinction.

Boylan did live for many years in a house, aptly named the "Coffin House" after the family who built it, that she took to be haunted. Her family moved there in 1972, just as she was entering her teenage years. On her first visit she received a big electrical shock, followed by another surprise: she was to sleep in a spooky third floor bedroom while the rest of her family would get their shut-eye on the floor below. From that first day exploring her new home, Boylan felt the presence of ghosts, and her nights there were full of disembodied footsteps and floating specters. As her story unfolds, it becomes more complex and nuanced. She moves readers back and forth in time, telling stories of the Coffin House, her adventures with "ghostbusters" later in life, and, most especially, her personal hauntings.

As she wrote in her earlier bestselling memoir, SHE'S NOT THERE, Boylan was born "James" but always knew herself to be "Jenny." It wasn't until after she was grown, a college English professor married with two sons of her own, that she came out as transgendered and began the process of becoming a woman physically. Her time in the Coffin House coincided with her teenage years, and she relates her frustration and uncertainty with honesty and grace. "Back then," she writes, "I knew very little for certain about whatever it was that afflicted me, but I did know this much: that in order to survive, I'd have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden." In fact, later, returning to the house as an adult woman, after the place had been remodeled and filled with the laughter of the next generation, she wonders if she had indeed haunted herself. Was the starry-eyed woman she saw, as a teenage boy, over her shoulder in the mirror really her future self still trapped and lonely in the male body?

There are other figures who haunt this tale as well. Boylan mourns the loss of her father and older sister, neither of whom get to know her as Jenny. Her family factors large in this memoir, of course. They are an eccentric Irish bunch: a crass and loving grandmother and her refined English sidekick, a perpetually cold aunt, a mystical cousin and others support the story of the immediate Boylan clan, including Jenny's smart older sister, musical father, and religious and accepting mother.

In the post-Frey era, memoirs are read with a critical eye. Like many others today, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU is prefaced with the disclaimer that there are elements of invention in the book, including some of the dialogue, and that she played a bit with the timeline. For readers of memoirs this may seem obvious (for who can remember the exact words of a conversation 30 years ago?), but it frees the author and allows her a creativity that only strengthens the story she is trying to tell. And Boylan's style is creative --- light-handed and readable, funny and wise, conversational and intimate, and yet polished.

Sprinkled with philosophy, without sounding snobby, and pop-culture references without being silly, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU is an enjoyable and memorable read. Boylan's story is at once singular and familiar --- the right combination for a successful memoir. While the Coffin House provides the bones of the book, it is lovingly fleshed out, with a personal, often bittersweet examination of family, loss, identity and change.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

At first glance I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir seems to be about growing up in a haunted house, but it's much more than that. Author Jennifer Finney Boylan uses the near-translucent spirits inhabiting her family home as a metaphor for her dissociated youth. She spent her first 40 years as James Boylan, the boy's and man's body a bad fit for her soul.

The Boylan family moved to the aptly named "Coffin House" on Philadelphia's Main Line, and at once young James began to observe ghostly shapes drifting through the rooms. Through the teen years and in later visits as a young adult, alienated by feelings that "James" was meant to be "Jenny," the author continued to experience the ghosts. In more recent years, after transgender surgery turned James into Jenny at last, she visited the house with a "ghostbusting" team and came to a better understanding of the strange presence and what it was foreshadowing to the boy, near-translucent himself.

This memoir follows the theme of author Boylan's earlier book She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, expanding on her life with a full cast of eccentric extended family members and friends. Boylan's humor has a dark cast; she deflects her serious moods with lightning-quick turnarounds, yet the reader never doubts her seriousness. The book is full of music and cultural references that at times are the only tethers holding Jenny/James in the real world.

Parent and partner, professor, friend, musician, daughter, sister -- some of Boylan's relationships have thrived and some suffered. Her books leave me believing that, as she states, she's "solid" at last. I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir is not your everyday memoir but it will make you think -- about ghosts, but especially about the human experience.

Linda Bulger, 2008

I had never heard of Jennifer Finney Boylan before I saw this book advertised, but I was drawn to it by the subtitle: Growing Up Haunted. We all live with memories of our past and from our family's pasts, and its interesting to see how others deal with their "hauntedness." Jennifer was born James Boylan, a child who felt "transparent" and "not there" through his childhood. Eventually, James recognized that he was trans-gendered, and succeeded in becoming a "solider" person as Jennifer. Before that transition she had a lively childhood in a house which had some weird spectres or "ghosts" along with a real living family of eccentrics.

Jennifer's story is interesting on several levels, both sad and amusing. She writes well and wittily and conveys a good impression of life in a haunted house as well as what it was like to grow up in a family which, while not wealthy, was part of Philadelphia's Main Line society.

I didn't know jack (or jill) about Jennifer Finney Boylan when I picked up this book. I was only interested because it was described as a "growing up in a haunted house" memoir, and I can't get enough of the paranormal.

Imagine my surprise when a few pages in I discover that Jenny was formerly Jimmy.

At first I was annoyed at what I perceived as falst advertising. But in no time I found myself captivated by Jenny's unique voice and perspective. She captures perfectly the goofiness of teenagers in the '70s, with all cultural references intact. The section on Jimmy's first job as a bank teller had me laughing out loud because it reminded me so much of my first job.

By the end of the book, I loved both Jimmy and Jenny, and the whole haunted angle was almost a moot point.

I'm looking forward to reading more by this talented writer.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU: GROWING UP HAUNTED, her second book to discuss her transformation from James to Jennifer, has much going for it. Since Ms. Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of several novels, we would expect that she is fluent in the language. And that she is. Her prose is as transparent and effortless as a stream in Maine, the state she and her family call home. Her wonderful sense of humor will grab you immediately. Case in point: "What am I doing here with a gin and tonic and a [...]?" At one point she opines that her sense of humor may have kept her sane in her anything-but-conventional life. The cast of characters is usually both entertaining and compelling; many of them surely could be subjects of short stories.

In a recent radio interview I heard Ms. Boyan, without whining, discussing the difficulties that she has faced in the world of the transgendered. While she dwells less on the topic in this memoir than in her previous book, SHE IS NOT THERE: A LIFE IN TWO GENDERS, she does rue the fact that she too often has to explain herself to and educate the gawking public about this world, something that a lot of us who are different from the great washed majority have long since become tired of doing.

What comes through on every page of this book is that Ms. Boylan is a remarkable woman and the most decent of people. I am convinced that I would like her on sight and would love to audit one of her English classes. She is far too kind to her sister Lydia (the book is dedicated to her sister) who has refused to ever see her again and demands that when she visits their mother that portraits of James/Jennifer must be removed from her mother's home and that Jennifer's name cannot be mentioned. Lydia needs to get over herself and/or stay in Scotland. Her mother should inform her that she does not remove photographs of anybody for her or anyone else.

Ms. Boylan says in the introduction that this book is a memoir. We'll just have to accept this-- at least recent ones-- as a new genre somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. She is obviously the godchild of Frank McCourt whom she refers to in the introduction-- who wrote dozens of pages of dialogue in ANGELA'S ASHES that supposedly took place while he was a child under the age of six, a feat that stretches credibility to say the least. This writer convinces us, however, that she has caught the essence of what happened to her. I for one, whether events happened exactly as she writes of them or not, would not have missed her account of the decorating of the Christmas tree with ornaments with each family member's names on them, as well as extended family and a special place on the tree for deceased pets known as the "Pet Cemetery."

This book should go a long way in convincing us that we are all in this together and we are more alike than different.

The title of Jennifer Boylan's book reminds me of the song by the Beatles from their "Rubber Sole" album released back in 1965. Although Boylan doesn't say that the song inspired her memoir's title, its words have a new meaning for me now as I relate them to Boylan's "haunted" youth.

When reading a memoir, I'm not as interested in the writer's childhood as much as in how she or he has integrated childhood experiences into the adult life. That's precisely what Boylan has been doing since she had transgender surgery in 2000, moving "from the potato-blighted land of men to the new green country of women." Jennifer Boylan was born a boy, James; now, as a woman, she is haunted by that boy as she unravels the continuous thread of her life through the power of story.

Boylan begins her memoir at the Astrid Hotel in Maine, where the sight of a ghost takes her up old stairs while her mind takes her, and the reader, back to the first time she visited the Coffin House in Philadelphia. Although Boylan uses fictional names in the book, the name of the Coffin House where she spent her childhood with her parents and sister Lydia, is just spooky enough to be real. The house was haunted by presences "otherwise invisible to the naked eye," as Boylan was haunted by the woman she knew herself to be.

Facing the personal hauntings of her childhood, Boylan returned in the spring of 2006 to the Coffin House, where her mother still lives. She brings a "paranormal investigator" to check out the hauntings of the house. Mrs. Boylan wonders about Jennie meeting with a group of paranormal investigators and asks, "When you say paranormal--do you mean, you know...other transsexuals?" The book is full of such humor as Boylan makes light of her childhood and her unique situation. At the end of the book she realizes that "maybe the humor is what I need to survive."

For me, one of the most poignant moments occurred one summer, when James was working in a bank. An older gentleman used the pronoun "she" to refer to James, his favorite "sweetie pie" teller. The man, whom Boylan called Mr. Bowtie, was embarrassed to find that James was a man, not a woman. He was one of the few who had seen James as the woman she believed herself to be.

On the subject of "gender theory," Boylan says she resents "the idea that a theory should even be necessary. To be honest," she writes, "just about the only theory I trust is story." She hopes that the story she tells stands in for theory, and indeed it does. As her mother says, "It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." It is a saying that sustains Boylan.

The book is dedicated to Boylan's sister. The last time Boylan saw Lydia was in the spring of 1999 when Boylan and her partner Grace spent a year in Ireland. They had two sons by then, born when the two were man and wife. I found this section of the book to be engaging and heart-warming, after the youthful antics and ghost busting. In a pub in Dublin, brother (Jennifer was still James) and sister talk. He wants to "come out" to her and I wait for the response. Will Lydia be accepting and understanding? As of the writing of the book, Jennifer and Lydia have had no further contact. (Check Boylan's blog on her website for an update on that part of the story.)

Boylan imagines a visit her sister took to a crypt at a church called St. Michan's. Was Lydia going to end up in the crypt herself? The description was spookier than the doors that opened and closed and the chair that swivelled on its own at the Coffin House.

One of Boylan's unexpected blessings was to have Grace decide, after some consideration, "that her life was better with me in it than without, and so, to everyone's amazement, we moved on into the unknown territory before us together." The two had met at Wesleyan University and begun dating in the mid-1980s when Boylan was James. Boylan's children now call her Maddy, a combination of Mommy and Daddy.

Boylan weaves her story backwards and forwards. It's what people do in therapy, Grace tells her, "one thread that puts your experience into a context that includes a past, and a present, and a future." Boylan really wants to be like everybody else. She's different, though, and the spirit of her dead father tells her that this is a gift. "But maybe you don't get to choose your gift," he advises. "You only get to choose what to do with it." In writing her memoir, and other books before this one, Boylan has exercised, rather than exorcised, her gift--through the power of story. She decribes herself as human "with a unique tragedy, deserving of kindness."

I'm left wanting more of that human story and will search out Boylan's other books, including her earlier memoir, She's Not There.

by Mary Ann Moore
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women

"Studied, mannered, and implausible", Richard Russo says of Jennifer Boylan in the pages of this memoir. I believe that quote much more than the blurb Russo put on the cover, extolling "I'm Looking Through You" as "one of the finest literary memoirs...", on a par with Mary Karr's books.

No way. This book isn't remotely in the same league as Mary Karr. I've read "Liar's Club". "I'm Looking Through You" is fairly entertaining, but I really couldn't take it seriously. The word that comes to mind is "fluff".

Jennifer Boylan, as she regularly reminds her readers, is clever and well-connected. She's been on "Oprah". She can play classical music pieces backwards, in ragtime.

As a writer, she is wonderful adept at pushing the readers' buttons...but they aren't always the right buttons. She's whipped up a light, frothy cafe au lait of a book, and stuffed it full of comforts for the boomer generation. There is a threnody running through it about ghosts. But Jennifer doesn't know whether she believes in ghosts. But, since its a theme of the book, she regularly returns to it.... time to talk about those ghosts again, and she hears a few more creaks in the steps.

It really seems that all Boylan cares about is whether her readers are entertained. Did she do enough song and dance, did you smile or cringe at her silly jokes?

Was I entertained? Yes, I have to admit I was. Was I satisfied that I had spent time with a book of substance? No, sadly,I wasn't.

I bought this as an audiobook which I played in my car to and from work for a week. The author reads her own work and, honestly, does a fabulous job of it. Jennifer Boylan has a natural reading style that makes the stories of her, her family and her transition from male to female come alive in the ear. It helps, too, that this is an engaging book, more revelatory about her sex-change in many ways than her first memoir, SHE'S NOT THERE.

What Boylan displays in I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU is a crackerjack sense of humor, a flair for descriptive passages that ring true, and a complete avoidance of self-pity regarding the less pleasant moments in her life. Chief among the latter is the total estrangement from her older sister Lydia following her transition (The sister's words to Jennifer were, "It would have been better if you had died.") which, considering that Jennifer's much more conservative mother welcomed her now-daughter with open arms, seems both inexplicable and heartbreaking. But Boylan chooses to concentrate on what life had been like with Lydia prior to that break, illuminating the convoluted qualities of their relationship and letting readers draw their own conclusions. Her stories and anecdotes about life with her father, who did not live to see her transition, are equally revealing. Along with the connecting narrative of growing up in what she describes as a haunted house, Boylan makes clear that the other ghosts----of her dead father and her estranged sister, of her eccentric grandmother and, certainly, of her former male self----helped form the person she is today.

I recommend the audio version of this book, but however you read or listen to I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU, you'll be rewarded with a story of growth and loss that will stay with you long after you're done.

After reading the first few chapters of I'm Looking Through You by Jennifer Finney Boylan, I thought I was going to learn about this woman's experiences with ghosts in her family's old Victorian mansion when she was a child. However, this book proved to be much more.

At the same time 13-year-old Jim was capturing glimpses of ghosts in the dark, three-story home called the Coffin House, he was also beginning to see that he was not the person reflected in the mirror. Not only did he conceal the fact that a particularly dark spirit shared the third floor with him, but he also kept hidden that what he really wanted to be was a girl.

"I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes. I have to turn my head until my darkness goes," the author wrote.

You may be wondering how this collapsing old house got its unusual name. It seems a scientist had lived there and working a laboratory in the basement - the place where a blue mist could be seen upon occasion. When first laying eyes on it, Jim's sister, Lydia said, "It's like the Munsters' house."
It is most interesting how the author weaves this ghost story with her own self-realization that he/she was transsexual.

"Back then I knew very little for certain about whatever it was that afflicted me, but I did know this much: that in order to survive, I'd have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden."

And like the ghosts who usually made their appearance during the dark of night, Jim would close his bedroom door when darkness fell, put on makeup and dress in girl's clothes. While family and friends, if they'd know back then would have viewed his behavior as totally bizarre, Jim (now Jennifer) is able to look back on it now with a sense of wonder, as well as delightful humor.

For example, he related what happened on the evening of Lydia's wedding. When the family returned from the reception, he saw her dress hanging in the hallway and could not resist the urge to grab it, take it to his bedroom and put it on. Then he heard the sound of footsteps in the attic. Of course, no one (of this world) was up there. When he released the trap door and went up to investigate, his father came up the stairs calling for him. Seeing the trapdoor open, his father climbed up and stood within inches of the hiding boy. He then left the attic and closed the trap door behind him leaving Jim trapped in the darkness. Worried that he might be forever enclosed in that attic tomb, Jim inched his way quietly toward the trapdoor.

"All at once the trapdoor gave way beneath me," he wrote. "Briefly, I flew through the air; a streak of white, an inverted angel in a downward flight, like a character out of Paradise Lost. Then I landed in the middle of the third-floor hallways with a tremendous crash."
Jim heard his father ask, "Jim, is that you?" Immediately he raced back to his bedroom, tore off the wedding gown, and stuffed the makeup and clothes into the secret panel where he hid those types of things.

Of course, life was certainly not all fun and games for Jim when he was young and he dared not tell anyone about his inner most feelings for fear of ridicule.
"I do not believe in ghosts, although I have seen them with my own eyes. This isn't so strange, really. A lot of people feel the same way about transsexuals," she wrote. "...Maybe some day, researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that aren't there or yearn to inhabit a body other than the one into which they were born."

Jennifer Finney Boylan is author of 10 books, including The Planets, Getting In, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders and a short story collection entitled Remind Me to Murder You Later. She has been on a number of shows including Larry King Live, CBS News' 48 Hours, Today and The Oprah Winfrey Show. For more information on this author, you can visit her site at: [...]

A fascinating story woven with the backdrop of a transgender young man haunted both by his phsyical identity and the physical haunting of a house in main line Philadelphia. It is a very poignant, at times sad and then humorous book. I deeply admire the struggle of the author and the way in which she wrote this moving story. The call to be real and to "find ourselves" is one in which we all struggle to achieve on varying levels.