The Shape-Shifting Self
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As James Finney Boylan, he wrote a number of well-received novels. In 2003, after the transformation, she came out with her first memoir, She’s Not There, which became a bestseller. She has since become something of a television personality, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, Today, 48 Hours, and even, as herself, on the soap opera All My Children. And she had the distinct honor of being parodied by comedian Will Forte on Saturday Night Live. As entertaining as her prose is, it’s not surprising that she would find a place in front of the camera.

Boylan’s new memoir covers some of the same territory as the first. She describes the pain and confusion of struggling with her gender identity, but, as she notes at the outset of I’m Looking Through You, her focus is not on being transgendered or exploring gender theory through her particular autobiography. It’s really a meditation on identity itself, particularly with respect to love: “My one chance,” Boylan writes of her youthful, confused self, “was that someday someone might fall in love with me, and that the alchemy of passion would transform me into a human like other humans. Maybe … I might yet leave my translucent self behind and at last turn into something solid.”

Boylan’s references to translucence and solidity are important here, because this book deals with a particularly strange aspect of Boylan’s childhood and adolescence: the fact that she grew up in a haunted house. What makes this part of her story all the more compelling is the fact that Boylan is, by her own admission, a hardened rationalist who is skeptical, to say the least, of matters involving the “spiritual” realm. For example, her discussions about her college paper on the German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who developed a weird theory of “monads,” are telling in this regard. (Note: Boylan repeatedly and mistakenly identifies Leibniz as an empiricist.)

As much as Boylan’s ghostly experiences provide a handy metaphor for her own undefined, shape-shifting selfhood, they also make for great storytelling. The visitations begin when her parents move James and his sister Lydia into a grand old mansion, the Coffin House, in Philadelphia’s Main Line neighborhood in the early 1970’s. The house’s name is not a reference to its history as a funeral home, but to the property’s original owner, Lemuel Coffin. But it might as well have been a funeral home, since so many ghosts seem to spend time there. Many of Boylan’s experiences involve undefined shapes and luminous presences, but there is one particular ghost, that of an old woman, that manifests itself with a frightening level of clarity and detail.

Young James Boylan remains pretty levelheaded about the ghostly events in the Coffin House and comes to develop a kind of affinity, perhaps even an affection, for his spectral housemates. Later, as Jennifer, she actively explores the house’s spiritual qualities with the help of a group of ghost-busters. It is perhaps understandable that Boylan was so comfortable with ghosts so early in her life. After all, death seemed to suffuse her childhood and young adulthood. Her sister’s horse died strangely and tragically. A classmate and friend died of a rare disease. And Boylan even witnessed, in horrific detail, a young woman’s suicide.

But I’m Looking Through You is more than a ghost story. The book is also Boylan’s loving and wonderfully drawn portrait of her family (particularly of her father and her sister Lydia) and her friends. As James Boylan moves from prep school to college, his experiences with women intensify and he’s confronted with the challenge of his problematic gender identity. He is also confronted with the repeated ghostly encounters that challenge his beliefs about life, death, and the nature of personal identity. There’s a strong sense of reckoning in this book. Leading up to and following her transformation, Boylan reunites with key figures in her past, literally and figuratively, and learns some surprising things about the people who have been close to her.

Boylan relates her story in a fluid narrative that travels back and forth between her present identity as Jennifer and her less-than-confident experience as James. In spare, limber prose illuminated by an engaging wit (and a generous spread of popular culture references), Boylan draws the reader along in a wonderfully entertaining story of her unique coming of age.
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Jim Nawrocki, a writer based in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to this publication.