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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 conver