Jennifer Finney Boylan
Author, 'She's Not There,' 'I'm Looking Through You' and 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
'Unlike Some People I Could Mention': On Transgender Identity and Storytelling
Posted: 05/06/2013 3:41 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-boylan/unlike-some-people-i-could-mention-on-transgender-identity-and-storytelling_b_3174776.html?utm_hp_ref=transgenderLast fall I sat down to read my 2003 memoir, She's Not There, in preparation for a new, 10th-anniversary edition. I returned to that book in the same room in which it had first been written: the study of a summer house, in the heart of winter. From outside came the sound of snow against the window glass, the warp of the water below the ice in Long Pond. I remembered hearing those sounds 10 years before as I sat in that place and looked out the window at the Maine winter, searching for the words to describe my "life in two genders."
This exercise in time travel put me in mind of an old Amish expression: "Ve are too soon olt und too late schmart."
I know there are plenty of people who, looking back at their younger selves, have had occasion to think, "Man, what you don't know could fill a book." However, I'm unique in that the book filled with the things I don't know is an actual book.
She's Not There, allegedly the first bestselling work by a trans American, was the first in a trilogy I wrote about gender. The second, I'm Looking Through You (2008), concerned my parents' haunted house and the ways in which the living, too, can wind up haunted, especially by the phantoms of their younger selves. The last in the series, Stuck in the Middle With You, hits the shelves this week; it addresses the differences between being a mother and being a father and considers the time when I was betwixt and between the binary poles of gender, the parental version of the schnoodle or the cockapoo.
