Jennifer Finney Boylan: She's Not Here: A Life In Two Genders

Reviewed by PHILIP CULBERTSON

We go through life asking ourselves lots of questions: Will I be happy in love? What do I have to do to feel content? Why do bad things happen to those I love? Few of us would, however, ask ourselves, Was I born in the right body? Yet in the early 1960s, even by the age of 3, James Boylan was aware that he was living the wrong life. And he also knew enough to keep this realisation to himself.

Boylan kept his secret for years: through a privileged education in some of America's best schools, his university studies in London, his postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, his early career as an aspiring writer, and through the first years of his marriage to Grace Finney, daughter of a highly successful US politician.

In short order followed an appointment to the teaching faculty of famous Colby College in Maine, the birth of two sons, and the publication of his first novel, The Planets, called a book of the year by the Times of London. The magazine Granta named him one of the Thirty Best American Writers Under Forty. And all the while, privately, Boylan longed to be a woman.

In 1998, Boylan began to talk to his wife about the psychological pain he lived with constantly, around the issue of his gender identity. He had no desire to be a homosexual, but was convinced he should have been born a heterosexual woman. In 2000, he began gender reassignment, and secured the co-operation of his university dean allowing him to take leave of absence from the faculty, after which he would return as a woman, Jennifer Finney Boylan. He then announced his pending transformation to all 113 of his faculty colleagues by personal letter. And he poured out his apology to his beloved wife Grace as they watched the first instalment of The Lord of the Rings: in the words of Bilbo Baggins, "I am sorry. Sorry you have come in for this burden, sorry about everything."

This book asks many hard questions, and leaves many questions unanswered. Boylan asks many questions of himself along the way, and even more are asked in the book's afterword, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, Boylan's best friend and colleague on the faculty at Colby College. Russo's own masculinity cannot comprehend his friend's psychological agony, or courageous transformation, or subsequent conundrum. He cannot understand how a man would want to be a woman, or how a wife could stay married through such a change. His afterword is at least as touching as Boylan's autobiography, not least because of his unshakeable loyalty in the face of something he cannot understand.

Of course, there have been transgender autobiographies before, including those of Jan Morris, Rene Richards, and Christine Jorgensen. I remember them as sensationalist and startling, but would apply neither term to Boylan's book. Jenny's story is poignant, tender, and very humorously told. There's nothing freakish about this story at all. It's a straightforward, simple narration of the complex struggles of a very normal and highly likeable person, whose physical and intuitive selves don't always work in synch. It's a story of pathos and stunning courage. Tears guaranteed.

Dr Philip Culbertson teaches in the School of Theology at Auckland University.

Bantam, $34.95