Customer Reviews

She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This book is just... fantastic. I am fascinated by this topic and, thus, decided to grab the book! Boylan's writing style is great and draws the reader in immediately! Not only is she humorous, but she knows how tell a story. She works for the English Department at Colby College, so you can imagine she has tremendous writing skills-- which is important for the story. It's wonderful to hear the story of a sex change through the eyes of the ACTUAL person who endured such a thing. Boylan is humorous, but doesn't make light of the subject. She talks about the entire experience, how she always felt like a girl trapped in aman's body... she covers her relationship with her wife and kids, with her best friend...and how things changed How her transition went, what the response to her transition was, what everything was like for her... And she tells the story SO well. It was fascinating. I recommend this book to ANYONE and EVERYONE!

When looking at trans books, there's a specific type of review I'm always looking for but can't find. So I'm writing it. This was a very good book, but didn't cover the issues I'm looking for. I got my hopes up because of the subtitle: A Life in Two Genders, but if you want a book that discuss what gender is, how it influences our lives, understanding wider gender expression, and confronting the binary gender system, this is not it. Also, the concept of trans as a medical condition that is "fixed" through hormones and surgery doesn't gel with my experience of being genderqueer.
Nonetheless, if you're looking for an excellent, insightful, and compelling story that focuses on the moving from one binary gender to the other, I would definitively recommend this book.

This book was so wonderful. It was better than I thought it was going to be. I couldn't help but feel a little skeptical when this book was first suggested to me but after I read the first 5 pages I was hooked.

Jennifer Finney Boyland tells her story of how it felt to live life in two different genders. She was born into the world as a man, James Boyland, but felt as though something was wrong. He felt as though he was supposed to be a woman, but he never told anyone and held all of those feelings inside. One day he could not suppress these feelings anymore...

This book was written beautifully. It is easy to read and very funny at times. Jennifer Finney Boyland tells you the truth and explains exactly how it is. She doesen't try to hide her true emotions on any topic. She explains how her children felt about their daddy turning into a woman, how the other professors at Colby College reacted to her gender changing, and what her parents thought of the issue.

Richard Russo has written a commentary at the end of the book which is particularly touching. It gives an insight to the reader about the friendship he shares with Jennifer Finney Boyland.

I would reccomend this book to anybody. The topic of which it is written about may be a shock to some people but by the time the reader finishes the book, there is a better understanding of gender issues and difficulties with which the writer dealt with.

After reading the last page of this book, I am left both with tremendous pity for his wife and children, and a tremendous sense of contempt for Boylan. Not only they had to endure his selfishness, but on top of that he had to put in on writing. I will never forget what John Irving wrote as foreword to his short story "Almost in Iowa": "writing about your divorce constitutes a different form of child abuse". Well, eliminating the very last semblance of privacy for his family (for example, describing the last time he ands his wife made love) is as low as someone can get. I imagine that with the expensive medical treatments and operations, a book deal was mandatory.

What a selfish individual. His wife is who put it in best terms: he asked at one point how she was feeling, and she replied, "does it matter?" I give Boylan credit in that he transcribes all this in the book, not hiding the fact of his selfish, self-centered behavior. He forgot that once you bring human beings into this world, your life is not your own anymore. How he manages to beautify his manipulation and end up convincing himself that this is what-had-to-be makes me sick. "Realities ignored prepare their own revenge".

A friend asked him after his transformation if his sense of irony was the first thing to go. Obviously not. As a good-bye ceremony to his manhood, Boylan cannot choose anything better than peeing against a tree. He uses his grandmother's silver to examine his son's stool, looking for a marble. He writes a letter to NASA asking to be the first transsexual in space. He even got a reply, and I resent him for eliciting a waste of my tax dollars. I couldn't stand the self-congratulatory reproduction of all the great letters of support and admiration he received. After her tirade against Nora Ephron, he covers all basis by excusing his exuberance with a "sorry, but i'm going through my teenage years right now!"

I closed the book feeling that Jim Boylan is just a vain and egotistical individual. A Return to Modesty, please.

If "She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders" was intended to demonstrate our common humanity, it fails. The book presents fungible people in featureless settings, speaking in a uniform language. The characters do not gain humanity by this sameness; they are robbed of it.

Nor does the book explain transsexuality. I learned little about it that I hadn't already known, deduced, or surmised. One exception was a recital by Prof. Boylan's physician, Dr. Strange, of the stages of treatment leading up to a sex-change operation, but his lecture seemed canned.

The book is not even very amusing. The incidents are too pointless to succeed as anecdotes, though, after a while, they begin to carry some conviction. Only real life could be so dull and meaningless. This perverse sort of conviction is reinforced by a thin and colorless style. The dialogue is a combination of vapid banter, fizzling comebacks and punchlines, and platitudes as shallow and insincere as a Hallmark card. Prof. Boylan's faddish words and slipshod colloquialisms invite mockery. Again and again, she uses a word or phrase so not-quite-right, that I wondered whether she might have intended these gaffes as a metaphor for her condition; but no twinkle in her eye justified the thought. A good example: "If word got out I was transgendered, I'd disappoint [sic] everyone who had put their faith in me." If the humor of that understatement wasn't unintended, then it's far too subtle for me.

One nice touch: giving many of the characters unisex names and nicknames. Also amusing is Jenny's hint to her banker as to how she might secure a loan to pay for her sex-change operation. (I suppose the financing statement would have described the collateral as "equipment.") James/Jenny is not entirely without irony or wit: while visiting a Pennsylvania monkey "orphanage," he speculates that the mannish woman who greets him must be his strangely absent host's professional nurse, "hired to rub salve into his scars." In fact, the woman *is* his host, who, having undergone a sex-change operation, may well need to salve a scar or two. In the first chapter, Richard Russo, Jenny's friend and fellow author, gives a reading at Colby College to end his book tour promoting "Empire Falls." Jenny, continuing an amicable rivalry with Russo, introduces him to the audience as "the country's second best novelist." 200 pages later, Prof. Boylan mentions that Russo's book "did all right" by winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Overall, the book seems like a casual after-dinner story: not believed when heard, and forgotten by the next morning. Nothing in it conveys the agony that James must have endured for forty years, or the relief that Jenny must now feel, having achieved womanhood and published it to a candid world. Jenny herself evinces little self-analysis. Surely, after wrestling with her misery and finally conquering it, she must have acquired more self-knowledge than she displays. In the end, the book left me skeptical that such a thing as transsexuality even exists.

This book is excellent for those who are learning a number of things. Forinstance, it's an excellent starting point for those interested in transgender issues in society. It isn't only that though. It does make one look inside him/herself & find what made them the person that they are...what impacts or influences created the being he/she has become. Jennifer does an incredible job of letting the reader tag along on her journey of finding one's self. At times, the book does seem to have a "rose-colored glasses" view of the struggle one faces, but overall, an amazing account.

"Life is not about finding yourself, it is about creating yourself" -George Bernard Shaw

"She's not there" is a great primer, of sorts, for those outside the Transgender community to assist in understanding the stuggles and sacrifices that Transpersons go through to be themselves. It is not a dry, 'medical grade' book, (which there are plenty of), but it puts a human face on a facet of life theat is puzzling to many.
Honest, witty, and extremely well-written, I picked up this book and finished it in 5 hours. Not that I'm any sort of literary demon, but because I myself am also Transgendered. So much of this book resonates as true, (in my experience), that it now serves as an 'Transgender 101' reading list book for my friends.
If you are Transgendered, or know someone who is, this book will go far in bridging the education gap of this misunderstood, and oft maligned segment of our society.

Just in case you aren't prepared for it, this is a book about the transgender experience. But, as searingly personal as such a nonfiction topic must, by definition be, it is strangely distancing in its manner of telling. Jenny Boylan lived for 40 yrs as James Boylan, an author (fiction) and college professor. It's been 5 yrs since she became female.
It's not the facts that are 'off' in this book; it's the tone. It's too breezy and leaves me with the feeling that a lot of the psychic pain and emotional valleys have been omitted.
But still, it's good. Consider, for a more literary approach and a truly amazing story, reading Conundrum by Jan Morris.

THis is a powerful book. Boylan breaks the story up in such a way that it really allows you to process it and put it in perspective. I really appreciated hearing the views from the people around her and can only imagine what this might be like. As another reviewer pointed out, it is kind of surreal because he treats it in such a way that you don't think he is at all crazy, but coping with a big life decision like the rest of us. Truly eye-opening.

This delightful mixture of funny and heartbreaking anecdotes takes readers who have never wondered about their own gender into a world where they can actually imagine what it would be like to find yourself inside of a body that does not "fit." I learned a lot from Professor Boylan's descriptions of her efforts to stay anchored to the reality of being male and her discussion of what it was like at a very early age to have a self-concept that did not fit with reality. But I learned just as much from watching the gradual reactions and transitions of the surrounding people who had to migrate through some pretty substantial changes in their perceptions of themselves in the course of changing their perceptions of Jenny/James. I loved this book, and I just hope that Professor Boylan will see fit to write us a sequel a few years down the road and let us know how it all came out in the long run.