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The Barnes & Noble Review
It may be voyeuristic curiosity that first prompts you to crack the binding of Jennifer Finney Boylan's first-person story of gender switching. But as you tuck into this amazing memoir, you'll find yourself transfixed less by the before-and-after photos than by an affecting, impossible-to-put-down narrative.
Jennifer spent the first 43 years of her life as James, the noted author of novels The Planets and Getting In, co-chair of the English Department at Maine's Colby College, and best friend of Pulitzer Prize–winning scribe Richard Russo (Empire Falls, Nobody's Fool), who contributes a touching afterword. Boylan begins her frequently self-deprecating and humorous tale with James's Philadelphia Main Line boyhood, then moves on to girlfriends and college; blissful first years of marriage to his wife, Grace; and the birth of his two sons.
It's against the backdrop of this achingly "normal" life that James comes to terms with the realization that he was born transgendered. "It has nothing to do with a desire to be feminine," Boylan writes, "but it had everything to do with being female." With hormones and surgery, James becomes Jenny, now a female faculty member of Colby College, a "sister" to his wife, and "Maddy" (that's Mommy+Daddy) to his children.
"The problem, as this memoir illustrates, is that the transgendered person's experience is not really 'like' anything," writes Russo -- which explains why this story is so startling. While Boylan's charm and wit endear him to the reader, we can't help but wonder about the untold memoirs in his story: the wife who lost a husband, a mother who lost a son, and two children who lost a father. Sallie Brady
The Washington Post
Boylan's depiction of femininity, as James becomes Jenny, is fascinating and often hilarious.—Judith Warner
The New Yorker
James Boylan grew up feeling that he was a woman trapped inside a man’s body; in his early forties, he chose to risk everything, including his marriage, to pursue another identity. This journey is the subject of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. How could James—who renamed himself Jennifer—explain to his wife, Grace, and his best friend, the novelist Richard Russo, that he hadn’t felt at home in his own skin? The most moving parts of the book are the e-mail exchanges with Russo that Boylan reproduces verbatim. As much as Russo wants to believe his friend’s account of himself, he doesn’t find the character of Jenny credible: “Here, you insist, is THE REAL ME, the me I’ve kept a secret all these years. And yet [it] seems mannered, studied, implausible,” Russo writes. Russo misses the old familiarity: now, he explains in the afterword, he guards against small slips (“he” for “she”) that reveal how much he wants James back.
Noelle Howey remembers her father, Dick, as a distant presence in her childhood; he would come home, fix a drink, and retreat to his corner of the living room. So Howey feels that she gained rather than lost a parent when Dick divorced her mother and became Christine. As Christine, she was “kinder, nicer, tidier, better with children, interested in flowers and birds and chick flicks,” Howey writes in Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's and Mine. It was “like the transformation of Mr. Hyde into Miss Jekyll.” Yet she wonders, “If all these wonderful traits were inside my father all along, why was gender the only means to let them out? Why wasn’t loving me—or my mother—enough?”(Kate Taylor)
The New York Times
Although this story is by no means pain-free (one friend commits suicide), Ms. Boylan places her emphasis elsewhere. What she accomplishes, most entertainingly, is to draw the reader into extremely strange circumstances as if they were utterly normal. It's easy to feel, as Mr. Russo apparently did, when being told by his friend's doctor that sexual reassignment surgery and novel writing require similar precision. — Janet Maslin
Kirkus Reviews
The limpid, soul-rich story of novelist James Boylan (Getting In, 1998, etc.) becoming Jennifer Boylan. From early on, Boylan says, the idea "that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind-never." In the beautifully guileless way he has of describing his feelings, he recounts wearing women's clothes-"I'd stand around thinking, this is stupid, why am I doing this, and then I'd think, because I can't not." Because he has mercifully inherited the buoyant optimism of his mother, an optimism that will serve him well over the years to come, he is able to recount, with comic aplomb, such tidbits as, "Earlier in the evening I'd sat on a chair in that room wearing a bra and reading Lord of the Rings." He was 16. He figured if he had sex, then his sense of himself might change, or if he fell in love, maybe then. Well, he does fall in love, with the remarkable Grace, and they have children, and he gets tenure and high marks from his students at Colby, and develops a close friendship with novelist Richard Russo, also teaching at Colby. And he still wants to be a woman. In writing as sheer as stockings, artful without artifice, he explains the process of becoming Jennifer: both the physiological, which has a comfortable tactility, and the emotional repercussions among his nearest and dearest. These aren't so easy-his wife's saying, "I want what I had"; his children thinking of him, in the midst of hormonal makeover, as "boygirl"; Russo telling him that Jennifer "seems mannered, studied, implausible." Yet they all manage the sticky web of circumstance-this mysterious condition-in their own fashion, and that makes them lovable. There's a particularly poignantmoment, when they're attending a wedding and Grace turns to Jennifer, asking if she wants to dance. Serious, real, funny. Told so disarmingly that it's strong enough to defang a taboo. (Photographs)
From the Publisher
She’s Not There, the Running with Scissors of sex-change stories, brings irreverence and a merrily outrageous sense of humor to this potentially serious business.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Beautifully crafted, fearless, painfully honest, inspiring, and extremely witty. Jennifer Finney Boylan is an exquisite writer with a fascinating story, and this combination has resulted in one of the most remarkable, moving, and unforgettable memoirs in recent history.”—Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors and Dry
"In addition to being a complete delight, this book should make us all question what we mean when we use the words love, marriage, and friendship. Jennifer Finney Boylan is a great gift to womanhood."—Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy
