Two years (ish) after buying the book, I finally read She's Not There. There's a chapter called "They're Not Like Jellyfish at All," and that's the chapter that has an email to the one sent by the ol' school prez himself almost five years ago. The memoir is extremely well-written; I couldn't put it down (hence the unprecedented 4 hours in a Starbucks in suburban Virginia).What I liked about the book was the glimpses into the lives of all the people James (and then Jennifer) meets: relatives, roommates, colleagues, fellow travellers. I liked reading their bittersweet, overlapping stories. I like stories about travelling and stories about time, and Boylan's book crosses both locales and decades with skill and fluidity. What I didn't like was the undercurrent of a massive ego that ran throughout it.
I'm not entirely certain that Boylan adequately addressed the difference between wanting to be a girl and actually being one inside; at some level I think she took it for granted that the reader would get it. I won't pretend to understand that difference; that would trivialize the experience of the person caught up in it. But I did appreciate that the book didn't get too much into the nature-vs-nurture debate. It was simply one person's life: feelings, unique struggle, comradeship, identity, and voice. The larger social and scientific dialogues took a back burner to the micro-level, human aspect.
And that little endnote about all names being changed to protect the innocent isn't true at all! It makes for flashbacks, nostalgic and otherwise. The American Studies requirements mandated a lot of literature, and every lit class I took managed to weave in a discourse on Huck Finn, and Boylan's book made a ton of references to it. She also frequently mentioned short stories and authors favored by the Americanists in the English Department on Mayflower Hill. I found myself wondering often throughout the book, if I didn't go to the school where Boylan teaches and her colleagues hadn't drilled the symbolism into me semester after semester, would I get all those literary references? Would I even be reading the memoir?
4 comments:
Hmm... I probably won't get all of the literary references, but I'd love to read the book. Can I borrow it?
i was telling the james/jennifer story to some people here in chicago and it turned out one of my friends was in the oprah audience the day jennifer was on.
i think that'd be a cool book to read too -- she was my advisor when she was still a he.
I was still a manager at BN when it first came out, and lots of people picked it up b/c of Oprah. I think the writing's very accessible (compared to, say, Faulkner), regardless of whether or not you went to Colby.
It's a good point about the egotism. That's part of why I didn't take a Boylan class. There's something resembling privilege as an undercurrent in her writing, which felt unexpected considering the topic.
Boylan did a reading at a Seattle bookstore almost 2 years ago, and during the Q&A, someone brought up the issue of class and privilege
--about being able to afford therapy and the surgery, etc. I forget how she answered.
Kate, you can definitely borrow the book! It's very good, and I do recommend it.
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