Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir, She's Not There, published in 2003, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan. Her new memoir, I'm Looking Through You, was published January 2008.

From a brief interview with Dick Donahue at Publishers Weekly:

PW: The press material about your new book talks about “what it means to be haunted.” What does it mean?

JB: There are all kinds of ways of being haunted. Even people who don’t believe in ghosts know what it means to be haunted: you’ve had an experience that you can never quite get over and because you’re often thinking about it you’re never quite living in the present. Or perhaps you’re haunted by someone you hope to become, a future that seems impossible or unimaginable, but that you can’t stop hoping for. When I was young I was haunted by the person I hoped to become, and now that I’m older I’m haunted by the boy I used to be. To some degree I think people are haunted because they can’t make peace between the people that they are and the people that they’ve been. Learning to see your life as one continuous story rather than “before” and “after” is one of the ways people make peace with their ghosts, and it’s one of the ways to stop being haunted.

Read the full Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: I'm Looking Through You.

--Marshal Zeringue