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| I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Jennifer Finney Boylan
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 92292
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0767921747
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780767921749
ASIN: 0767921747
Publication Date: January 15, 2008
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Product Description
From the bestselling author of She’s Not There comes another buoyant, unforgettable memoir—I’m Looking Through You is about growing up in a haunted house...and making peace with the ghosts that dwell in our hearts.
For Jennifer Boylan, creaking stairs, fleeting images in the mirror, and the remote whisper of human voices were everyday events in the Pennsylvania house in which she grew up in the 1970s. But these weren’t the only specters beneath the roof of the mansion known as the “Coffin House.” Jenny herself—born James—lived in a haunted body, and both her mysterious, diffident father and her wild, unpredictable sister would soon become ghosts to Jenny as well.
I’m Looking Through You is an engagingly candid investigation of what it means to be “haunted.” Looking back on the spirits who invaded her family home, Boylan launches a full investigation with the help of a group of earnest, if questionable, ghostbusters. Boylan also examines the ways we find connections between the people we once were and the people we become. With wit and eloquence, Boylan shows us how love, forgiveness, and humor help us find peace—with our ghosts, with our loved ones, and with the uncanny boundaries, real and imagined, between men and women.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
Boylan's story is at once singular and familiar --- the right combination for a successful memoir January 22, 2008
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
A quick glance of Jennifer Finney Boylan's latest memoir, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU, would give the impression that the book focuses on growing up in a haunted house. But a closer look reveals, as the subtitle states, that it is about "growing up haunted." This is an important distinction.
Boylan did live for many years in a house, aptly named the "Coffin House" after the family who built it, that she took to be haunted. Her family moved there in 1972, just as she was entering her teenage years. On her first visit she received a big electrical shock, followed by another surprise: she was to sleep in a spooky third floor bedroom while the rest of her family would get their shut-eye on the floor below. From that first day exploring her new home, Boylan felt the presence of ghosts, and her nights there were full of disembodied footsteps and floating specters. As her story unfolds, it becomes more complex and nuanced. She moves readers back and forth in time, telling stories of the Coffin House, her adventures with "ghostbusters" later in life, and, most especially, her personal hauntings.
As she wrote in her earlier bestselling memoir, SHE'S NOT THERE, Boylan was born "James" but always knew herself to be "Jenny." It wasn't until after she was grown, a college English professor married with two sons of her own, that she came out as transgendered and began the process of becoming a woman physically. Her time in the Coffin House coincided with her teenage years, and she relates her frustration and uncertainty with honesty and grace. "Back then," she writes, "I knew very little for certain about whatever it was that afflicted me, but I did know this much: that in order to survive, I'd have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden." In fact, later, returning to the house as an adult woman, after the place had been remodeled and filled with the laughter of the next generation, she wonders if she had indeed haunted herself. Was the starry-eyed woman she saw, as a teenage boy, over her shoulder in the mirror really her future self still trapped and lonely in the male body?
There are other figures who haunt this tale as well. Boylan mourns the loss of her father and older sister, neither of whom get to know her as Jenny. Her family factors large in this memoir, of course. They are an eccentric Irish bunch: a crass and loving grandmother and her refined English sidekick, a perpetually cold aunt, a mystical cousin and others support the story of the immediate Boylan clan, including Jenny's smart older sister, musical father, and religious and accepting mother.
In the post-Frey era, memoirs are read with a critical eye. Like many others today, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU is prefaced with the disclaimer that there are elements of invention in the book, including some of the dialogue, and that she played a bit with the timeline. For readers of memoirs this may seem obvious (for who can remember the exact words of a conversation 30 years ago?), but it frees the author and allows her a creativity that only strengthens the story she is trying to tell. And Boylan's style is creative --- light-handed and readable, funny and wise, conversational and intimate, and yet polished.
Sprinkled with philosophy, without sounding snobby, and pop-culture references without being silly, I'M LOOKING THROUGH YOU is an enjoyable and memorable read. Boylan's story is at once singular and familiar --- the right combination for a successful memoir. While the Coffin House provides the bones of the book, it is lovingly fleshed out, with a personal, often bittersweet examination of family, loss, identity and change.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
"Far more hearts are haunted than houses" August 26, 2008
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
At first glance I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir seems to be about growing up in a haunted house, but it's much more than that. Author Jennifer Finney Boylan uses the near-translucent spirits inhabiting her family home as a metaphor for her dissociated youth. She spent her first 40 years as James Boylan, the boy's and man's body a bad fit for her soul.
The Boylan family moved to the aptly named "Coffin House" on Philadelphia's Main Line, and at once young James began to observe ghostly shapes drifting through the rooms. Through the teen years and in later visits as a young adult, alienated by feelings that "James" was meant to be "Jenny," the author continued to experience the ghosts. In more recent years, after transgender surgery turned James into Jenny at last, she visited the house with a "ghostbusting" team and came to a better understanding of the strange presence and what it was foreshadowing to the boy, near-translucent himself.
This memoir follows the theme of author Boylan's earlier book She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, expanding on her life with a full cast of eccentric extended family members and friends. Boylan's humor has a dark cast; she deflects her serious moods with lightning-quick turnarounds, yet the reader never doubts her seriousness. The book is full of music and cultural references that at times are the only tethers holding Jenny/James in the real world.
Parent and partner, professor, friend, musician, daughter, sister -- some of Boylan's relationships have thrived and some suffered. Her books leave me believing that, as she states, she's "solid" at last. I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir is not your everyday memoir but it will make you think -- about ghosts, but especially about the human experience.
Linda Bulger, 2008
I'm Left Wanting More January 20, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The title of Jennifer Boylan's book reminds me of the song by the Beatles from their "Rubber Sole" album released back in 1965. Although Boylan doesn't say that the song inspired her memoir's title, its words have a new meaning for me now as I relate them to Boylan's "haunted" youth.
When reading a memoir, I'm not as interested in the writer's childhood as much as in how she or he has integrated childhood experiences into the adult life. That's precisely what Boylan has been doing since she had transgender surgery in 2000, moving "from the potato-blighted land of men to the new green country of women." Jennifer Boylan was born a boy, James; now, as a woman, she is haunted by that boy as she unravels the continuous thread of her life through the power of story.
Boylan begins her memoir at the Astrid Hotel in Maine, where the sight of a ghost takes her up old stairs while her mind takes her, and the reader, back to the first time she visited the Coffin House in Philadelphia. Although Boylan uses fictional names in the book, the name of the Coffin House where she spent her childhood with her parents and sister Lydia, is just spooky enough to be real. The house was haunted by presences "otherwise invisible to the naked eye," as Boylan was haunted by the woman she knew herself to be.
Facing the personal hauntings of her childhood, Boylan returned in the spring of 2006 to the Coffin House, where her mother still lives. She brings a "paranormal investigator" to check out the hauntings of the house. Mrs. Boylan wonders about Jennie meeting with a group of paranormal investigators and asks, "When you say paranormal--do you mean, you know...other transsexuals?" The book is full of such humor as Boylan makes light of her childhood and her unique situation. At the end of the book she realizes that "maybe the humor is what I need to survive."
For me, one of the most poignant moments occurred one summer, when James was working in a bank. An older gentleman used the pronoun "she" to refer to James, his favorite "sweetie pie" teller. The man, whom Boylan called Mr. Bowtie, was embarrassed to find that James was a man, not a woman. He was one of the few who had seen James as the woman she believed herself to be.
On the subject of "gender theory," Boylan says she resents "the idea that a theory should even be necessary. To be honest," she writes, "just about the only theory I trust is story." She hopes that the story she tells stands in for theory, and indeed it does. As her mother says, "It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." It is a saying that sustains Boylan.
The book is dedicated to Boylan's sister. The last time Boylan saw Lydia was in the spring of 1999 when Boylan and her partner Grace spent a year in Ireland. They had two sons by then, born when the two were man and wife. I found this section of the book to be engaging and heart-warming, after the youthful antics and ghost busting. In a pub in Dublin, brother (Jennifer was still James) and sister talk. He wants to "come out" to her and I wait for the response. Will Lydia be accepting and understanding? As of the writing of the book, Jennifer and Lydia have had no further contact. (Check Boylan's blog on her website for an update on that part of the story.)
Boylan imagines a visit her sister took to a crypt at a church called St. Michan's. Was Lydia going to end up in the crypt herself? The description was spookier than the doors that opened and closed and the chair that swivelled on its own at the Coffin House.
One of Boylan's unexpected blessings was to have Grace decide, after some consideration, "that her life was better with me in it than without, and so, to everyone's amazement, we moved on into the unknown territory before us together." The two had met at Wesleyan University and begun dating in the mid-1980s when Boylan was James. Boylan's children now call her Maddy, a combination of Mommy and Daddy.
Boylan weaves her story backwards and forwards. It's what people do in therapy, Grace tells her, "one thread that puts your experience into a context that includes a past, and a present, and a future." Boylan really wants to be like everybody else. She's different, though, and the spirit of her dead father tells her that this is a gift. "But maybe you don't get to choose your gift," he advises. "You only get to choose what to do with it." In writing her memoir, and other books before this one, Boylan has exercised, rather than exorcised, her gift--through the power of story. She decribes herself as human "with a unique tragedy, deserving of kindness."
I'm left wanting more of that human story and will search out Boylan's other books, including her earlier memoir, She's Not There.
by Mary Ann Moore
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women
 More than a ghost story January 15, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was lucky to have received an advance copy a few months ago, and I really enjoyed it. Paranormal stories rarely hold any interest for me, so it was unexpected for me to relish it so. It is so much more than a ghost story. It's personal and candid , and quite witty, about being haunted not only externally, but internally.
She seems to have a fondness for using Beatles songs in her titles ;-)
Clearly music is important in her life and her writing. Both of her titles that I have read seem to have soundtracks built in.
Ms Boylan has another hit with this book, I'm sure.
I'm Looking Through You February 13, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is one of the best books I have ever read. Am sneaking chapters during work - cannot put it down. It is terrifying and wonderful at the same time. You will not be disappointed by this book!
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