I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted

By Jennifer Finney Boylan
288 pp. Broadway Books, 2008 $23.95

Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

The most unsettling thing about I’m Looking Through You is not the ghosts, real or imagined, or the transgender issues of the author. It is: not knowing what is true and what is invented. Boylan writes in a note at the beginning of the book, “The story contains occasional elements of invention, in keeping with the facts of my life, not in order to shamelessly bamboozle the reader but in order to fill in gaps in the narrative, or to dramatize scenes that I did not witness firsthand.” However, even scenes experienced by the author, such as the family’s move into the Coffin house, seem far-fetched – the over exaggerations of a highly suggestible fiction writer.

Near the end of the book, Jennifer’s partner, a social worker named Grace, states the raison d’etre of this memoir. Referring to Jenny’s feelings of being haunted by her former life as a boy and man, Grace likens Jenny to her clients with post-traumatic stress who are haunted by a trauma from which they separate themselves. Grace tells Jenny, “Well, what you do with people in therapy is try to get them to tell their stories, to weave the narrative of their lives backward and forward, with one thread that puts your experience into a context that includes a past, and a present, and a future.”

It seems that Jenny decided that being haunted could be the thread that holds together her former life as James Boylan, husband of Grace, and her current life as Jennifer Boylan, English professor. She appears to have invented a ghost story to make sense of all the pieces. With no one to contradict her – her father is dead, her mother loves fantasy, and her estranged sister is in Ireland – Jenny makes up a narrative that revolves around growing up in a haunted house. Apparently, to carry through with the ghost theme, she sought out some ghost busters and hung out with them in order to enhance her story.

On the same page that Grace suggests storytelling as a healing therapy, Jenny launches into a ghost tale that appears to occur upon leaving the Astrid Hotel after a singing gig. It turns out seven pages later that she fell asleep on a bed in the hotel and the ghost tale was merely a dream. This is another clue that Jenny uses ghosts as a literary device, a metaphor, to explore her conflicted feelings about her sex change.

The transgender aspect of I’m Looking Through You – the dual experience of being male and female – will likely help this book find a good market. But I doubt that readers will be any more convinced than I that the boy James Boylan actually lived in a haunted house or that the writer Jennifer Boylan saw a bona fide ghost in the Astrid Hotel.