Ethan's review
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders
by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Goodreads author!)
Ethan's review
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Goodreads author!)
Ethan's review
rating:
recommended for: fans of comic memoirists like David Sedaris, and people interested in transgender issues
I really enjoyed this memoir, and I think it helped that Boylan approaches it as a literary fiction writer, which means she can actually write. And she writes a very human, idiosyncratic story, not something that feels like a formulaic Lifetime Movie version of what it means to change genders.
But what bothered me about the book is that there were a lot of things she left out, and it seems like if you're going to write such a revealing memoir, you have to take a warts-and-all approach. So the negative reaction of her sister was very much minimized, and she left the current state of her relationship with her wife, one of the main characters in her story, very vague. Also, some of the incidents in the book almost seemed too well-constructed and thematically relevant to be genuine, more the product of a novelist than a memoirist. But overall it was a fun read and an interesting look into the life of someone going through the transition process.
But what bothered me about the book is that there were a lot of things she left out, and it seems like if you're going to write such a revealing memoir, you have to take a warts-and-all approach. So the negative reaction of her sister was very much minimized, and she left the current state of her relationship with her wife, one of the main characters in her story, very vague. Also, some of the incidents in the book almost seemed too well-constructed and thematically relevant to be genuine, more the product of a novelist than a memoirist. But overall it was a fun read and an interesting look into the life of someone going through the transition process.
