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.
Praise for She's Not There
"There's quite a story here. Ms. Boylan tells it with disarming humor and a sharp eye....She's Not There...brings irreverence and a merrily outrageous sense of humor to this potentially serious business....Tender as well as funny."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Probably no book I've read in recent years has made me so question my basic assumptions about both the centrality and the permeability of gender, and made me recognize myself in a situation I've never known and have never faced....The universality of the astonishingly uncommon: that's the trick of She's Not There. And with laughs, too. What a good book."
--Anna Quindlen, from the introduction to the Book-of-the-Month Club edition
"Beautifully crafted, fearless, painfully honest, inspiring, and extremely witty. Jennifer Finney Boylan is an exquisite writer...one of the most remarkable, moving, and unforgettable memoirs in recent history."
--Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors