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    I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
    I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
    I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
    Audiobook9 hours

    I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir

    Written by Jennifer Finney Boylan

    Narrated by Jennifer Finney Boylan

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    For Jennifer Finney 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 into 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 3, 2008
    ISBN9781400175963
    I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
    Author

    Jennifer Finney Boylan

    Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of more than a dozen books, including a bestselling memoir, a collection of short stories entitled Remind Me to Murder You Later, and three novels for adults. Her novel Getting In won the Alex Award from the American Library Association in 1998 for an adult novel with special appeal to young adult readers. Since 1988 she has been a professor of English at Colby College. Jenny Boylan lives at the end of a dirt road in Maine with a Sasquatch, a wind elemental, two weredogs, and a leprechaun.

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    Reviews for I'm Looking Through You

    3.5/5

    76 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This memoir covers Boylan's childhood and youth (in a haunted house) as a conflicted boy who knew he'd rather be a girl, but had no hope of doing anything about it other than dressing in his sister's clothes behind a locked bedroom door. It was just excellent. Please read it.
    • 5/5
      Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir of childhood, adolescence, and some bits beyond centers around the Coffin House (named after people who once lived there, of course), the house where she grew up and which she always felt was haunted. This is a memoir of family and of self (whether there were or were not any actual ghosts in the house is left an open question; the real haunting here was of Jenny haunting herself), and Jenny's hopes and confusions around gender and love as a trans person trying to figure out life and friends and partners and herself are a strong thread throughout. The memoir is masterfully done, with early reflections echoing down the pages to come back stronger, more revealing, chapters later. The sentence-level writing is often a wonder, and Boylan is *funny*, in that slightly off-center way that should be familiar to members of the sorts of families that are proud of their shared, idiosyncratic inside jokes. I felt like I was in the hands of a fair and assured storyteller from page one. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      My mother-in-law turned me on to Jennifer Finney Boylan. She read "I'm Looking Through You" first, while I started with "She's Not There". I don't know what my impression would have been had I read the books in chronological order, but in light of what I already knew about the writer's life, I could not help but see this book, in part, as a love letter to her sister. Again, that may well be my own perspective, but it is one of the beautiful and bittersweet threads that weaves throughout this memoir.

      Throughout both books, Boylan's unexpected and agile twists of humor elevate stories that might otherwise feel overly dark and serious. Some books leave you with a great respect for the writer. Others, make you wish you could chat with them casually over coffee and a bagel. Boylan manages to do both as she weaves stories that make her endearingly familiar and extraordinary at the same time.
    • 2/5
      Must admit to skimming all but the haunted house parts of the story. I don't even want to go there as far as reading the rest!
    • 4/5
      Excellent and clever use of memoir to tackle larger issues. Ms. Boylan is a great writer with a real talent for comedic dialogue and atmospheric, emotional description. I loved this book and highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating story woven with the backdrop of a transgender young man haunted both by his phsyical identity and the physical haunting of a house in main line Philadelphia. It is a very poignant, at times sad and then humorous book. I deeply admire the struggle of the author and the way in which she wrote this moving story. The call to be real and to "find ourselves" is one in which we all struggle to achieve on varying levels.
    • 4/5
      This was a book that I couldn't put down, and I found it a quick, fascinating read. The entire memoir is centered around the metaphor of a haunting: There's the physical haunting that the author felt in her old house when she grew up, and the idea that the author felt haunted in her own body while growing up the wrong gender.The author's humor is present throughout the book, but it is bittersweet, cultivated through years of feeling odd and unaccepted, by others and herself. She has a great eye for detail, perhaps stemmed from her musical talent that was drilled into her by her father, (playing classical music in different rhythms as a personal challenge) and from her empathy (perhaps encouraged by her father making his children stop mid-argument to debate the opposite side.) The result is an engaging novel that is truly touching.This novel also may help those wishing to understand more about the transgendered, and why they feel they must change genders at the risk of devasting their families. The author herself made her choice after being married with two children. It is difficult not to feel for the author's internal struggle with gender identity. While questions of sexuality are marginally addressed, the author makes it clear that this is not about sex, it's about gender. A line that has stuck with me after reading is "It wasn't a question of who I wanted to go to bed with, but who I wanted to go to bed as." I think that line, most of all, helped me to understand the transgendered's choice to "come out" as a different gender. I believe that this approach handled the issue with dignity.This book had bonus points for me for being set in the Philadelphia area, which made the setting pop all the more in my head.
    • 5/5
      Written after She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, but mostly set before it. A memoir about ghosts and gender identity. Very funny in many places, but also very sad in spots. As with it's predecessor, really thought provoking. The time frame really brackets the first book. Most of this is about teenage/young adulthood. But some is about present/post first book life.