A lovely, heartening piece of work.
Growing up in a haunted house while inhabiting the wrong body.
Back then, Jennifer was James, living with his family in a dilapidated Victorian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line. While Boylan’s first memoir (She’s Not There, 2003) took place mostly in her head or dealt with the physiological process of transformation, here she turns outward to provide the backdrop for James’s desire to change gender. The house was lousy with ghosts: disembodied footsteps, a sentient blue fog, a woman with blond hair and white nightgown, reflected in a mirror. Also in residence were the author’s pleasing parents and a freewheeling sister; an array of fairly kooky relatives floated in and out. James had a secret. He, too, was haunted. A female spirit lived in his body: hopeful, wraithlike, translucent. Doubtless, this was vexing, but Boylan takes it as an occasion to provide much polished humor, some of it dark, most of it simply sparkling. Cross-dressing provides gloriously colorful moments. “Reading Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger in German while wearing Playtex products,” James had to hastily change clothes when he heard his sister heading toward his room. One time his father nearly caught him in the attic trying on his sister’s wedding dress: “Did he know, as he stood there atop his ladder, that his son was gathered in a baroque clump behind an army trunk in the corner?” As James wrestles with his conundrum, Boylan surrounds him with an appealing cast of friends and family. She draws a particularly striking portrait of her mischievous grandmother. Love abounds, the kind that must have helped James make his move despite the fact that he’d married and fathered children. Boylan’s vivid atmosphere and characterizations and use of dramatic irony and comic relief give this memoir a bright, shimmering force.
A lovely, heartening piece of work.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2174-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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