Jennifer Finney Boylan.Photo:Dan Haar
Dan Haar
Jennifer Finney Boylanburst onto the literary scene with her breakthrough 2003 memoirShe’s Not There, which established her as a prominent voice on what it’s like to be transgender. The writer, however, is careful to point out that she doesn’t speak for all trans people — just herself.
“I’m not the emblematic transgender person,” Boylan said at a Feb. 4 book launch event at the New York Public Library in conversation withRoxane Gay. “Right now, there are so few of us who get to have microphones and cameras pointed at us. So when you get that chance, you have to make sure that people know that you’re just one person.”
The event was held in celebration of her new memoir,Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, out now, which examines both the divisions and common ground among the genders, per the book’s synopsis. The book also examines how Boylan’s own experience coming out as transgender in the early 2000s may differ from what people transitioning today may run up against.
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“It jumps around in time,” Boylan said of the book. “Things keep threading back, which is the thing I love to do as a writer. I love to weave things together into a mosaic. I thinkCleavagemight be a little bit of a harder read, but that’s good. It should be hard. I mean, the life that made it, the life that it’s about, was hard.”
Boylan, who co-wrote the 2022 novelMad HoneywithJodi Picoult, also said that revisingCleavageshowed her an important parallel between writing and real life.
Jennifer Finney Boylan in May 2024.Jamie McCarthy/Getty
Jamie McCarthy/Getty
“It’s never over either,” Boylan added. “If you write something and you look at it and you hate it, that doesn’t mean that you’re not a writer or that it’s a dud. It means you get up the next day and you try again, in the same way that if you don’t like your life, you can reinvent yourself. You might not be able to do it that day or that week, but eventually with hope, that little luck, you can find a way to make a new draft of the self.”
Boylan also noted the importance of new voices in fiction coming up in the literary scene today, especially trans fiction. “This has got to be my last book about trans experience,” she told Gay. “If I have a story left untold, I don’t know what it is.”
source: people.com