By Gerry Boyle '78

Jenny Boylan

Novelist James Finney Boylan often wrote from the point of view of characters who bore secrets. In Getting In it was Dylan, a teenager on a college-tour trip who hasn't told anyone he botched his SATs. In The Constellations it was Phoebe, who concludes the way to be liked is to look and act like anyone but yourself. Drawing these characters came naturally to Boylan, in part because he kept a secret himself.

Jennifer Finney Boylan does not. "Rather than write from the point of view of someone who has a secret, [in the future] I'll write from the point of view of someone who finally has put that burden down," she said.

Boylan has done just that, declaring to both the Colby community and the public that she is transgendered. The introduction of Jenny Boylan to Colby came last year; the larger public met her this spring when Boylan began a string of television appearances preceding the publication of her memoir, She's Not There. The morning she spoke to Colby in her office in Miller Library, shortly after her first national TV appearance, e-mails were coming in by the hundreds. Nearly all were positive. The public was supporting Jenny Boylan--and she wasn't surprised, because the national reaction mirrored the reaction on Mayflower Hill.

"I wish that everyone had the chance to ride around on my shoulder because I had the rare chance to see what the community of this college is really made of," she said. "People went to their best selves and they reacted with intelligence and with kindness, and, in some ways, people thought it was not that big a deal."

But publication of She's Not There promises to make Boylan's experience, if not a big deal, then certainly public knowledge. The "buzz" about the memoir began to build in the spring and promised to grow in the weeks leading up to the July publication. While Boylan was pleased by the enthusiastic reception, part of her was ambivalent. "In some ways it's stupid to publish a book at all, if you think about it," she said. "The thing is, I have what I always wanted. The one thing I don't want to become is a professional transsexual."

On the other hand, as both James and Jenny, Boylan was and is a writer. "This is what I do," she said. "And I have to tell you. There are just some unbelievably good stories. I couldn't not tell these stories."

Another reason to write, according to Boylan, is to fill a void in the existing accounts: "There are a lot of books on transgender published but they're all terrible."

With the exception of Jan Morris's memoir Conundrum to which Boylan gives high marks, most books about transgendered people are either self-pitying and lurid or dense with impenetrable theory, she said. "My life is not about a theory. My life is about children and students and friends and a partner and a family."

Boylan has a partner, the woman she married as James. They now live "as sisters," she has said, and continue to be completely involved in the lives of their two sons. In fact, Boylan says her life is pretty normal. She comes to work, teaches creative writing (a former winner of the Charles Bassett Teaching Award, her courses are booked solid), goes home and tends to her kids. "By seeing me . . . people do learn something about transgendered people," she said, "that the things we have in common with people are much more dramatic than the things that separate us."

Not that Boylan expects to outlive her history. She knows it will always be with her, even as she goes on to write other books, none of which, she notes, will be novels about transgendered women living in Maine. "I wouldn't want to read that book," she said.

She does have ideas and a few chapters for other novels, is considering a sequel to her memoir, or perhaps a nonfiction book based on interviews with great teachers. She predicts her fiction in the future may be more relaxed and gentle than her earlier works, not because she is a woman but because she is more at peace: "I hope I'm not too much at peace because that's not very interesting."

And she hopes her experience, like her teaching, contains lessons for her students. "I don't want every student in my class to have a sex change," she said. "I want every student in my class to find their courage and to do the impossible thing, to do whatever it is in their life that they need to do and are afraid that they can't."