She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

I swore after my last outing with this author that I wouldn't read another, but I'd forgotten that I'd ordered this book from the library, so I gave it a whirl in the hope that it would be better than Stuck in the Middle With You which I reviewed negatively back in October 2015. It wasn't!

This one just arrived at my excellent local library, and so, hoping it would be more focused upon what I was interested in, I plunged in. The problem was that this was just like the other (or that was just like this!). It was just as dissipated, random, lackluster and as meandering as the other one was. This disappointed me. Like the other book, this one was all over the place, starting in 2001 with a random encounter with two girls, one of whom had been a student of the author's when she was a both a professor of English and a he. This had taken place two years before the publication of the book. The second chapter referred us back to 1968. The third jumped up to 1974, then there was a weird interlude, after which we're off to 1979, and then to 1982. No. Just no!

I confess I don't get this "Nauseating Grasshopper" technique which, as a martial art, would undoubtedly be a deadly and disorientating fighting style, but which is nothing but irritating and off-putting as a literary conceit (and I use that last word advisedly). It's the same kind of thing which was employed in the other book and at a point just 50 pages in, I started to realize that I had little interest in continuing to read this despite the engrossing and important topic. I only ever had two English professors (post high school) and both of them were great in their own way. How this English professor can write a book about a n important and fundamentally interesting topic, yet make such a pig's ear out of it is beyond my understanding. Perhaps it's precisely because it was written by an English professor that it's so bad. Perhaps you have to have a certain distance from the language in some way I can't quite define, to be able to execute a story successfully in it.

If the skipping around like a cat on a hot tin roof had revealed anything, I could have maybe got with it, but it didn't. This wasn't a coherent story, not even remotely. It was an exhibition (and I mean that in the most derogatory sense) of miniatures - of impressionistic paintings in water colors that were so lacking in definition that they were essentially meaningless stains on old, discarded canvasses. They conveyed nothing, and I can no more recommend this than I could finish it. I wanted to learn just what had gone on with this guy who was really a girl, and I wanted to hear it in her own words, but I couldn't because she's not there.

Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

“enormous and beautiful wife”
“…after ten years of marriage she was a beautiful as when we married…”

Wrong in assumption that all parents want to talk endlessly about children. I know I didn’t.

This is a book written by a man who married a woman, had two sons with her, then felt the need to become a woman himself, which she did, and the family maintained their coherence throughout this. That's a remarkable, joyous thing. My question when reading this was, "How can you make a story like that trite and boring?" I have no answer to that except that somehow, this author managed it. She has written at least one other book on this topic, and has also branched into fiction, but having read about a third of this and given up on it, I don’t feel any kind of compulsion towards reading more by this author.

The problem with this book was that despite how remarkable the experience was, not unique, but darned close to it, all we got here was a family drama which could have been related by anyone. The author talks about her family life like it's unique and engrossing, but it isn't. It may have become interesting after she changed, but I couldn’t stand to read that far because the early part of the book was so awful. I don't know how you can make a book like this sound monotonous and tedious, but she did.

The one thing which really stood out to me was how genderist she was - and for someone who has been both genders, this really made an impression. For example, she rambles on about “rites of passage” categorizing her sons in a way she cannot, nor probably would want to, be categorized. The first example was when her oldest son started shaving. She had this bizarre idea that this was some sort of ritualistic father-son bonding thing. No, it’s not. Maybe for some people it is, but it’s a really blinkered view to imagine that every other father-son is just like you are with your son.

Her bland, and frankly arrogant, assumption that no fathers have beards and that no women have any experience with shaving is so far off base as to be in a different ballpark. On page twenty she talks about women liking the fact that when she was a man, she had a feminine streak, “…that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn’t know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto.” I’m sorry but I don’t see any of these traits as being un-masculine. I found it incredible that this author who had broken so much ground was categorizing and pigeon-holing people in a way she herself presumably would not wish to be categorized, pigeon-holed or classified. It was both clueless and arrogant as well as hypocritical.

As a man, the author met her wife Deedie at one funeral and a wedding, rather like the movie, but she applies genderist and patronizing descriptions to her. I read (when Deedie was pregnant) that she was an “enormous and beautiful wife” and later I read, “…after ten years of marriage she was a beautiful as when we married…”. I found this obnoxious, dismissing not only women, but the woman she supposedly loves, as a skin-deep fleshpot, whose only important trait was how pretty she looks. Forget any other traits she might have because who cares - we don't need to go beneath the skin! Again, it’s insulting. On which topic, her younger son is referred to and addressed as " Seannie ". How belittling can you get? The infantile name doesn't even sound cute. And yet later she's expressing concern about what kind of an effect her personal transition has had on her two boys?! Lady you got bigger problems than that if you're branding your son a "Seannie"!

She dismisses all parents with an insulting assertion that all that parents want to talk endlessly about is their children. I know I don’t and didn’t even when they were infants. Most people I know do not do this. I have no idea who she hung out with, but they were evidently very shallow, or she had a very biased view of them. But at least she had the pleasure of becoming one of those people later, so I'm sure she was very happy. The annoying thing about this was that it spent so much time talking about ordinary everyday life - the same kind of life every adult, and every parent leads. It wasn't interesting and had little bearing on what became of her later. Maybe the latter part of the book is different. I didn’t read that far because I'd read all I could stand of bland.

The book consisted of a first person PoV of her life, but there were breaks in the story for interviews with people I had never heard of and had no interest in. I skipped all of these to get back to the story for which I'd got hold of the book in the first place - the story I wanted to read, but was denied evidently in more than one way! There were really odd parts, too. for example, at one point, she's out cycling with her boys, and one of them cycles ahead and somehow manages to come flying off his bike. The story tells us he goes to the hospital, but then we get a bunch more of those annoying interviews. I quickly skipped past those to find out what happened to her son, but the next section where she's telling us her story makes no mention whatsoever of the incident. I'm like, "What?" Is your son that unimportant? Did you forget what you had previously written before collating and interleaving these irritating interviews? Had the previous borrower of this book torn pages out? Who knows? It was at this point that I quit reading this and returned this to the library so it could piss off someone else instead of me.

I learned essentially nothing of how she went through this, what she felt, how she coped. Maybe later in this book some of that was addressed, and there is another book on the topic by this same author, which is probably the one I should have read instead of this, but as for this one, I cannot recommend it. I should have realized that anything with "memoir" on the front cover ought to be avoided like the plague!

The level of naïveté demonstrated by this author is really quite stunning. She writes things like, "...it also occurred to us that physical intimacy may not be the most important kind" May not be?!! One thing which really disturbed me, and this goes right back to gender roles and stereotyping, was where she wrote, "What kind of men would my children become...having been raised by a father who became a woman?" This is a problem how exactly? I guess if your view of life is that a man must be a man and a woman a woman and never the twain shall meet is your starting point, as evidently it was hers, then this is your unavoidable destination. Given that this particular author literally transitioned from male to female, the level of hypocrisy here is truly giddying. Quite obviously she learned nothing from this transition, and this is apparently why she can teach us nothing.

I'll Give You Something to Cry About by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Title: I'll Give You Something to Cry About
Author: Jennifer Finney Boylan
Publisher: Shebooks
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Here's another writer who thinks a book is entitled instead of just being titled. I'm in favor of entitlements, but not when it comes to books. I don't know of any entitled books, but I guess I'm fighting a losing battle on behalf of the English language and all who rail in her. Other than that (and the rather odd title itself), this novel started out intriguingly. I mean, what's not to engage the imagination in a Toyota Sienna minivan full of people of assorted ages, all of whom seem to be carrying a sorry-load of pills?

There's "Gammie" (shades of Dana Carvey) who comes armed with Lopressor (aka metoprolol, used for cardiovascular issues, particularly hypertension or high blood pressure). There's a young boy Otis, who carries Luvox (aka Fluvoxamine, used to treat OCD). There's the former son, now daughter Alex, who carries Spironolactone (an antiandrogen) and Premarin (a contraction of "pregnant mares' urine" - a type of HRT, or hormone replacement therapy) as well as stilettos and fishnet stockings(!). Riley, who's driving, has Celexa (aka Citalopram, an anti-depressant). Oh, and he has a prosthetic leg - a victim of cancer, for which he has an unfulfilled script. This is not a recipe written in Heaven, but it is a great recipe for a story!

The end point of that journey, but starting point of the story, is a ramshackle building in Manchester (New England, not Olde Englande) where Riley's estranged wife Junie decided to take a sabbatical to do something (writing) for herself.

Once she's on-board, the minivan heads towards Washington DC where Otis is supposed to play in a band for the vice-president. Road trip!

This novel bounces around between the characters. All is not well between Riley and Junie since they both have a different take on where their marriage is going (or not going). Otis is nervous about his performance. All is not well, either, between Riley and Alex, since he's not really on-board with her gender reassignment, which is why he's baulking at paying for her actual surgery. Right now she's what some people term a 'shemale': to all outward appearances female, including breasts, except for the fact that she still has male genitalia.

For me, Alex's story was the most engrossing and the best written. It really took an uptick, too, when she encountered a Geordie - amusingly while looking at the Liberty Bell! How portentous is that?! Lucas, in some regards, seemed to be a bit of a stalker, but in the end, his intentions were, whilst way too amorous, largely honorable. What really capped this for me was Alex's internal monologue. That, I thought, was brilliantly done.

I was less enamored of Riley and Junie, because their story was - intentionally, I should note - a complete mess, but even that had its moments, particularly when Riley had flashbacks to his younger self, right at the point where he first started becoming involved with Junie. The ending for me was a bit odd, and I enjoyed the part with Alex much more than the part with Junie and Riley.

Having said that, I recommend this novel for its originality and inventiveness, and for the really great character portrayals.