{"id":64090,"date":"2022-10-01T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/?p=64090"},"modified":"2022-09-26T13:43:34","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T17:43:34","slug":"how-one-trans-activist-author-found-truth-and-acceptance-in-maine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/how-one-trans-activist-author-found-truth-and-acceptance-in-maine\/","title":{"rendered":"How One Trans Activist Author Found Truth and Acceptance in Maine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To get to the Boylans\u2019 home in the Belgrade Lakes region, I drive across a narrow causeway that crosses Long Pond. On this early fall day, the car is surrounded for a moment by glinting sun and sparkling waves before the trees close in again around the quiet road. A few minutes later, I\u2019m sitting with Jennifer Finney Boylan on her lakeside deck, looking at the pond through the trees. These are, she tells me, storied waters. \u201cYou know \u2018Once More to the Lake\u2019?\u201d she asks, referring to E.B. White\u2019s timeless 1941 essay about memory, fatherhood, and mortality. \u201cIt\u2019s that lake. Well, actually the next lake over.\u201d The rustic, peaceful place seems at first an incongruous home for Boylan\u2014a woman known across the country as a transgender activist who\u2019s appeared not only on Oprah<\/em> but also on the reality show I Am Cait<\/em>. She has just returned from a celebrity-studded New York City gala. But, like White before her, Boylan has found in Maine a special place for writers\u2014and for people looking to become who they truly are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boylan and her wife, Dierdre, came to the region in 1988. Boylan, a promising young writer, had been offered a one-year teaching position at Colby College, and they expected to move on after that. \u201cDeedie and I fell in love with where we were,\u201d she says. At Colby and in the Waterville area, they discovered a community that suited them. \u201cThere\u2019s a sense of connection, a sense of less bullshit here. It\u2019s less about posing and more about a sense of truth.\u201d It was a moment when the \u201cstruggle for truth\u201d was very important to Boylan. \u201cWhen I moved here, I was a closeted transgender person who wasn\u2019t out, in some ways not living very honestly. One of the things I hoped to find in Maine was an ability to live a life that was a little truer to my own soul and the people around me.\u201d For her first 12 years in Maine, Boylan was living as a man, the gender she had been assigned at birth. She had two children, became a beloved professor at Colby, published some successful fiction, and developed friendships with other Maine writers, especially the novelist Richard Russo. Her happiness was double-edged: she had known since childhood that she was meant to be female, but worried that coming out as a woman would mean losing much that she loved. In 2000 she began to publicly and physically transition from male to female. \u201cWhen I came out, a lot of people didn\u2019t know what transgender was. They thought I made it up myself,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBut at Colby almost everyone was supportive. The people who weren\u2019t supportive didn\u2019t say it to my face, which is almost as good.\u201d Boylan found her identity accepted outside the college, too. \u201cPolitics aside, people respect your privacy here. I can\u2019t say that the last half-dozen years haven\u2019t made me feel more afraid. It\u2019s not all sweetness and light. But there is something about New England in which people generally leave each other alone. As weird as things have gotten, I hope that remains true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2003 Boylan published a memoir of her transition called She\u2019s Not There: A Life in Two Genders<\/em>. She describes its approach as \u201cvery human and relatable, instead of thinking of transgender people as rare creatures, like the duck-billed platypus.\u201d The book tells the story of a boy carrying a soul-crushing secret through young adult-hood, marriage, and early career, then of a woman in rural Maine struggling through transition. It\u2019s about the pain of living as some-one you\u2019re not, and the costs\u2014to self and others\u2014of expressing one\u2019s true being in a society that doesn\u2019t allow it. When She\u2019s Not There<\/em> was published, \u201cit took a lot of people by surprise, including its publisher,\u201d Boylan says. The book was the first bestseller by an openly transgender American. Its success led to a two-day appearance on Oprah as well as a suddenly broader platform for Boylan\u2019s work and words. Now, nearly 20 years after its publication, She\u2019s Not There <\/em>is a time capsule from a slightly different era, when people conducted relationships through long, searching email exchanges (some are reproduced in the book) and no singular \u201cthey \u201d or \u201cthem \u201d could pass an editor\u2019s scrutiny. In some ways it shows what has changed in two decades. Yet, while the cultural presence and acceptance of transgender people has increased, a book that invites you into the life of a trans person remains a new experience for many readers. \u201cI served as an object lesson that, yes, who I am and what I am is not so far from you,\u201d Boylan says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That message has remained central to Boylan\u2019s work in the years since. She\u2019s shared her story in three more memoirs\u2014most recently Good Boy: A Life in Seven Dogs<\/em>\u2014that explore childhood, parenting, love, and other fundamentally human concerns. She\u2019s published fiction for children and young adults and contributed to multiple anthologies on transgen-der issues as well as other topics. In 2014 she left Colby to become the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College in New York City\u2014a \u201cdream job\u201d that allows her to spend most of the year in Maine and to teach on campus in the spring. She also teaches at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Vermont and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. This fall, she\u2019ll publish her first coauthored novel, Mad Honey<\/em>, written with New Hampshire novelist Jodi Picoult. As a murder mystery, it might seem far removed from her usual concerns, but, told in alternating chapters by the murdered girl and the suspect\u2019s mother, the book experiments with the idea of voice and explores, in the publisher\u2019s words, \u201cwhat we choose to keep from our past, and what we choose to leave behind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boylan also devotes a good deal of time to nonprofit board work. She was on the board of GLAAD for seven years (and chaired it for four) advocating for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people. After the end of her term at GLAAD, she joined the board of trustees at PEN America, an organization dedicated to the protection of free expression. She\u2019s also just concluded a 15-year run of a monthly column for the New York Times<\/em>, in which she linked her lived experience with pressing national issues, like abortion rights and presidential politics. She notes that she was the only trans voice regularly appearing on the opinion page, and expects to continue contributing \u201cas my imagination, and\/or the news cycle, demands.\u201d Some of Boylan\u2019s most popular pieces were about cocktails and dogs, but she tried to keep at least half of the content focused on LGBTQ+ issues. \u201cIt gets back to giving a voice to the normal, quotidian lives of LGBTQ+ people,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s showing that transgender people have children, have families, make bread, go to PTA meetings, vote, get their car washed. People think our lives are exotic. Just sharing all the joys of a quiet family life is a subversive act.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the Boylans will continue to enjoy their Maine life, inviting friends over for patio cocktails and gourmet pizzas made in their outdoor oven, watching Long Pond sparkle through the trees. Boylan will continue to stretch her skills as an author: for the 2022\u20132023 academic year she\u2019ll be a fellow at the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University, doing research for a book about feminist pioneers. And she\u2019ll be continuing her activism in her preferred form: writing. \u201cTo tell a story. It\u2019s a radical act,\u201d she says. \u201cTell me what\u2019s more revolutionary than telling your story, telling it in a way that opens people\u2019s hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Jennifer Finney Boylan Reading List<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

START HERE<\/strong>
She\u2019s Not There<\/em> (Crown, 2003; updated 2013). Boylan\u2019s best-selling memoir is a seminal work of trans literature: a story of love, sex, selfhood, and understanding. The book is the story of \u201ca life in two genders\u201d\u2014and the space between\u2014but it\u2019s also a love story: the tale of how James became Jenny and how her marriage survived, and thrived. The 2013 edition included a new updated chapter as well as a new epilogue by Deirdre \u201cGrace\u201d Boylan, Jenny\u2019s wife. And it also includes an afterword by the Boylans\u2019 beloved friend, Maine\u2019s own Richard Russo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FICTION<\/strong>
If you prefer fiction to memoir, Boylan\u2019s four novels provide mystery, humor, and wisdom. Long Black Veil<\/em> (Crown, 2017) begins with seven college friends accidentally getting locked into the ruins of Philadelphia\u2019s Eastern State Penitentiary one night, only to find that they are not alone. If you\u2019re intrigued by Long Black Veil<\/em>, you might also try Boylan\u2019s first novel, The Planets<\/em> (Poseidon Press, 1991). It\u2019s the first book Boylan wrote after moving to the Pine Tree State, a story she wrote \u201cduring a time when I was newly wed, and new to Maine, and just in love with everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

YOUNG ADULT<\/strong>
The Falcon Quinn series (HarperCollins, 2010, 2011, 2016) is kind of the reverse of Harry Potter: young people turning into monsters are sent to a special school to teach them how to imitate human beings in order to survive in the world. It\u2019s a not-particularly obscure metaphor for LGBTQ+ experience. Would you try to imitate someone you\u2019re not, if it meant you could survive? Or would you embrace your true self, even if your true self were, say, a Sasquatch? Boylan wrote the three volumes with her then middle-school-aged children. \u201cIt was the most fun I ever had writing anything. Every day we\u2019d come up with new monsters: A chupacabra? A were-chicken? I\u2019m in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BOYLAN\u2019S PICK<\/strong>
Boylan says her favorite one of her books is her memoir I\u2019m Looking Through You <\/em>(Crown, 2008) about growing up in an allegedly haunted house. It\u2019s also an exploration of what it means to be \u201chaunted,\u201d and how we occupy our own bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAINE MORTALS<\/strong>
Don\u2019t forget I\u2019ll Give You Something to Cry About: A Novella<\/em>, in which the Rileys of Bar Harbor drive to Ford\u2019s Theatre in Washington, D.C., where their youngest, six-year-old Otis, is supposed to play \u201cFlight of the Bumblebee\u201d on violin for then-Vice President Joe Biden. Also in the car: recently transitioned trans teen Alex as well as the jubilant, impossible grandmother, \u201cGammie.\u201d On page one, the Rileys pass by a group of chefs smoking cigarettes on the street. \u201cWhat happened,\u201d Gammie shouts out gleefully, \u201cdid somebody spoil the broth?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ESSAYS<\/strong>
\u201cIf I Had Loved Her Less: On a Queer Reading of Henry David Thoreau and the Daily Performance of Manhood,\u201d LitHub, September 13, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTime Won\u2019t Let Me Wait That Long,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, December 9, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Brilliant Uncertainty of the Grateful Dead\u2019s \u2018Dark Star,\u2019\u201d The New York Times,<\/em> February 27, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat Peanuts Taught Me About Queer Identity,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, February 21, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow a Sliver of Glass Changed My Life,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, September 4, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInside of a Dog,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, December 27, 2017<\/p>\n\n\n\t\t

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