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BookBrowse Reviews I'm Looking Through You: An unexpectedly graceful mix of ideas about ghosts, childhood, sexuality, gender, family, death, and the many ways one can be haunted

I'm Looking Through You
Growing Up Haunted
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Paperback, Oct 2008,
288 pages.
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When she was a boy, Jennifer Finney Boylan grew up with ghosts. Her family's Victorian house, crumbling among the impeccable and impressive digs populating the Pennsylvania Main Line, also housed a number of spectral residents who had met unfortunate, sorrowful ends. A sensitive and slight boy, James Boylan resigned himself to cohabitating with the resident ghosts and their door-slammings, wall-whisperings, and flashes in the mirror with a sensible mix of terror, curiosity, sympathy, and humor. Which is kind of how Boylan related to himself.

Back then I knew very little for certain about whatever it was that afflicted me, but I did know this much: that in order to survive, I'd have to become something like a ghost myself, and keep the nature of my true self hidden. And so I haunted that young body of mine just as the spirits...

Beyond the Book
Belief in Ghosts

  • A recent survey, cited by Boylan, reveals that 48% of people say they believe in ghosts, with women more likely to say so (56%) than men (38%); overall, more than 1 in 5 Americans say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost. Having said that, other polls have put the general figures between 37%-65%, which does make one think about statistics as well as ghosts!

  • In 1991, in the case of Stambovsky v. Ackley, the Supreme Court of New York ruled that a seller must disclose that a house has a reputation for being haunted because such a reputation impairs the value of the house. The Ackleys, and much of the community in Nyack, NY, believed the house to be haunted, and...
This review was originally published in February 2008, and has been updated for the October 2008 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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