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

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...