Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Jennifer Finney Boylan is Professor of English at Colby College in Maine and the author of the bestseller She’s Not There, as well as the acclaimed novels The Planets and Getting In. In addition to her novels, Boylan has penned a collection of short stories, three memoirs, and six young adult books, four of them written under a pseudonym. A three-time guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she has also appeared on Larry King Live, Today, NPR's Marketplace, and 48 Hours, and has played herself on ABC’s All My Children. Boylan has spoken widely about gender, diversity and imagination at conferences, colleges, law firms, and bookstores across the country. Her most recent book is the novel Long Black Veil, published by Penguin Random House in April 2017. Two other current projects are Falcon Quinn and the Bullies of Greenblud, an anti-bullying YA project; and the anthology of women writing about home, This is the Place.
She lives in Belgrade Lakes, Maine with her family.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's website
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I'm Looking Through You takes place in the atmospheric and very palpable
setting of Pennsylvania in what you describe as the Coffin House. In fact,
the house itself is one of your memoir's more prominent characters. Please explain.
I believe that people's characters are shaped, in part, by the houses in
which they live. Surely this house has left its mark on me. For a long time I
think I felt, in spite of my sense of humor, that I was a fundamentally
"haunted" person, and I wondered, for years, how I was going to make peace with
my many ghosts.
The Coffin House - named after its builder, Lemuel Coffin, was a three story
Victorian eyesore, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, on the Main Line. It had a
creepy lightless attic, in which we occasionally heard mysterious footsteps, and
a vast dusty basement, in one corner of which was a sign that said, "BILL HUNT:
LABOROTORY." In the deed to the house, Coffin had said that at no time in the
future could the property be used for "a glue factory, a tavern, a starch
factory, or other offensive purposes." At the time we worried that this meant we
couldn't even legally invite over my grandmother, a woman whose antics - ...
Cris Beam is the author of Transparent and has written for public radio's This American Life, as well as for several national magazines. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia and teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, ... (more)
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Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first ... (more)
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Long Black Veil
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