Jennifer Finney Boylan biography

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Jennifer Finney Boylan
© 2007 James Bowdoin

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan Biography

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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Interview

Jennifer Finney Boylan discusses her memoir "I'm Looking Through You", what it means to be haunted and how people can make peace with the 'ghosts' that dwell in their hearts.

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 - ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Jennifer Finney Boylan at BookBrowse
Long Black Veil jacket I'm Looking Through You jacket She's Not There jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Jennifer Finney Boylan but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Cris Beam

    Cris Beam

    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)

    If you enjoyed:
    She's Not There

    Try:
    I Am J
    by Cris Beam

  • Jeffrey Eugenides

    Jeffrey Eugenides

    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)

    If you enjoyed:
    Long Black Veil

    Try:
    Middlesex
    by Jeffrey Eugenides

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