Media Reviews

Washington Post - Patrick Anderson The best part of the book, by far, comes near the end when Boylan tones down the cute stuff and talks about her later life. Jimmy, hoping that love could "save" him, married at 30 and fathered two children but still wanted desperately to be a woman. Finally, after surgery, Jimmy became Jenny, and we learn how Jenny's wife and family dealt with this new reality. It's an interesting and touching story, but it has already been told in more detail in Boylan's earlier memoir.

Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese [S]he strains for parallels between her wraithlike pre-op self and the apparitions who purportedly haunted her childhood home near Philadelphia, the aptly named Coffin House. But the blurry specters sending out electric currents and mysteriously closing doors never come to life on the page. C+

South Florida Sun-Sentinel - Carole Goldberg Boylan freely acknowledges giving characters pseudonyms and other identity-hiding characteristics, stretching or collapsing the book's time frame, reconstructing dialogue and even inventing some material to plug gaps and dramatize events she (or earlier, he) did not experience, all in the name of telling a richer story.

Those considerable caveats aside, Boylan has here produced another highly readable, mind-stretching tale, full of visitations that might be ghostly or, not-so-simply, the product of an deeply sensitive mind, along with raucous wit and poignant recollections.

Seattle Times - Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett Boylan uses her childhood house and its eccentric character as a device to explore her life, noting: "If, as Aristotle said, character is fate, then so, I would argue, is architecture. Surely whoever it is we become is the result, in part, of the houses in which we live."

Kirkus Reviews Boylan’s vivid atmosphere and characterizations and use of dramatic irony and comic relief give this memoir a bright, shimmering force. A lovely, heartening piece of work.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In spite of the singularity of Boylan's circumstance, the coming-of-age story has far-reaching resonance: estrangement in one's own home, alienation in one's own skin and the curious ways that men and women come to know themselves and one another.

 Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls Jenny Boylan’s I’m Looking Through You ranks right up there with Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life as one of the finest literary memoirs of the last several decades. Like these, it’s a haunting revelation of the human heart, its terrible longings, its fears and joys, the secret recesses where we most truly dwell. How alike we all are, down this deep.

Reader Reviews

Books with similar themes

• Biography & Memoir
  
• USA
  
• Mid-Atlantic
  
• Penn.
  
• 1960s & '70s
  
• Coming of Age
  
• Magical or Supernatural Elements