Female author writes about her own male past
March 26, 2008
But the novelist and English professor at Colby College was thrust into that role by her 2002 best-selling memoir about the transition to womanhood that freed her from the decades-long torment of being a female trapped in a male body.
With three appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," two on "Larry King Live" and numerous other interviews and public appearances, Boylan, 49, has become a sunny-faced activist for the nation’s transgendered and one of the most widely recognized transsexuals of recent years.
"Activism for me takes the form of living a normal life and doing so very publicly," she said.
Boylan’s public schedule is getting busier with this year’s publication of her second memoir, "I’m Looking Through You," a poignant but laugh-out-loud story about growing up in a Charles Addams-like Victorian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line.
The author, then named James, concealed her conflicted sexuality, hiding her stash of lingerie in a secret panel in her bedroom. The spooky old house, with footsteps in the attic, clouds of blue mist and a ghostlike figure of an old woman in a mirror, serves as backdrop for an adolescence haunted by gender issues that forced Boylan to keep the nature of her true self hidden. In so doing, she became something of a ghost herself.
