Having married and fathered two sons, Boylan transitioned to live as a woman within the same family. She wrote about her transition in She’s Not There and about the continuity of her life from boyhood to womanhood in I’m Looking Through You. This third memoir focuses on parenting as seen from the perspectives of Daddy, Maddy, and Mommy. Maddy was the word her sons created for her new role in their lives.
Boylan begins with the early years as father to Zach and Sean which includes memories of her own father and growing up as a boy. In the middle section, she describes the period from when she told her wife, Deedie, through her transition and her sister-in-law’s untimely death. The family went to Ireland for a year while Boylan tried to self-medicate gender distress with cross-dressing. The tension of living a lie began to affect parenting, and one incident, when Boylan tells Zach that boys protect girls by hiding their pain, is particularly wrenching. By the third section, the boys are adolescents, and Boylan has settled into life as a woman while coping with her mother’s failing health.
Following each of the three sections, Boylan shares interviews with friends, some of them well-known writers, about their relationships with their parents and with their children if they are parents. Their stories cover diverse families–straight and single-sex, happy and dysfunctional—and those with both tragic losses and successful children with disabilities. The book concludes with Anna Quindlen’s interviewing Deedie and Jenny together. Readers of the previous memoirs will appreciate hearing Deedie’s viewpoint.
The multiple perspectives illuminate the ways in which parenting does and does not depend on separate roles for father and mother. Families in which a parent is transgender will find reassurance, and parents of any kind of family can learn from these varied experiences. Because Boylan is a wonderful storyteller with a wry streak of humor, any reader can enjoy her memoirs. In a year when a Supreme Court Justice thinks that families with two parents of the same gender are newer than cell phones, this book is the perfect response.
Reviewer: Carolyn Caywood, Retired
Virginia Beach Public Library
