A review by trudilibrarian
I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted by Jennifer Finney Boylan

3.0

I've been on a memoir kick lately and this one by Jennifer Boylan is quite enjoyable. Boylan's irreverent wit knows no boundaries, and her candid descriptions of what it was like to grow up as a boy wishing she was a girl revealed to me a heretofore unimagined life. Boylan's plight struck me as heartbreaking - yet her courage and perseverance are ultimately inspiring. What is this life but our search to uncover who we really are and who we really want to be? At its core, Boylan's memoir is an unconventional coming-of-age tale you won't soon forget.

I did not know quite how to assimilate Boylan's numerous encounters with spirits, mists, and otherworldly bumps in the night. In hindsight, even Boylan questions if she really experienced something supernatural, or if it was herself she was haunting all along:

Was it possible, I thought, as I looked at the woman in the mirror, that it was some future version of myself I'd seen here when I was a child? From the very beginning, had I only been haunting myself? (249)

Whatever the case, whether you take the hauntings as literal or metaphorical, Boylan's honesty about her experiences gives the memoir a unique texture that left me questioning my own beliefs in the possibility of an afterlife.