Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | She’s Not There | 2003 | Jennifer Finney Boylan | Buy |
| 2 | I’m Looking Through You | 2008 | Jennifer Finney Boylan | Buy |
| 3 | Stuck in the Middle with You | 2013 | Jennifer Finney Boylan | Buy |
| 4 | Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us | 2025 | Jennifer Finney Boylan | Buy |
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s nonfiction spans more than twenty years and returns repeatedly to questions of gender, identity, and family. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, published in 2003, was among the first memoirs by a transgender woman to find a mainstream audience. It covers her life before and after her transition in a narrative that is frank, often funny, and written for readers who may know little about the subject. The book has remained in print and continues to be widely assigned and recommended.
I’m Looking Through You (2008) is a more oblique memoir, structured around the idea that the old Victorian house she grew up in was haunted, and using that framework to think about the ways her earlier identity felt like a ghost. Stuck in the Middle with You (2013) is partly a parenting book and partly a series of conversations with other writers, including Ann Beattie and Richard Russo, about gender and raising children.
Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, published in 2025, is her most recent nonfiction work. It addresses the cultural conversation around gender and the space that exists between fixed categories, drawing on decades of personal experience as well as the broader public debate that has intensified since she first began writing about her life. Boylan has been a consistent and visible voice in that conversation and her memoirs collectively form a long-running account of what it has meant to navigate it.