Twenty years after her memoir She’s Not There became the first bestselling book by a trans American, Jennifer Finney Boylan returns with the essay collection Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us. Despite the think-piece-ish subtitle, Cleavage is a memoir in essays; Boylan reflects on gender through the lens of her experience, a perspective tempered by the passage of time, parenthood, a long marriage and old friendships.
Boylan sets scenes well, as in the opening of the book’s first essay, “Fathers,” which sees Boylan and her father setting firecrackers with neighborhood kids. “I lit the fuse, and we watched the spark race down the long red string: Dad, me, and the Culbertson Rocketeers. Summer was ending. Ahead of us was middle school, and adolescence, and all the forces that would, inevitably, tear us apart. But for now we were gathered together, one last time.” These lines signal one of the book’s themes, that even though Boylan knew she was “meant to be female from my earliest memory, an insight that succeeded in twisting my heart around like an Amish soft pretzel,” there were also joyful days presenting as a boy, and later as boyfriend, husband and father.
Boylan’s tone is conversational, staying grounded in her own experience when exploring complex topics like “passing,” as in “Voice,” which recounts her search for a new female voice. This funny, poignant essay features a strange encounter with a ventriloquist who tries to use his voice-throwing skills to hit on Boylan. Many of the book’s essays rove between disparate episodes. “Daughters” oscillates between a night that teenage Boylan had a tense moment with her parents, and a visit to Cape Cod 50 years later with her wife, Deedie, and one of their now-grown kids. The two experiences reflect the long journey of coming to terms with herself.
While each essay stands alone, if you read Cleavage straight through, you’ll experience a moment of great surprise, much as Boylan and Deedie did, midway through the book. Boylan is an amiable, self-aware narrator—she recounts one of her kids calling her out for name-dropping Edward Albee during a heart-to-heart—poking gentle fun at herself and noting her good fortune in being privileged enough to live in comfort and safety, unlike many trans people. Cleavage is a sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, meditative collection.
