She's Not There--Jennifer Finney Boylan

**Book Club Pick** She's Not There is the memoir of a transgendered English professor in the process of transitioning from male to female. I have mixed feelings about this book. By turns funny, sad, and intriguing (Richard Russo is her best friend!), I don't feel like I gained an overarching understanding of transgender from reading it. There were moments in the book where she had the opportunity to go a little deeper into gender issues, and I felt like she chose to stay superficial and focus on the chronology and the details of the transition and its effect on her friends and family. For example, shortly after she transitioned, she was chatted up by a drunk man who followed her out of the bar, got demanding, and ended up following her in her car. He passed on by when she stopped at a gas station, but she had quite a scare. To me, this was a great opportunity for her to discuss the fears women face every day, what it means to be a woman in this society, something like that, but she didn't even scratch the surface. Disappointingly, she just recounted it as a story. I must say, though, that this book got the discussion going in our book club like never before, trying to wrap our heads around gender, its meaning and implications.