Good Boy. My Life in Seven Dogs.
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
What a charming notion, to trace one’s life through the dogs in one’s past. The title of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s novel is immediately captivating to a dog-lover. Within two pages, though, the reader becomes aware that there are additional layers to this memoir.
Our family had been through a wrenching couple of years. And yet we’d emerged on the other side of those days still together, the four of us plus Ranger, the black Lab.
I’d been their mother for seventeen years, but for years before that I’d been a father, a boyfriend, a child.
Boylan is trans, and had lived as a male for 43 years — through school, college, marriage, academia, and children — before transitioning. (I had enjoyed her writing in the New York Times, but was unaware of her history before reading this memoir.)
Boylan, by the author’s own reckoning, was an unusual child.
My mother had enrolled me in the airplane-glue colloquium because she was worried about me, and not without good reason. It was her theory that getting me out of the house might make me more like the sons of her friends. They played sports, these boys, joined Little League, had friends. Unlike me, they didn’t build Gemini capsules in the corner of their room and explore imaginary planets with a dalmation as co-pilot.
Uncommon in smalltown Pennsylvania, perhaps, but from the description, Boylan sounds no more unusual than any other intellectual or geeky or imaginative or less sports-minded boy. Yet:
All through my childhood, from my earliest memory […] a voice whispered in my heart: You are not you.
By middle school her interior monologue became louder and clearer:
This was not the real reason I did not want to go to an all-boys school, of course, but the real reason was not one that I could speak out loud. I could barely whisper it to myself, because who could want the thing that I wanted? How could such a fate be granted? It was stupid to even think about.
But I thought about it.
Boylan’s thoughts about her ‘sense of dysphoria’ are a compelling read: honest and thought-provoking, and a calm refutation of those who argue that people like her are misguided or ‘sinful’. It is also fascinating to read her thoughts about life as each gender.
It has to be admitted that my womanhood is different from that of most other women if only because I arrived here after forty years walking around undercover and after having internalized so much of the privilege that that subterfuge provided. True — it wasn’t privilege I especially wanted: every day felt like Halloween. But that experience is different from that of most of the other women I know.
What of the dogs of the title? Indeed, there are dogs throughout Boylan’s life: a dalmation named Playboy, another named Sausage, a mutt called Matt, a lab called Brown, a Gordon setter named Alex, and then a retriever/chow called Lucy, before the aforementioned Ranger. Each chapter is named for one of the dogs, and covers that time period.
My days have been numbered in dogs. Even now, when I try to take the measure of the people I have been, I count the years by the dogs I owned in each season.
As is often the case with pet-owning families, Boylan’s early life was deeply enmeshed with that of the dogs. In addition to their own, she writes about his friends’ dogs and those of the neighbours, weaving their stories into her own. The dogs, too, are given an interior monologue, but theirs was less interesting to this reader than Boylan’s own. There are times, especially later in the novel and in Boylan’s life, when the connections to the dogs seem somewhat strained, as if they were brought in only to fulfill the promise of the novel’s title.
Boylan is pretty much my contemporary, which means that the cultural references are both familiar and appealing. The house rocks to the Rolling Stones in 1972. Boylan’s older sister likes The Who and David Bowie and Alice Cooper. Tubular Bells plays on the stereo. (The 1970s TV references had less resonance for me).
The author’s sense of humour is evident in this memoir.
My parents were suspicious of Lloyd, who being diabetic, often arrived at our house with syringes and insulin. We were only eleven years old, but the idea of needles in the house put my mother on edge. It was 1969, and Lloyd had long hair, and if there were needles in the house, heroin could not be far away, or so thought my mother, whose name, unexpectedly, was Hildegarde.
The last part of that last sentence brings out something that is also often evident in this memoir: a train of thought that sometimes causes mental whiplash in the reader. A page about a first day in middle school describes the empty study halls, the shades on the windows (each hung by a rope that was ‘tied in a noose’. The significance of that is left to the reader, presumably by intent), then the young man at the next desk, then a mention of how 18 years later that man was Boylan’s best man. That’s a lot of loosely connected thoughts in a single page.
The novel is not linear, and the leaps back and forth can also be disorienting, leaving the reader confused about which time period or dog is being referred to.
Despite its title, this is not really a book for dog-lovers. Most of Boylan’s early dogs are unappealing as described, and the later dogs are not as closely woven into the story. The sections about her transition, though were thoughtful and intriguing. The reactions of her wife and children are also interesting and perhaps unexpected. I imagine they are fleshed out in more depth in her earlier memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, and some readers might want to try that one first.
This is a book about men and boys, written by a woman who remembers the world in which they live the way an emigrant might, late in life, recall the distant country of her birth.
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