A memoir with a lot of spirit

“How is it,” Jennifer Finney Boylan wonders early in this flabbergasting book, “that some people manage to integrate their lives, and live in the moment, while others become stuck, become Exes, haunting their own lives like ghosts? How do we learn to Be Here Now (in the words of Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert). How do we let go of the past, when its joys and injustices are such a large part of making us whoever it is we’ve become?” That’s a lot of questions, pretty earnest questions, for a book that is just so darn fun to read I found myself doing something I haven’t done in years: finishing the last page and immediately, seamlessly, starting the thing again.

When the author was 13, the family moved to a big old house in Pennsylvania, fondly referred to in the following years as the Coffin house, after previous owners.

From the sound of it, you’d have to be dead yourself not to pick up on the past lives in this house, particularly a little girl who drowned, but also an older woman. Both appeared regularly to Boylan, in the form of identifiable (if gauzy) humans, blue mist or skin-tingling fields of energy.

As a child, the author had a lot going on.

The Boylan family was full of strange and colorful characters, rather like Susan Minot’s family as portrayed in her novel “Monkeys,” but even crazier. James (as Jennifer Boylan was called for the 42 years before a sex change operation in 2000) routinely dressed in girl’s clothing and underwear in the privacy of his own, haunted room.

His demeanor was feminine enough to make the kids in his new school give him a hard time. He was a funny kid, and this, along with music and the tender, generous love of his family, got him through events that might have been unbearable in any milieu, but certainly in the preppy, upper-class world of private school, debutante parties and tony universities.

Boylan’s own beloved sister Lydia, once the author’s fiercest advocate, refuses to see her or allow her children to see Boylan after the operation. (The author quite brilliantly, generously re-creates a person the reader firmly believes is incapable of such a gross mistake. Surely she will open the doors after reading this memoir.)

It’s true that Boylan has thought, written and spoken in public a great deal about her sex change (and described in the book “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders”), and this adds a layer of forgiveness, distance and humor to things that must have been so painful: “This is not a book about being transgendered per se, and I’m all too aware that the whole subject will strike more than a few readers as annoying, for which I can only say I am truly very sorry. I feel that way sometimes, too.” The light hand with which she treats the subject of gender allows that issue to fold beautifully in with the problem of being haunted.

This is the gorgeous twist, the weave that makes “I’m Looking Through You” so fascinating. Even after Jennifer Boylan has hired a paranormal expert to comb through the house (which is indeed loaded with ghostly energy), she wonders if the woman she saw floating behind her when she was a boy could have been “some future version of myself.” “Sometimes,” she says, “I wonder if a belief in the paranormal has anything to do with the secrets we all carry around. Perhaps, when we bear a dream that remains unspoken year after year, that dream is somehow projected out into the world, transformed into some translucent figure or mist, a shape so distorted by our denial or fear that we cannot even recognize ourselves as its author.” This is an extremely generous admission (though I believe completely in Boylan’s sixth sense and the visions seen first as a boy and then as a female as well).

Even more astonishing is the way the writer (an English professor at Colby College in Maine) hops between the past and the present, creating (often using other people’s words as they echo through her life) a resonance that actually feels like haunting. Questions left unanswered, things unresolved and wildly strange coincidences stored away in a child’s mind for 30 years leap from the pages, animated by her intelligence, empathy and belief . . . in what? In love, of course, even for ghosts.

susan.reynolds@latimes.com