Jennifer Finney Boylan tells her life story with both sweetness and fierceness in Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs. A coming-of-age story, a tale of finding and owning of self, and an elegy to a series of delightful and frustrating mutts, this is an occasionally heartbreaking but ultimately feel-good memoir about life and love.

Boylan's 2003 memoir, She's Not There, about her trans experience, was the first bestselling book by a transgender American author. Good Boy differs in several particulars: for one, there are dogs. "This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been." It follows the path of Boylan's life, from a confused and troubled boyhood through various teen and young adult phases, to dating and marriage, and finally to the decision to transition and the recent happy years as wife and mother to two young adults. Through these years and epochs, seven dogs in particular helped Boylan mark time and observe change, and learn to love.

First came Playboy, "a resentful hoodlum who loved no one except my father." He chases and attacks motorcycles and is happy to raise a leg or squat indoors. "My father thought this was kind of funny, but then he was never the person who had to clean it up." (That person was Boylan's mother, and she would continue the unenviable task of cleaning up for several dog lifetimes to come.)

Then there was Penny, aka Sausage. What eventually turned out to be a thyroid problem caused this Dalmatian puppy to grow enormously fat, but the young Boylan (at this point known as Jimmy) carries her around "like an unusually heavy rag doll." Boylan loves her, despite the dog's indifference. "I figured, if I kept being sweet to Penny all the time, eventually her heart would open, and she would love me as I loved her. No one told me this is never how it works." 

Matt the Mutt humps everything and everyone, human and non, and knocks people down as they enter the house. Despite being neutered, Matt has lots of sex with Sausage, while James--now in college--mostly avoids it, even though he has opportunities with female classmates.

Next comes Brown, whose perfectly plain (if descriptive) name the Boylans hoped would match a personality boringly normal and sane, as none of their dogs had been to date. But all Brown wants to do is eat her own paws, and so she must spend her days in the Cone of Shame, meant to protect her from herself. "Was Brown not so unlike me, driven to the ends of the earth simply because she could not quite do the thing that she was destined to do?"

Alongside the lives of these dogs, young Boylan wrestles with deeply hidden anxieties--about how well he belongs in "his" body, in an all-boys school, in the world he's been assigned. James's mother is a martyr to dog poop, and his father battles cancer. On his deathbed, Boylan Sr. tells his son, "Be the man." That, of course, is the task James most struggles with.

Boylan describes herself as a gender immigrant, as having a life divided into more or less equal thirds: boyhood, manhood, womanhood. (Boylan makes clear that while some trans people would not use such terms, she does see the earlier parts of her life as belonging to a person others perceived as a boy and, later, a man.) Good Boy is in part a contemplation of these themes: What does it mean to be a man? Is it tied to one's ability to change the oil in the car, build things, woo women?

In adulthood, Boylan meets the woman she will marry, and they receive from their best man and childhood friend a dog that he can no longer care for. Alex is Boylan's "guardian angel" and a "unique scholar," apparently the first well-behaved dog to belong to a Boylan, but one who never gets over the loss of his first owner.

Happily married James adopts a "golden retriever" puppy that turns out to be anything but. This vaguely yellow mutt, Lucy, serves as witness to the beginnings of Boylan's transition, finding herself and becoming Jenny. Initially distressed by the sight of her owner in dress, heels and wig, Lucy eventually counsels Jenny (in imagined dialogue) that, rather than losing everything, "Some things you will keep."

Finally, Ranger is the dog of Boylan's happy, settled life, a loyal black lab with a troublesome inability to avoid porcupines. In these later years, the author reflects on how well her conservative mother had handled her coming out, and Boylan herself must consider how to be the best mother she can be when one of her own children has news to share. Happily, well-adjusted Ranger is there to counsel the whole family as Boylan's children grow up.

The mature woman who has penned Good Boy has much to reflect upon and lessons to share, many of them couched in the lives of good (and troubled) dogs. "There'd been this puppy I'd loved when I was eleven, but in time I'd turned my back on her, thrown my dog out of bed because her gelatinous sadness was a merciless chain tying me to the person I no longer wished to be." Boylan's dogs have taught her about love, and how its unconditional nature flows between humans and dogs. Good Boy is a story, first and foremost, about love, its many forms and the many directions in which we point it and receive it, and about how certain details, like gender, really matter very little in the end. If you have a family--and a dog--that love you, that's the vital thing. --Julia Kastner

(photo: Dan Haar)

Novelist, memoirist and short story writer Jennifer Finney Boylan is also a nationally known advocate for human rights. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, and her column "Men and Women" appears on the op/ed page of the New York Times. Her 2003 memoir, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the board of directors of GLAAD and also provided counsel for the TV series Transparent and I Am Cait. She lives in New York City and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean, and a daughter, Zai. Boylan's memoir Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, will be published by Celadon Books on April 21, 2020.

What inspired this book?

I think a lot of people, when they're a little older, look back at their lives and wonder, how did I get here? It can be a challenge to connect who you've become with who you've been, for a transgender person like me. And yet it's not a dilemma that's unique to transgender people. I think we all seek to connect our pasts and our presents. When I look back, one of the constants in my life would be the dogs that I've had. And each of those dogs represents a particular phase of my life. There's the dog I had in boyhood, there's the dog I had when I was a nascent hippie, when I was a college boy, and then a young hipster, and a boyfriend and a husband and a father... it occurred to me it would be an interesting way to connect present to past, to talk about the dogs who were a constant over a very complex life.

How was writing Good Boy different from writing She's Not There, more than 15 years ago?

With She's Not There, it was all very new to me. Whereas at this point in my life, I've lived a third of my life as a woman, almost 20 years. She's Not There is very much a book about transition. Good Boy in some ways is a book about dogs, but also about masculinity. About boyhood and manhood. It strikes me that a woman in late middle age who had a boyhood has a unique insight on what that experience was like. I have to be careful with this metaphor, because I don't want to be insensitive, but I sometimes think that being a transgender person has something in common with immigration. I wasn't born here in the land of women, but I do have my green card. I look back on boyhood and masculinity in the kind of way that my great-grandfather looked back on Ireland: a place remembered well but also a place you're glad to have escaped from.

I'm able now to celebrate some of the joys of that life. It was a life I was delighted to escape, and I feel so lucky to have landed where I am. She's Not There was a book of trouble--I was trying to solve a lot of problems over the course of my life with that book. I think I'm able to take a more generous look at masculinity, now that it's so far in the past.

There is both pain and humor in your story. How do you balance those elements in storytelling?

I've always thought those two things come from the same well. Some of my favorite writing is the kind where you're laughing one minute and in another you're overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. American humor is funny--we think of humor as the lesser art form compared to tragedy. When was the last time that the winner of the Best Picture Oscar was a comedy? Was it Annie Hall, in '76, '77? The humor of fart jokes and frat boys is one thing, but the humor that comes from a life of trouble and absurdity is a much deeper form. I think that kind of writing and the literature of sadness comes from a very similar place.

It seems you and your family have sorted out the rules about sharing personal information. How do you negotiate that?

Well, I don't know if we have it figured out. There are times when I just feel very sorry for them all, being stuck with me. One of the things that you learn in this book is that my older child came out as transgender a couple years ago, and that completely floored me. That's not a story in which I come off very well, quite frankly. There are ways in which my own initial response to my child coming out as trans was not as generous as was my Republican evangelical Christian mother's response to my coming out as trans 20 years before.

In the past I've written a lot about my children, and I'm sorry to say I think sometimes I've used the stories of their success in the world as kind of a way of proving to people that I am not that bad a person after all. And perhaps, in previous works, I might have waved that flag a little too vigorously. I did have my older child read the book. I had my wife read the book, to make sure everybody was okay with everything. But you still worry. I hope in the end that the people that I love and that love me have some respect for what I'm trying to do as a storyteller, and trust that what I'm doing essentially is done with love. My mother used to say, "It's just as easy to tell nice stories. Why don't you tell some nice stories instead?" I think if it were just as easy to tell nice stories I probably would. But the drive wheel of story is conflict. A true story that has conflict in it is going to be about people who at least at times are at loggerheads. You hope in the end that you show how people come to an understanding of themselves and each other, but it's often a qualified resolution, and not everything being tied up neatly with a bow. There are some things that never get resolved.

Does this book have a moral or a lesson?

I think we all know that if we're here for any reason at all, it's to love one another. And yet it turns out that loving each other is not easy, and a lot of the time it's something that we're not good at. For men in particular, expressing love can be really difficult. For women, too, but my memory of masculinity is that a lot of serious things, and love not least, had to be expressed ironically or through understatement or through these long pregnant silences. And what dogs do is give us a way to express the love that's in our hearts in a way that we don't have to feel ashamed of. You can see the most serious, somber person in the world, and then they get a dog in their arms and suddenly they're blubbering all over the place and kissing Bingo on the head. If there's a message, it's that we all should share the love that's in our hearts, and if you find that difficult, get a dog.

A lot of times in this book, you'll see a moment where I'm really messed up. My father is dying upstairs, or I'm out in the woods trying to figure out how am I ever going to get through transition, or I'm wondering how am I going to be a good parent to my daughter. And at those moments, the dogs are there. Lucy and Ranger and Brown. And they put their heads in your lap and you understand that you're not alone. The message that they have for us is not that complex. Most dogs are not deep thinkers (unlike cats--cats are philosophers). Most dogs kind of know one thing. And that is that we're here to love each other, and also maybe that it's always good to have a snack. --Julia Kastner