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| Emily Russo and Jenny Boylan | |
"It is my great pleasure to introduce to you this morning author, activist and my dear family friend Jennifer Finney Boylan," Emily Russo, co-owner of Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine, said at yesterday's Wi15 breakfast keynote. Boylan's latest memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, will be published by Celadon Books in April.
In her moving introduction, Russo observed, in part: "Many of you probably know Jenny Boylan from her numerous accolades: bestselling author of the memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, the first bestselling work by a transgender American; by her New York Times column 'Men and Women'; or by her work on the television series Transparent and I Am Cait; and as a nationally known advocate for human rights....
"But let me introduce you to the Jenny I know and love. In the summer of 1991, the Russo family moved from southern Illinois to central Maine after my dad, Richard Russo, accepted a teaching position at Colby College. We rented a camp on one of the Belgrade Lakes while we looked for a house, and Jenny was the first person to show up on our doorstep and welcome us. Jenny, you see, was to be my dad's office mate on campus. What began that evening.... was not only a lifelong friendship between my dad and Jenny, but also a lifelong friendship and mentorship for my sister Kate and me."
When Boylan took the stage, she joked: "Well, you have your revenge upon me, Russo. Making me cry before I hit the podium. Thanks so much for that."
Noting that it was an honor to speak to this particular audience, she recalled having once "logged some serious time as a bookseller myself at Classic Bookshop, which was actually a Canadian chain but they used to have two bookstores in New York City.... At the bookstore I would sit underneath a sign that read 'Ask Me Anything.' And this being New York City, they would."
Like most authors, her goal was to write books, "but I had to admit that as a Plan B, selling books was pretty great. I know that it outs me as a hopeless nerd, but all I wanted was to be around books. And even now, decades later, I still feel that way."
Boylan ranked booksellers and book publishers among the people she most admires in the world, but cautioned that this world "is in a tight spot right now, clearly enough. It's not just that bookstores and publishers are threatened by the vampire economy; it's also that we're living through a time when the very nature of the truth, and art itself, is under attack."
She observed that too many people who "fall outside the bright lines of the culture are met with hatred and ostracism because whoever and whatever they are is something others have never been compelled to imagine. We don't go to heaven because we hate people who are easy to hate. We go to heaven because we love people who are difficult to love, and who is more difficult to love than someone whose experience of the world is so radically different from our own."
This is where books play a critical role: "They help us to have not just moral imagination, but a profound cosmic imagination that allows us to inhabit the lives of other people and visit worlds that we didn’t even know existed. And so now all of those things can live in us and help us become ourselves."
One of the most important ways to fight back is through "the work that you all do every day," Boylan stressed. "If you want to open people's hearts, if you want to inspire passion and fire and resistance, there's no other way to go about it than by writing books, by publishing books, by selling books. I would be shocked if there were not plenty of days when many of you, many of us, have simply felt worn down by our working lives....
"I'm here to remind you that sometimes the frustrating work that we do makes a huge difference. In a world of bullshit, it is an act of defiance, an act of resistance and an act of love. So, from the bottom of my heart, on behalf of all the authors who are represented by the thousands and thousands of books all of you help to bring into the world, I just want to say thank you. The work we do may not seem glamorous sometimes, but truly, on a good day, we really are all in the business of saving souls." --Robert Gray