My Life As a Boy

Rating:
Summary: Letter to Kim Chernin
Review: First, I was jealous of your priveleged lifestyle... no apparent work, surrounded by those who have the money and the leisure time to seek self-fulfillment. Oh, for the luxury of pondering! If you had less time on your hands, you may have made it with this babe, or you may have searched elsewhere sooner. I floundered for almost two years too; a first-timer, groping for someone inaccessible. Twenty years later, she still occupies my thoughts and rains on me like sadness on an umbrella. I applaud you for baring your mind and heart, and hope to run into you some day in Berkeley. Yes, life is serious

Rating:
Summary: An offbeat, odd book
Review: The best thing about this hard cover volume of 204 pages, is the photo on the dust jacket of a young, very attractive, and very butch looking woman.

The book actually is somewhat mis-titled, as the story has more to do with the main character's obsession with a neighborhood acquaintance who becomes a close friend, named Hadamar.
When the book begins, the main character, Kim Chernin,( it is told in the first person), is a young married woman in her thirties.
She seems to have a rather nice husband named Max, and a daughter who has gone off to college.
For reasons that remain rather vague, Kim decides to suddenly become a boy.
Oddly enough she never identifies herself as being butch.

Kim and Hadamar at times speak in vague, odd ways. The book does offer a somewhat unusual and unexpected twist when Kim returns from a women's gathering and discovers what Hadamar has been up to during her absence.

This alone made the book worth reading.
As a lesbian who reads numerous lesbian works of fiction, I found I could relate to some of Kim's feelings, and have experienced knowing a woman similiar to Hadamar.

However, the book is written in an odd, disconnected kind of way.

Rating:
Summary: A poem of self-transformation
Review: The book reads like a poem in some places, like stream of consciousness in others. The style to me was as wonderful as the story, which, told in regular everyday words doesn't sound like much. She grows apart from her husband, becomes a 'boy' and chases after a local woman. But it's not about lesbianism, or about any such issues, it's not about leaving her husband or about the woman she was chasing. It is about the transformation that she herself undergoes as she comes out of her shell and finally feels the confidence and the drive to go after something purely because she wants it, with no thought to the people that are in her way. In that way, she becomes a boy- brash, driven and concentrated only on herself and what she wants. It is an unusual journey that I highly recommend.