Apache Odyssey: A Journey Between Two Worlds Book

There are many things to admire in Boylan's latest memoir. Certainly her prose conveys consistently her quirky and entertaining personality and ironic sense of humor, while the sheer extraordinariness of her story, both with its ghosts and her life-long journey to become Jenny after living over 40 years as James, offers much to captivate a reader's attention. However, what I found most impressive was the structure of the book. It is a brilliantly framed memoir with all of the themes central to the book embedded in the framing scene. In that scene, Boylan's rock band plays at a skanky biker bar housed in a beaten down house, complete with its own ghost. The social awkwardness of her transgendered status, a haunting feeling of being out of place or never quite whole, the centrality of music in her life, deep meditations in solitude, sensitive and generous treatment of others, and her difficult, and continuing, journey toward peace are all played out not only in that one evening, but also throughout the book. The average reader will probably not give much thought to the structure of her story, because it works so well. As a writer, however, I was enthralled with it. One gets a sense that the structure evolved only after the material itself existed, probably written out in unconnected scenes beforehand, then masterfully woven together with special attention to use certain threads throughout the book. So interwoven are countless little details from isolated stories which keep repeating and building as the memoir progresses, I would be surprised to learn that Boylan wrote this memoir as one draft and fine-tuned it with editing. It seems too finely crafted to have emerged whole, but finely crafted it is.