My Life as a Boy: A Woman's Story

Although touted as a reflection on gender and sex roles, My Life As a Boy is a classic romance--a memoir of Kim Chernin's star-crossed love affair with the bewitching Hadamar, which began as a friendship in Berkeley in the late 1970s, when both women were on the verge of leaving their husbands and changing their lives. For Hadamar, who had "never made an unconventional decision in her whole life," the erotic subtext of their romantic dinners out and talks until dawn was satisfaction enough. But Chernin was developing a new boyish persona that needed to push forward, to pursue, to possess. Even her looks began to change, and she found a slender, assertive self emerging, ready to scale the garden wall and climb a ladder into her beloved's window. Hadamar's eventual betrayal of Chernin comes as no surprise to the reader, nor does Chernin's admission that Hadamar was not the love of her life. After her first despairing days alone, Chernin begins to sense "in the inexorable thrust" of her own development "the promise of power, liberation, license, opportunity"--the stirrings of her new response to women, and the potential it holds. A strange, dreamy memoir that reads like a novella of fated love. --Regina Marler