Jennifer Finney Boylan Announces New Book “Cleavage — ”And Shares Her Famous Doppelgängers (Exclusive)

In an exclusive excerpt, the author and transgender rights activist considers her ongoing journey, what's changed over the past 20 years — and what hasn't

Jennifer Finney Boylan is set to publish a new book about gender identity.

The author and transgender rights activist has shared an excerpt and the cover of her forthcoming book Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us exclusively with PEOPLE. The book will be published next year from Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group.

Boylan, the author of 18 books including 2023’s bestseller Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, published her groundbreaking memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders in 2003. Boylan made history when the book became the first bestseller by a transgender author. Now, in Cleavage, Boylan reflects on her gender identity journey over the last 20 years, how it felt coming out as transgender when she did in 2000 differs from today's climate and more.

Cleavage poses a range of questions, including how gender affects our body image, relationships and our sense of self. Throughout its pages, Boylan also considers her own journey as a writer, activist, spouse and parent in the present day, and the prevailing power of love.

Cleavage “provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women and in the space between us,” per its publisher. Read on for an exclusive excerpt from the book, below.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!

I was born in 1958, on June 22, the second day of summer. It was also the birthday of Kris Kristofferson and Meryl Streep, both of whom I later resembled, although not at the same time.

Related: 20 Memoirs PEOPLE Staffers Love — That Aren't Written By Celebrities (Exclusive)

I began the story of my life with these words in She’s Not There, a memoir published in 2003. At the time it seemed reasonable enough, beginning with the beginning.

Now I wonder whether I chose the right companions. Instead of Streep and Kristofferson, I could just as easily have picked others born that day — Elizabeth Warren, say, or John Dillinger, or Dan Brown. Would my book have landed differently if my chaperones had been the senator, or the gangster, or the author of The Da Vinci Code?

Sometimes I think about it, all the other lives I might have led.

At the time of its publication, She’s Not There was a real brouhaha. I was on Oprah five times, Larry King twice. Will Forte imitated me on Saturday Night Live. Though hardly the first trans memoir, it came out at a moment when things were changing, at least a little. I hope She’s Not There did push the needle, at a crucial moment. The publisher’s promotional copy now calls it “the book that jump started the transgender rights movement.” Big words.

But She’s Not There was a story told by someone for whom everything was new; the voice is that of a woman who’s still in the late stages of an amazing ride, her clothes still smoking after she’s been shot out of a cannon. Memoirs of transgender people are almost always about that moment, when a little morning dew is still twinkling on the cobwebs of their transitions.

It’s a good question: What is like to go from a man to a woman, or vice versa, or to some identity even more liberating than that?

But a more important, if less scandalous, question is: What’s it like for those who finally have what they’ve been impossibly yearning for all their lives? And what of the people we’ve been, and our histories from the times before? Surely all of that can’t just vanish, like breath on a mirror?

Related: Essential Reading for Pride: PEOPLE Picks Our Favorite LGBTQ+ Books For Adults

I’ve spent almost a third of my life over here. I have stories to tell, now that my spangles are no longer aflame, about the difference between the worlds of men and of women, not to mention the fertile territory that lies in between.

This time round, instead of Streep and Kristofferson, perhaps I’ll celebrate the fact that I share a birthday with Cyndi Lauper, who sang “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” as well as Billy Wilder, the man who directed Some Like It Hot.

In that film’s final scene, of course, Jack Lemmon rips off his wig, and tells Joe E. Brown why they can never get married. “You don’t understand, Osgood!” he shouts. “I’m a man!”

“Well,” says Osgood. “Nobody’s perfect.”

From Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Copyright (c) 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us will be published on Feb. 4, 2025 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.