James Finney Boylan and Richard Russo were best friends and office mates at Colby College in Maine. Both were engaged in impressive creative endeavors. Mr. Russo had written the splendid Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls. But James took on what was arguably the more ambitious project by transforming himself into Jenny.

She's Not There, the Running With Scissors of sex-change stories, brings irreverence and a merrily outrageous sense of humor to this potentially serious business.

"Boylan," Mr. Russo writes in an email message reprinted here, with a tone very like the author's, "I have always known, and never doubted, that in called you'd be right there. I had no idea you'd show up in heels, but that's hardly the point, is it?"

Another Boylan friend with similar aplomb remarked: "I don't see why you get to be a woman just because you think you are. I mean, what if you thought you were a cat? Would you walk around with little paste-on whiskers and a tail?"

As James Boylan, a talented novelist, the author, now co-chairwoman of Colby's English department, had written (in The Planets): "People's personalities were pretty much finished developing by the time they were thirteen years old. Then you spent the eighty years trying to cover it up." As it turned out, this came from the heart.

James had fallen in love with a woman called Grace here (and Deirdre in earlier Boylan books) and become a father. But like other transsexuals, he always sensed a certain confusion. He had begun wearing women's clothes at home. ("No pearls before 5," he says his wife uneasily warned him.) Phrases like "an eggshell cardigan" had a special resonance for him. His birthday "was also the birthday of Kris Kristofferson and Meryl Streep, both of whom I later resembled, although not at the same time."

He felt out of place in a man's body. Fortunately, as the book puts it, "In spite of the nearly constant sense that I was the wrong person, I was filled with a simultaneous hopefulness and cheer that most people found annoying."

Eventually he felt compelled to investigate his medical options. And as She's Not There makes clear, the decision to change genders was easier on the author than on those around him. "You're asking me to accept a fundamental change in the one person in the world of whom I could honestly say, "I wish he would change nothing" " he says Mr. Russo told him.

"I guess that's a compliment," James answered.

"Russo shrugged," the book reports, and said: "It used to be." She's Not There, which takes its name from the Zombies' song because the author is that rare rock 'n' rolling transsexual English department chief who plays "Brown-Eyed Girl" in a bar band, is tender as well as funny. Determined as she was to morph into a willowy blonde, Jennifer remained aware of creating problems. But Grace adapted. The children now have a parent they call "Maddy" (as a Mommy-Daddy hybrid). And the friendship with Mr. Russo, which is strained during part of this account, is secure enough for him to have contributed an afterward to the book.

There Mr. Russo makes the good point that his friend's sex-change and fiction writing may be fundamentally at odds. The James who became Jennifer, feeling that this was her destiny, might bring a different set of imperatives to her work. "Novelists continue to hold people accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions," Mr. Russo writes. "This is the fiction writer's manifesto, because without it, there's no story."

With or without free will, there's quite a story here. Ms. Boylan tells it with disarming humor and a sharp eye for some of the absurdities of her situation. Thinking as a woman, she ends phrases in timid question marks ("I'm Jenny Boylan?") and starts thinking she ought to lose weight. Taking both estrogen and a drug to lower her testosterone level, she explains: "Well, one pill makes you want to talk about relationships and eat salad. The other pill makes you dislike the Three Stooges."

She announces her situation to her Colby colleagues in a "coming out letter - which contained equal measures of Joseph Campbell, John Barth and Ann Landers." She appreciates the way that people in her situation can become extremely self-centered. "It does no good to tell a transsexual that this is all old ground and to get over yourself," she writes, "any more than it does to tell this to a fifteen-year-old. There is nothing as annoying as someone for whom the world is new. At least to those for whom the world is old."

Although this story is by no means pain-free (one friend commits suicide), Ms. Boylan places her emphasis elsewhere. What she accomplishes, most entertainingly, is to draw the reader into extremely strange circumstances as if they were utterly normal. It's easy to feel, as Mr. Russo apparently did, when being told by his friend's doctor that sexual reassignment surgery and novel writing require similar precision. "Rick rubbed his chin," Ms. Boylan writes, "having never realized how much his work and Dr. Schrang's had in common."

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.