My Brother's Name is Jessica

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He has a girlfriend who betrays him, finishing their relationship when he confides that he’s “really a girl” and in no time at all everyone at his unconvincingly illiberal London school knows.

John Boyne deletes Twitter account after trans article backlash

In short, this book is not Jessica’s. It doesn’t belong to her. It’s about everyone else but her. And when you look at it like that, it’s not hard to see why the trans community has refused to embrace it as theirs. She said if she had to write about her experience, “I would be writing about American Jewish girls who grew up in Malibu on the beach”.

At the time, he wrote a newspaper column in whic h he criticised Linehan’s gender-critical views, saying: “At best, he seems like one of his own creations, roaring ‘down with this sort of thing’ to anyone who’ll listen, while at worst he comes across as someone masking intolerance by promoting himself as a champion of women.” He was supported from the Hay audience by the Horrid Henry writer, Francesca Simon: “I am American and I am female and my main character is a little British boy.”

John Boyne: ‘People were criticising my book when they hadn’t John Boyne: ‘People were criticising my book when they hadn’t

Yesterday I bought and read My Brother’s Name is Jessica by John Boyne (2019), who wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). Before I knew what had been going on behind the scenes, I would say absolutely read this book. Now, I would say consider it, but be aware of the transphobia. Don’t use this as a source of what it’s like to be transgender, and take what you read with a grain of salt.

It’s the concept of “failing” that feels so poignant. His experiences at school, combined with the fact that homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until Boyne was in his third year of university and that, by that time, the Aids crisis was in full spate, feel like so much to contend with that self-reproach is simply too cruel. In other parts of his life, after all, Boyne seems like a measure of success: not only in career terms, but in his closeness to family and friends and in his enjoyment of his daily life. “I’m not spending all my day crying about it,” he reassures me. “I work hard. And I like my life a lot. And maybe you just can’t have everything.”