I am very puzzled by the part on the copyright page that says, "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental."But... the main character is Ivan herself and bears what is surely not a coincidental resemblance to Ivan. I found myself wondering throughout the book about whether or not it was fiction.I googled Boner Preservation Society and came up mostly with references to the book- I guess it is fictional?On the other hand, the eulogy of Catherine White Holman appears to be about a very real Catherine While Holman (at least, she comes up on google).So there's that.As a person who spent a large part of early life being questioned about gender, reading this book about being a butch lesbian has these parts where I start to identify with the author because of the familiarity with going into places assessing how people are assessing me, but then another story will make it really really clear that to Ivan, this is part of being a butch lesbian, which introduces an element of choice to the whole thing that was wholly lacking in my life. This book is about sexual being as well as gendered being, together maybe even, and everytime I started feeling like I maybe understood who Ivan was, the sexuality bits would remind that no, I don't. I found it slightly problematic that Ivan seems to equate this gender presentation and gender reading with butch lesbianism. As her own family members note (if this is nonfiction) there are plenty of butch straight women.Most of my reaction to this is my own baggage but one line really hit me in the wrong way. It is about dealing with a breakup, for butches, and it says, "reach out to your butch and trans male friends." Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I just read that? No. Uh-uh. No. Butch and trans male is not a pairing that belongs together like that. If you'd like to align masculine persons, great, how about your butch and male friends? It is insulting, erasing, degrading, and just plain wrong to include trans men where cis men are not included, because a trans man is a man. He's not necessarily butch in any sense. He's not necessarily attracted to women. And he's certainly not necessarily a person to go to if you won't go to a cisgendered man. I'd never heard of Ivan Coyote before I saw her name on the list for the Word on the Lake Festival I'm attending in Salmon Arm, BC next week. I picked up her book, not knowing what to expect and found I tore right through it. Each story is only a few pages long and I found myself reading "just one more," until the book was done.Coyote is a storyteller and her stories are engaging, entertaining and sometimes challenging. She is a lesbian butch and I haven't read anything like this since my university days. Her stories are very personal, mostly from her own life or from her family's history. I love this kind of attention to the details in life.I will admit, I liked some of the stories more than others, but as a collection, they made me at various times laugh, feel angry, miss Vancouver (where I grew up), and think about things in a new light.
What do You think about Missed Her (2010)?
More heartfelt, moving stories from master storyteller Ivan E. Coyote. A beautiful book.
—sarisetty
strong and poignant, and occasionally hilarious.
—PhantomHyde
