TERRY DACTYL, trans girl's life from plague to plague

TERRY DACTYL
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It was my world, this one. The AIDS epidemic to COVID...yeah...my adulthood. So no, not the lesbian moms part, and I'm not trans, but it still feels very familiar if not very sweet and happy.

No book about this span is ever not going to center the experience of loss and grief. It was the fabric we cut our lives out of. It takes a lot of moxie to be openly trans, even now when you can imagine your lesbian moms being glad for you that you've found your Self, the real one. Terry never hides her identity. She is herself from giddy-up to whoa. It leads her into the loving embrace of her found family in New York just as AIDS begins scything them with its death sentence for being queer.

Why this is a book made for the run-up to Yule is it's about us who live in loss, who never get to be the happy little homebody, who always yearn for something gone beyond our reach. Its unconjoined nature makes it the right kind of read for a busy and distracted holiday...re-reading a sentence or two is absolutely ordinary in this book's world. What this read offers, in this "festive" season, is the company of someone who survived...without her loved ones. Terry's a survivor in the approving, tough and capable definition; also in the lonely, left-behind definition. As COVID threatens to ravage her world again, she retreats to her home in Seattle.

It's not her home. It's a different place with the same name. I relate...I'm from Los Gatos before Netflix, Austin before Infowars, Manhattan before 9/11. None of my homes are remotely the same as when I was growing into myself there. It was this fellow-feeling that kept me reading the non-linear, mosaic story that followed the vibes of the story not the plan of it.

Certainly an unusual choice to make, going home to weather a storm. I wish I'd been able to spend more time in her moms' company, and wanted some greater theme to emerge from their choices to give Terry's life a more theatrically-defined completeness. I know this story is more the way life is lived: moving from experience to experience while still working out what the hell just happened.

Completely successful on that measure. I'm glad I read the story. But now, please write something from Terry's mothers' point of view, please and thank you, Author Mattilda.