Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

So Many Ways To Sleep Badly could be read as monotonous, or, to quote Publishers Weekly, "[t]he narrator takes far too long to move beyond the bitchy play-by-play, making sure that, by the time Sycamore introduces genuine stakes, readers will already feel too bored and browbeaten to care." Of course, Publishers Weekly is right if you'd rather read fiction held together by contrived, coherent narratives that lead to climax and then boring, happy endings. If you're interested in something that show more actually says something (by nearly saying everything) about drug culture, consumerism, queers and gays, protests, assimilationism, abuse, and disability, read this book. I chuckled frequently during "the bitchy play-by-play" and the book's insomniatic energy was enough to keep me up late at night. At least in a year as boring as 2008 (Olympics! McCain v. Obama!) we have this gem. show less

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 show more 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. show less

This book really challenged my views on sexuality, sex, and radical feminist and queer thought. Theory, story, interview and case study blended together to create a coherent radical queer agenda against assimilation into the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The hot topics of the "gay rights" white gay male "movement" are Gay Marriage, Adoption, and the Right to Military Service. These all benefit the system more than they benefit queer liberation, so that even if you win, you lose. show more

One of the highlights of the book for me was the story of PISS, the campus movement to create gender-neutral and handicap accessable bathrooms. To have things as simple as being able to go to the bathroom be a serious complication with your body and identity is heartbreaking. It was inspiring to read about what I had previously thought of as disparate movements working together for a common goal and supporting one another.

Another highlight was the article stating that Gay Marriage is racist. Marriage is seen as the route to assimilation and acceptance from the hetero world. The interviewee made the case, however, that black families and mixed-race families often have the "foundation" of marriage. Black people have done the experiment of marrying for acceptance within the larger society, but the state sees them as "queer" (as in, part of the "other" that isn't white and wealthy). The state destroys their families by jailing the father, refusing welfare to the mother, and putting up children for adoption or foster care. Therefore, marriage is an ineffective route to acceptance, and even if it were effective, it would be selective acceptance based on race, as black people are systematically denied family and marriage.

After reading this book, I was embarassed that I put HRC stickers on my class binders in university to show that I was a queer ally. show less

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating new novel is a gender-bending queer tale about the struggle to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco: roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, cops, chronic pain, the gay vote, Vegan restaurants. Our gay hero(ine) survives it all with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions, and show more sleeping pills.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel, Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift, and Maximumrocknroll, and lives in San Francisco.

Praise for So Many Ways to Sleep Badly:

"So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a Sex in the Other City—only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn. Sycamore deftly skewers a landscape that's been completely sacked by mindless consumerism and unchecked gentrification, whether it's a Whole Foods customer whining, "Which fish is the least fishy?" or an earnest yoga practitioner bragging about opening a factory in China. And hallelujah: this refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language—and I promise it'll still be singing to you long after you close your eyes at night."
—T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts

"Mattilda's brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness. This is an entire lived life's worth of heartshaking honesty, arch observation, searing vulnerabilty and craving and seeking, all in one breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book."
—Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Rose of No Man's Land

"Like the best writers that have come before — Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, Burroughs — Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it's a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it."
—Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters

"Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don’t know how to swim. You feel like you’re gonna drown, like how am I going to do this? You can’t breathe and you flail and start to sink, you’re freezing but then you feel brisk then actually kind of exhilarated and then you are breathing not mere air but something rich and sweet and fluid, a thing a whole lot like the inside of your body. You breathe in this new element—this frantic, fluid prose—and read like you have never read before."
—Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth and The Last Time I Saw You

"In 1955, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an attack on the conformity and the alienation of that era. Now here’s another great paean to a counterculture of hustlers, junkies and visionary angels to wash the taste of the Bush years out of our mouths. Instead of incantation, it is a hooker’s pillowbook that describes a community of physical uproar and activism based on doubt. What a tonic this books is — that people fuck with such conviction and attention to detail! It’s like a treasure map of a San Francisco with orgasms instead of doubloons...The map is the body, volcanic, weary, sick, fragile and tough."
—Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist and Denny Smith Stories show less