Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
“That’s what I like about language, about playing with language. I’m playing with repetition. I’m playing with sound and the texture of language and what meaning you can create from sensation and from experience and from cadence and from emphasis. Because meaning is not only what we impose or what we imagine. Meaning is what happens anyway.”
“Sycamore (Touching the Art) spins a shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic...Indelible.”
“[Touching the Art] blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence . . . Sycamore paints with language, using it as a device to translate her grandmother’s canvases into multisensory descriptions that branch off into various sites of memory, analysis, and juxtaposed quotations, modeling how inseparable art and life are . . . [Touching the Art] asks us to place our hand and tongue directly on the painting, to know that it becomes ours through this contact, and that both we and the artwork will be changed by our touch.” ”
“In Touching the Art, Sycamore responds to the call for white artists to reckon with our pasts, our connections to power and privilege. The scalpel she takes to her own family, both the education, access, and love of art they gave her, and the intense and ongoing violence they did to her and cannot face, is brutally laser sharp. In all the messily queer craftsmanship we’ve come to expect from her prose, she offers us a handhold and a way forward: Touch the art, fuck it up, get free. Art is a part of our liberation and our future, and Sycamore is trying to write us all free.”
“I thought I knew everything about how the queer generation after mine was impacted by AIDS, but Sycamore’s eye-opening anthology pierced my naive cockiness. I remember my life and sexual coming out before the AIDS crisis, but what if AIDS is all you’ve ever known? How did that define your queerness? Sycamore breaks open a dam of suppressed stories centered on stigma, from wildly diverse voices, pouring forth with startling honesty and resilience.”
“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is the kind of book I read in excited bursts, then had to put down for a minute to absorb. I gasped,I laughed out loud on public transportation, I felt seen and changed and so relieved to live at the same time as this truth-telling genius. How lucky we all are to have this meditation on bodies, sex, friendship, cities, loss, loneliness, and, of course, pleasure! ”
“Sketchtasy is a powerful firecracker of a novel; it’s not just one of the best books of the year, it’s an instant classic of queer literature.”
“The End of San Francisco, is a despairing memoir of loss — the loss of the dream of radical queer San Francisco, the loss of formative friendships, the loss of personal and political innocence. Written in a free-associative style and merging personal and social history, it is — like all of Sycamore’s work — innovative both formally and politically… The End of San Francisco is the opposite of nostalgia. Nostalgia is fundamentally conservative, and its conservatism is often embedded in the form in which stories are told. The End of San Francisco seems to me radical, not just in content, but formally, in insisting on other ways of remembering and documenting.”
“These essays come like a plunge into a forest pool of revitalizing joy, honesty, and common sense. Read them. Now. No—not tomorrow. Now!”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author, most recently, of Terry Dactyl (Coffee House Press, 2025; UK edition Cypher Press), described by the New York Times Book Review as "a remarkably grounded look at what it means to be fully alive," and by a starred review in Publishers Weekly as "a shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic." Her previous book, Touching the Art (Soft Skull, 2023), was a Washington State Book Award Finalist in 2024 and a Pacific Northwest Book Award Finalist in 2025. Her other books include: The Freezer Door (Semiotext(e), 2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and three novels: Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018; So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 2008), which Michelle Tea called, “a breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book”; and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2003).
Her memoir, The End of San Francisco (City Lights, 2013) won a LAMBDA Literary Award. She is the editor of six anthologies: Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), Why Are Faggots So Afraid Of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press, 2012), Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal Press, 2006), That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2004), Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Routledge, 2004) and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients (Routledge, 2000.)
Sycamore has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, The Baffler, n+1, Ploughshares, Fence, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Truthout, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Bitch, Bookslut, Denver Quarterly, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. For ten years Mattilda was the reviews editor and a columnist for the feminist magazine Make/shift, and she’s now part of the editorial collective for the Anarchist Review of Books. Sycamore also created Lostmissing, a public art project about the friend who will always be there, and what happens when you lose that relationship.
Sycamore’s activism has included ACT UP in the early-‘90s, Fed Up Queers in the late-‘90s, Gay Shame, and numerous lesser-known (or even unnamed) groups.
In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Sycamore was asked about the structure of The Freezer Door. “When I start writing a new book, I’m not thinking about what I’m doing,” she responded. “I just write and write, and I don’t take a look at the whole thing until I have a sense that I might have arrived somewhere—I never know where exactly, but a place where the text might reveal something surprising. Then I basically just cut and rearrange and cut and rearrange and cut—I’m a really neurotic editor.”
Her papers are archived at the San Francisco Public Library, and are accessible to the public. She lives in Seattle.
Open and right-click to download
(c) Jesse Mann
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
