I finally got around to reading this in anticipation for Sycamore's newest book, Sketchtasy. This stream of consciousness memoir-esque book really captures so many scenes and feelings quite well. My rowdy days are mostly over, but this drew me back in to remembering queer partying, hook-up, drug, etc culture as well as what it is like to try to navigate life amongst these cultures along with activism, sleep, self care, health care, and so on with fibromyalgia. Among many other things, Mattilda a...

Have you ever had a friend you meet and it is like love at first sight and they are like kind of exciting and living on the edge a little bit, like a little more out there than you but more real seeming too, and you really get each other and you are in this whirlwind of going down alleys you wouldn't have late at night and to weird bars and it's exhilarating... then suddenly exhausting and you're like, this person has problems bigger than I can solve and actually it would be nice to just go to b...

Ms Mattilda, you are so awesome. Thank you for showing me around San Francisco it was very fun. Sorry you’re feeling bad much of the time. Love the speed at which this goes, like finding the lingering effects of the last week upon now and riding the momentum into the next work, the next night out, the next tragedy, the next exercise, the next kiss, the next boyfriend, the next dissolution, the next sunstormy day, always endearingly tied to one’s meat envelope and those of others

this book made my body mimic the feelings of the narrator's, all exhausted & tripped out & careening through the days carefully. one of those narratives that makes you narrate your own life in its voice.

This book is an instant classic of a new generation as far as I'm concerned. Written almost like a diary, it is a constant feed of Sycamore's daily life and routine. The words and ideas flow like a steady stream of data tape. It's very poetic, unconventional, confrontational and moving. Sometimes it is hard to read because pain wafts off the pages. The cutting commentary on just about everything that is within Sycamore's range had me either laughing or gaping. It didn't leave my hands from the m...

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—San Francisco Bay GuardianMattilda 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 sleeping pil...

This was a great read. Scathing stream-of-consciousness San Francisco from the point of view of Mattilda, a transy faggoty whore with a host of chronic maladies, a sub-standard living situation and surprisingly few chemical dependencies. A paragraph will start out talking about pigeons and rats, and end with sex in a hotel room with someone who smells funny, processing with friends in the middle. Then off to a sex club, then the anti-war protest and hop in a taxi for another trick. The book's ac...

Makes me love San Francisco again! Oh, I miss what the city used to be.

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 act...

The reviews on the back jacket of this cover pretty much say exactly what I would write about this book. Awesome reviews from Michelle Tea and the Scissor Sisters. Really, what else could anyone ask for? I definitely see the resemblance to Tea's work, being stream of consciousness, set in SF, and about being down and out and living the street life/party life. And yet it is very separate from Tea's work. Mattilda has her own unique voice and story.I have to say I had sort of a love/hate relations...

my favourite MBS book, and the first i read. mattilda's striving, yearning, deeply feeling voice is like no other... performs the repetitious nature of daily living, in particular pain and disappointment, in a way that is never boring or depressing

It makes me think a tweaker tape recording their diary and had it transcribed, but apparently the author didn't do those kinds of drugs when this was written. At first it had me feeling like I was completely sober and subjected to endure the heated rantings of a tweaker, a drunk, AND a junkie. It was amusing and annoying at the same time, but after finishing about a third of it, I started to feel like I could relate and even join in every so often. San Francisco is a horrible place; I've live

I almost didn't bother to finish the book. For all the sex and colorful places and characters, it managed to get boring. The author is obviously smart, literate and expressive, and troubled. S/he is also very self-involved, and came across to me as self-righteous and snobby--dismissive of people who don't measure up to her queer and quirky standards. The stream of consciousness got monotonous at times. I like the blurring of gender lines by mixing pronouns. The San Francisco queer vegan activist...

I love Mattilda. This is a beautiful book that reads like raw poetry. I’ll always like reading her work at this point. Excited to bite into The End of San Francisco later this year.

"Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s brilliant new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, is either about the end of queer politics or its beginning. It’s either a record of how dismal the contemporary gay movement has become with its relentless pursuit of assimilation or about the possibility for a politics that challenges the same...You could leave feeling frightened by the vision of a sexy gay world that pays no heed to the destruction around it. Or you could exult, as I do, in the revelations offered...

And then nobody was surprised when Mattilda created literally the gayest thing in the whole world. I loved it. What I wasn't expecting was for it to be a fibromyalgia memoir. It's kind of hard to critique or say anything really intelligent about- much like Pulling Taffy, there isn't really a plot with a conflict or resolution- it's just a bunch of stuff that happened to a bunch of people. So also just like Pulling Taffy, the most prominent reference point is Michelle Tea. Grownups! Gotta go!Edit...

mattilda and i both love david wojnarowicz and i love stream-of-consciousness memoirs. this takes it way past the limit of s-o-c and that's exhausting but satisfying. also mattilda has more chronic pain than i can imagine as well as more pests, but on the other hand much more gay sex. "really i just want a ten-hour hug," doesn't that sound like the absolute best???????

To read So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is to be plunged, five senses searing, into the frenetic, poetic prose universe of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's unique design. No doubt, to share this world is both a privilege and a punishment, faced as we are with the blow-by-blow accounts of the highs and lows of the human body and psyche. The crippling emotional pain of a past tainted by incest is never far from the tremulous outer edges of Sycamore's mind as she spars daily with fibromyalgia and turns tr...

I really wavered - I stood in Modern Times for a long time being like "wait for the library or spend the money?" I spent the money because I was drawn to the book and I needed something to read on my way to pussy school in Vegas. A lot of the reviews I've read have been confused or irritated by the form Mattilda chose, or flumoxed by the lack of traditional plot, stream of consciousness speedy yet fibro-fogged narrative voice. I really liked Mattilda's capturing of the disaster and love as we kn...