Almost indescribably eclectic in both prose style and cornucopic social content, the sometimes dizzying, frequently devastating memoirs and au-tobiographical novels of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Sketchtasy, The End of San Francisco, Pulling Taffy) prickle and tickle all at once. None more so than his latest, in which the genderqueer logonaut takes his pen to the gentrification and whitewashing of our cities and our bodies. What at first may feel like an unedited stream-of-consciousness turns o...

at times brilliant and insightful and at times tedious. Its an interesting read that is uneven (to me).

a vulnerable and effective blend of lyrical memoir and cultural criticism, with some experimental prose poems (?) of call-and-response convos between an ice cube and an ice tray. this is my favorite kind of book, a book that is mostly about walking around, going to different bars, trying to meet up with friends, meeting strangers, hooking up in the park, and missing friends -- the mundanity and intensity of longing for connection. interspersed, mattilda critiques the gentrification and "seattle

I don't know where to start, but I am sad because I finished this book and I am happy because I loved every word of The Freezer Door. I don't know how to describe this book - rumination after thought after diary entry after joke after something else. I guess I'll just leave you with a few quotes from the book because why not? Here: "The problem of living. The problem of living in spite of it all. The problem of changing the larger world if we can't change ourselves. The problem of changing ourse...

Mattilda has a unique way with looking at the world, and with words, turning a phrase on its head, or is that heading a phrase on its turn? She (hope that's the right pronoun, it's in the bio) looks at gentrification, Trump's election, friends and friendship, sex and how to find it and that whole nightmare in the world of technology now. I think what I liked best about this book (and I've read more of her writing, too) is that it forces you to look at your own perceptions of similar things in yo...

Somewhere between Proust and Anais Nin, a modern diary of loneliness and the will to connect. Mattilda is a wonderful writer, honest and playful, not afraid of feelings- in fact- in search of them. There is a duet here between an ice tray and an ice cube to help readers imagine what is going on behind the freezer door-that you will not find the likes of in any other work of art. I am a loyal fan and reader.

(Matt)ilda Bernstein Sycamore (MBS) is the author of several memoirs and non-fictional accounts of a variety of subject matter concerning LGBTQ culture. In “The Freezer Door” (2020) the style of stream-of-consciousness thought and observation is featured-- from her congested urban neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. Ms. Bernstein Sycamore has lived in NYC and San Francisco and recalled her immense love for JoAnne (1974-95), her inspiration from the Whitney Museum, the writing of author-AIDS act...

My review for the Women's Review of Books: https://www.wcwonline.org/Women-s-Rev...It’s easy to see the pandemic as a rupture with the past. In March of 2020 we entered a new epoch, and yet, in many ways, the imperatives of social distancing are continuous with what came before: a shrinking public sphere, diminished opportunities for meaningful social interaction. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is an intimate exploration of desire and its impossibility, as well as a critique of t...

I'm a huge fan of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's writing. She is a historian of the gay movement, and a contemporary who is documenting life through a lens that is unique and important to question current norms. In The Freezer Door, the most delightful parts are the ice cube and ice cube tray in conversation where we feel the questions outside the normal questions we all hold in our head. What is it like to be in interaction with another, sometimes much like the ice cube and it's tray, we are stu...

I'm obsessed! This book filled me with longing, longing to be able to go out dancing, to be able to be casual again. But also longing in the sense of understanding and framing longing and expectations. I could listen to her talk [write] forever and feel like I am with a friend and also in my own head.

I am thinking about The Freezer Door a lot. It is the kind of writing that touches something vital, and then stays there, still touching and refusing to let go. In many ways this book feels like the invert sibling to Close To The Knives. A sibling because it feels forged from the same emotional urgency to find connection in a disconnected world. And an invert because of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's generous capacity to exchange Wojnarowski's burning rage for something far more tender. At one po...

"The opposite of nostalgia is truth," Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes in The Freezer Door, her powerful reflection on community and queerness and the trauma that influences us all.Mattilda came of age in the 90s, her queerness shaped by the death and activism of the AIDS crisis and the dance and music of rave culture. Finding herself caught between the various monikers used to describe the people in the LGBTQ+ community, she settles on "queer" and then spends many years trying to figure out...

4.5 stars: I needed this book in my life. It felt like I was sitting down with a queer mentor---and finding any mentor is hard---soaking up all they had to tell me. I could have easily read its 270 pages in one sitting; my attention was rapt.The structure of *The Freezer Door* defies convention. Its "essays" and "mini-essays" are neither numbered chapters or cleanly separated. Their fluidity is a part of their power since Mattilda's book is itself a manifesto on unconventionality and an unabashe...

Like nothing I’ve ever read, in the best way. I often put down the book for minutes at a time just to process what I’d felt. There’s a lot of pain in this book, but also beauty and joy and wisdom.“I remember the playground, where they called me sissy and faggot before I knew what those words meant, but I knew they meant I would never belong.” (p. 49)“When someone asks you how you’re feeling, and you tell them, and then they want to tell you why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, you wonder w...

Personal account of public sex and the desire for intimacy against the backdrop of the rapidly gentrifying, capitalist city. The anxiety of how even your most personal relations come to be cauterised by platforms and systems. Lack of any means to address trauma or any sort of difference meaningfully. The slow creep of gentrification that demands ever increasing commitment to homogeneity. A parallel dream vision of the city as endless possibility for new encounters and relations everyday.The them...

So many insights on desire, intimacy, writing, beginnings and endings. Such flow between thought and scene. One of those books that makes you want to write a book like it, in how it feels interior and outward, speaks to itself and you so closely. Love the character of Seattle in the book. A few quotes I’m keeping with me: “The most expensive art is a sense of belonging. The best way to remember a sense of belonging is to remember incorrectly. The correct memory is a memory of nothing. Nothing co...

I got absorbed in this. I have lived in Seattle almost my entire life and this book perfectly portrays the cold flakiness of this city that I love-hate, gentrified and disfigured beyond recognition, and full of connection without connection. Maybe it’s just that I’m another queer and trans person with chronic health probs but the layers of isolation that Mattilda explores here really reached me. I love the sense of place she conjures here, woozy scenes weaving together, dreamlike moments of almo...

Maggie Nelson writes in her cover endorsement "In a happy paradox common to great literature, it's a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone." I can't really say it better.I loved Sycamore's's non-linear, weird, poetic memoir.There's so much here that resonated about belonging to places and people and when that falls short, ie. by gentrification; ghosting; pinkwashing. There's no real plot here, kind of just snippets or vignettes: Sycamore's reflections and depictions of her...

I am speechless, but also feel so much connection from someone who writes about the longing for connection and the dynamics of queer relationships that get close, yet not close enough. This feels cliché to say, because I feel it whenever I read a really good book, but it felt like I knew the author, Mattilda, and she knew me, and the words were thoughts and feelings I often feel, but hardly let escape. It’s always the raw, authentic, vulnerability that gets me. And Mattilda does it, freely.

Behind the freezer door there is an ice cube tray and and ice cube. They have a relationship that involves form and fluidity. Towards the end of this book, in which they appear sporadically, the two ponder disasters, what might happen in various difficult situations where clearly the result would be melting. That is one topic of this book in which Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is on a lamenting quest to find satisfying intimacy, a merger of mind, body and emotion. The author is a queer person who