THE FREEZER DOOR

"[An] underline-every-sentence compendium of queer desire"
—Michelle Hart, Oprah Magazine

“How does one delimit the world when language isn’t enough? Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore seeks to uncover and reconsider boundaries in her new book, The Freezer Door… [L]anguage, when wielded in expert hands, can thrive in mystery, outside of linearity… The pacing of the work, with its often fragmentary form, allows readers to sit with poignant moments for a beat, unpacking a sentence only to return later to unpack it again...There are no questions answered in this book. Instead, questions create further questions, further attempts at rediscovery and at blurring boundaries. Hers is a welcome blurring and, in a culture of relentless demarcation, a necessary one."
—Kristen Arnett, New York Times Book Review

"The Freezer Door is an aching, playful memoir of vivid desire amid the desperation of midlife disconnection... With an intellect that supersedes social boundaries through sheer insistence, Sycamore chronicles the paradox of inhabiting a fluid life in a rigid world."
—Kristen Millares Young, Washington Post Book World

“There have been plenty of things to cry about in 2020, but I never thought a ten page conversation between an ice cube and an ice cube tray would be one of them. And yet there I was, tears blurring my vision as I read Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s latest book… The Freezer Door, Sycamore’s fifth book, appears deceptively simple: a series of short—sometimes a lone sentence at the top of the page—and seemingly unconnected bursts of writing. But it’s a dirty trick. I would read a short section and become so emotional I’d have to put the book down and leave the room. Like Maggie Nelson or Wayne Koestenbaum’s work, the complexity and power of The Freezer Door comes precisely from how tightly honed and spare the text is… It’s hard to say exactly what The Freezer Door is ‘about,’ but the narrator’s ruminations…feel like a summation of what it’s like to be alive right now: lonely, adrift, but full of desire and yearning for change.”
—Amy Gall, BOMB Magazine

"[A] lyric tirade against gentrification—of our minds, our sexualities, our cities—and the persistent, collective longing and loneliness it produces."
—Corinne Manning, The Baffler

“Like a latter-day, radically queer Jane Jacobs, Sycamore offers a biting appraisal of cosmopolitan existence for the twenty-first century… She shines her wit like a flashlight on all that darkens her bright vision of what urban life should and shouldn’t be.”
—Kathleen Rooney, Women’s Review of Books

“There’s no narrative propulsion to speak of in The Freezer Door no overarching plot. Instead, the structure of the book is what coaxes readers along. Some chapters are just a few tiny, despairing sentences. Some joyous descriptions of the pleasure of dancing in a mass of writhing, sweating bodies thrum on for a few pages. It’s such a compelling reading experience because Sycamore is in love with the endless possibilities of language, turning words inside out to find new meanings… Sycamore believes we’ve fallen under the sway of the wrong story, and that story is making us lonely and sick, alienating us from each other even as we live closer together than ever before. In The Freezer Door, she’s out to tell a new story—one which redefines who we are and what we can become.”
—Paul Constant, Seattle Times

“The Freezer Door is like a novel that reads like a memoir. It’s a treatise that feels like a long prose poem. It’s fragmented and yet it skips along like a pop song. It’s aphoristic and daily at the same time. It doesn’t worry about your hang-ups because Sycamore is beyond that shit. She’s too smart for that, and we should be, too.”
—Carley Moore, The Rumpus

“Expanding on her dazzling stream-of-consciousness style, Sycamore has crafted a true marvel in The Freezer Door. Its segments cohere as fractals, crystalizing every observation into its sharpest, pithiest form. Every page teems with aphoristic gems… The result is an invaluable meditation on holistic belonging.”
—Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness

“Standardized language is the language of the dictator, the colonialist, and of Literature; in The Freezer Door, it is freer, uninhibited, intimate, non-linear, and anti-literary. The language is vibrant, pulsating, and provocative. It is thought embodied in language; it is as if the reader is experiencing the birth of her thought as it happens on the page, like when you’re talking to someone, say, in an afterhours place, or at home, after a night out in the clubs… The Freezer Door is an important book because it challenges our assumptions about the world, and in doing so, gives us hope that an alternative might be possible. When reading her book, I can almost see it before my eyes; I know that world is in front of me all the time, just on the edge of visibility. It’s books like these that ultimately help us to see clearly.”
—Peter Valente, Full Stop

"The Freezer Door is a story about queerness, belonging, loneliness, desire, and the utter havoc of capitalism."
—Sarah Neilson, Literary Hub

"Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is a thoughtful, lyrical analysis on hookups, hegemony, and the myth of the American city. In her latest book, cruising culture features as prominently as colonialism; gentrification as much as gender identity... With urbanization comes atomization; loneliness is the most beautifully detailed analysis in The Freezer Door... The streets of Seattle become internalized in her own thought process and cultural critiques. Sycamore never wastes time with either/or opinions; she continually crafts passages which invert words and play with their meaning until they are neither or both... Sycamore’s narrative elegantly calls out urban conformity, social isolation, and the silent dullness taking over daily life.”
—Barbara Purcell, A Gathering of the Tribes

“In her latest, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reflects on queerness, pleasure, pain, loneliness, connection and conformity, all in her signature candid and original style. Read it, reflect on it, and then read it again.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“The Freezer Door is a mind-blowing distillation of what it means to live in a city, in loneliness, in a queerness that bends toward assimilation, inside a gentrified suburban world.”
—Sarah Neilson, Seventh Wave

“From Seattle’s Volunteer Park to local gay bars, Sycamore roams in search of intimacy. Yet the American city in the contemporary age seems to deny connection at every turn, as gentrification, consumerism, and fear encroach further and further upon daily life. Even in queer spaces and communities that once felt familiar, she finds herself increasingly alienated. Shifting between various scenes and timelines, Sycamore mourns sites of brokenness, but also discovers glimmers of humor, pleasure, and new language along the way. She keeps moving, despite everything, finding new ways to be alive.”
—Poets & Writers

“The Freezer Door invites the reader to be vulnerable, to be open to loneliness, to question cultural constructs, to consider feeling joy, even briefly, and to allow these things to be the very things that connect us.”
—Bruce Owens Grimm, New City

“[The Freezer Door is] a book that refuses the gated communities of the gentrified city just as it does the gated communities of suburban minds who produce and consume so much of what passes for literary.”
—McKenzie Wark, Mousse Magazine

“I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door. In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone. I so admire its appetite to get down and dirty, to wield non sequitur with grace and power, to ponder the past while sticking with the present, to quest unceasingly. I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty.”
—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

”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!”
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts sex and gender, suffering and gentrification, encounter and solitude, at the center of a book that defies borders and uses language to dive directly into mystery. I admire Sycamore’s gossamer refusal ever to land anywhere definitive; the sentences travel further and further into trauma’s backyard, where complex ideas find a habitat among the simplest formulations. Sycamore, by breathing into the prose, treats the act of book-building as a practice strange and organic as sleeping, walking, bathing, eating. The Freezer Door delves into the philosophy of the sexual meetingplace with a virtually unprecedented aplomb.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Figure It Out: Essays