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Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
74/100Critics
95/100Scholars
Author:
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Publisher:
semiotext(e)
Date:
November 24, 2020
Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.
What The Reviewers Say
Many writers have tried to describe the chill of Seattle’s social distance, an aloof tendency that predates the pandemic. No one got it right until queer activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in The Freezer Door, an aching, playful memoir of vivid desire amid the desperation of midlife disconnection.
... language, when wielded in expert hands, can thrive in mystery, outside of linearity.
... an expansive, witty, perambulating book.
... a lyric tirade against gentrification—of our minds, our sexualities, our cities—and the persistent, collective longing and loneliness it produces. This book, this intervention, was written well before the coronavirus was a quiver in our lungs. And yet it’s a bizarre gift that we get to read it now, quarantined as we are in the American nightmare and acutely attuned to our fear and disconnection.
