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.

I clutched [the book] a lot and sighed heavily while I read, underlining so much of it with my stubby pencil that it’s now a field of text, gray smudge, and exclamation points.

... acts less as documentation and more as rumination.

... an intimate exploration of desire and its impossibility, as well as a critique of the waning possibilities for communal engagement with desire in everyday experience.

A highly personal, complicated book, by turns blunt and poetic and full of thoughts on belonging and the lack of it, alienation, and the limitations of social convention and gender essentialism; not everyone will find Sycamore’s style or viewpoints agreeable, but readers seeking non-mainstream queer perspectives should consider this challenging but broadening read, which presents observations on connection and loneliness that have the occasional ring of touching on a universal feeling.