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 ... alive with the existential nausea of being displaced ... With the probing, restless spirit of the flâneuse, Sycamore traces topographies of hurt and want during long walks on Seattle streets mapped with the same precision shown to Boston in her third novel, Sketchtasy ... The sheer density of ideas in this subversive memoir hovers at an exponentially higher level than most books, which build to major revelations choreographed over a three-act structure that is the calcified legacy of dead men. Pushing the boundaries of her mellifluous stream-of-consciousness style, there is little respite in The Freezer Door. The rigor and clarity of her thinking may not be evident to those who need character and plot development through linear narrative ... reading her prose is like watching someone burn themselves on heat of their own making, made frantic by the bared bulb of instinct. This book unfurls in one long feverish rush with philosophical crests and scenic meanders through clubs, bars and parks where, sober and toting condoms, Sycamore seeks connection that does not last ... Whimsical and disaffected, that surreal dialogue provides a respite. Otherwise, this book brims with slippery sentences that reach their truths like rivers finding the sea. With an intellect that supersedes social boundaries through sheer insistence, Sycamore chronicles the paradox of inhabiting a fluid life in a rigid world.

... language, when wielded in expert hands, can thrive in mystery, outside of linearity ... There is much to love here. 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. Other sections slide past more quickly, thoughts rubbing up against one another in wild streams of consciousness. The larger, denser segments allow uninterrupted access to Sycamore’s thoughts as she navigates the complex (and occasionally conflicting) intimacies that construct her life: connections to illness, to art, to gender, to friends and lovers ... Sycamore moves fluidly through timelines ... A rich tapestry of images, tethered by rigorous self-examinations ... 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.

... an expansive, witty, perambulating book ... Sycamore’s most significant work since her dazzling 2013 breakout memoir, The End of San Francisco ... A careless reader might classify Sycamore as a misanthrope. The Freezer Door is almost entirely an internal monologue, narrated by someone who feels desperately detached from society against her will. But Sycamore resists that interpretation; this is not a Notes from the Underground for the 21st century. She’s not closed off from the world; rather, she’s painfully eager to receive human connection. Sycamore is amazed by the miracle of having a body that can perpetually give and receive pleasure, and she is scandalized by the tragedy of a society that insists you feel guilty about that pleasure, and keep it to yourself.

... 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 ... Sycamore opens us to the desire of the unknown, the stranger that gets to become something else ... Sycamore politicizes the roots of human suffering in The Freezer Door . Connection, its lack thereof, and the vagaries of desire are the work’s animating forces. It’s not quite a memoir and yet, like her fiction, it spirals into nonlinear, associative magic: passages about cruising for sex, meditations on grief, and an imagined dialogue between an ice cube and the tray that holds it, both imprisoned by and dependent upon the freezer ... Sycamore offers us possibility through the language of desire: to act on the thing you want by feeling and risking disorder. However, as the lyrical recurrences of the book demonstrate, Sycamore and the people she encounters are stuck in a loop: everyone is doing the same things and expecting different results. The willingness to expect the different result can make us feel alive, especially in those moments when we are surprised, but they never bring lasting nourishment. If we must constantly resist violence, which includes the gentrification of our minds, our communities, and our relationships, we will only have the resilience for brief moments of surprise at best before we are thrust back into the cycle again. Ephemeral pleasures are not a destination, and Sycamore is uncertain she will ever truly experience the queerness she longs for.

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 ... 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. Sycamore writes about community, gentrification, white supremacy, queerness, being trans within queer spaces, fucking, love, housing, Seattle, San Francisco, cities and our love for them, trauma, sexual assault, chronic pain, solitude, and longing—all with rare candor ... Sycamore wrote this book long before pandemic time, and yet it couldn’t have arrived at a better moment. You need it. I did, and still do.

... acts less as documentation and more as rumination ... Expanding on her dazzling stream-of-consciousness style, Sycamore has crafted a true marvel...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.

... 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 ... Sycamore identified these problems, particularly as they relate to queer communities, long before COVID, but this new book enters a world in which they feel more poignant than ever ... challenges the culture of queer assimilationism and documents her own search for sexual and intellectual intimacy. This deceptively slim volume is a slow read in the best possible way. I wanted to underline practically every sentence, and Sycamore strews her poetic fluidity with an almost overwhelming abundance of aphoristic utterances ... As seems fitting for a work that aims to challenge the very idea of the mainstream, Sycamore’s lyrical writing flows like stormwater ... This is an anarchic and unruly, yet dreamy and languid, meditation in fragments, full of unexpected juxtapositions and white space ... a biting appraisal of cosmopolitan existence for the twenty-first century ... Sycamore slings plenty of zingers, and her targets are righteous, but she’s a lover, not a hater—a lover of trust, of beauty, and of genuine connection in all its forms, not only between romantic partners but between people and their friends, people and their architecture, people and trees, and on and on. What stuns me about her criticism is its gentleness—the ways she finds to be forceful but not harmful, always punching up, so to speak, or really not even punching at all, only highlighting blind spots and inviting her readers to open their eyes to more than the restricted array of consumerist possibilities that late capitalism presents as our only options ... One of the many wondrous aspects of Sycamore’s approach becomes not only what she’s saying, but how she’s saying it ... Rather than employing taboo and transgression as ends unto themselves, Sycamore transgresses in order to urge her audience to interrogate their almost- invisible suppositions and so-called civil decorum ... stands as a call to open the door and take a gamble on what might be outside—to reject the illusion of safety and try instead for a re-enchantment of everything, a magic that can only happen by reaching beyond 'walled-off insufficiency.'v

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 ... Those familiar with Sycamore’s writing and activist work will welcome this new installment; those unfamiliar but interested in exploring an unconventional angle on LGBTQ+ issues may find it illuminating.