A Year in Reading: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Sometimes you just happen to be reading the right book—maybe it doesn’t happen as often as you’d like, but when it happens, oh my, it happens. But first let me say that in the middle of the Todd Haynes documentary about The Velvet Underground, which is really about trauma, at least for me, trauma and dissociation, trauma and dissociation and drugs, trauma and dissociation and drugs and feeling, and in the middle I had this profound feeling of loss, wondering, have I let go of the dream of a world of touch? That queer dream of desire activated in the everyday in every way, in spite of the world that annihilates these possibilities. I mean I went from finally having 50 percent of the touch I need in my life to 0 percent overnight when this new pandemic emerged almost two years ago, and now maybe I’m somewhere around 10 percent or maybe 15 percent on a good day but still the dream, how to stay present. 

Before this pandemic, I wrote a book, The Freezer Door, about desire and its impossibility, the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over urban life, and the dream of the city as the place where you find everything and everyone that you never imagined, and whether this dream is still possible in our gentrified cities that foreclose possibility where we once found it. So when I first thought about this past year of reading, I thought about how the beginning of the year was the end of my book tour for The Freezer Door and how before the book tour started I thought, oh, I wrote a book about alienation, and then everything got worse. But what happened on my book tour is that I felt connected to everyone because we were all feeling this together, and even if the book tour was virtual there was so much intimacy present. 

And now, in