So Many Ways to Sleep Badly

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Overview

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872868922
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	07/29/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the novel Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revoling! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift, and Maximumrocknroll. She lives in San Francisco.

What People are Saying About This

Richard Labonte

...Sycamore's luscious prowess with prose—coupled with an easy gender fluidity—is evocative and provocative and literarily seductive.

Editorial Reviews

Novelist (Pulling Taffy) and nonfiction anthologist (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity) Sycamore is back with an ambitious but less-than-compelling satire of drug-fueled, gender-bending San Francisco subculture. The narrator, who may or may not be genetically female, fills days and many late nights with relentless sexual encounters and vivid ruminations concerning random sex, hustling, cocaine and other party drugs; occasionally, she takes time out for a rare healthy habit, vikram yoga, and to worry about her apartment's roach-and-rodent infestation. Obviously inspired by the stream-of-consciousness and day-in-the-life classics of Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, here the pointed commentary falls flat; the problem isn't San Francisco's eccentric denizens, but Sycamore's profane meanderings, too much of which isn't especially insightful or funny. The narrator takes far too long to move beyond the bitchy play-by-play, making sure that, by the time Sycamore introduces genuine stakes, readers will already feel too bored and browbeaten to care. (Oct.)

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Publishers Weekly

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly offers up the events of Sycamore's own life in a frantically paced stream of consciousness narrative. Her writing swings between poetic and horrifying as her ambiguously gendered central character lies awake in San Francisco's rundown Tenderloin district, disturbed by roaches and rats and the real or imagined pigeons in the ceiling of her apartment, before taking off to service a variety of seedy men in the city's most expensive hotels.
—Cate Simpson

Extra!

This Lambda Literary Award finalist offers up a thrilling socio-politically transgressive, gender-bending queer novel about life in San Francisco. From bad sex to vegan restaurants to NPR and tweaking buddies, Sycamore's frenetic pace and unabashed solipsism is most refreshing.
—Diane Anderson-Minshall

Curve Magazine

Sycamore's second novel (his first, 2003's Pulling Taffy, was nominated for a Lambda Award) is a high-speed, stream-of-consciousness romp that could easily have been subtitled "looking for love in all the wrong places." In 27 chapters, a flamboyantly queer sex worker named Tyler, aka Mattilda to his friends and anarcho-feminist comrades, takes readers into a world where well-heeled men rent ritzy penthouse suites while others grapple with AIDS, cockroach- and rat-infested apartments, depression, incest, and, of course, insomnia. By turns raunchy and tender, Sycamore's wryly neurotic text is often funny, and his optimism that a better world is possible makes the book compelling. Subtly political, he posits friendship, camaraderie, and activism as ways to defy the morass of Republicrat rule. What's more, in quips worthy of Stephen Colbert, he slams San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, the Iraq War, and the queer rush to the altar celebrated by mainstream liberals. Sexually explicit, the book is recommended for adult fiction collections.
—Eleanor Bader

Library Journal

"So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a Sex in the Other City—only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn. Sycamore deftly skewers a landscape that's been completely sacked by mindless consumerism and unchecked gentrification, whether it's a Whole Foods customer whining, "Which fish is the least fishy?" or an earnest yoga practitioner bragging about opening a factory in China. And hallelujah: this refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language—and I promise it'll still be singing to you long after you close your eyes at night."—T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts

"Mattilda's brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness. This is an entire lived life's worth of heartshaking honesty, arch observation, searing vulnerabilty and craving and seeking, all in one breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book."—Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Rose of No Man's Land

"Like the best writers that have come before—Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, Burroughs—Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it's a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it."—Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters

"Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don't know how to swim. You feel like you're gonna drown, like how am I going to do this? You can't breathe and you flail and start to sink, you’re freezing but then you feel brisk then actually kind of exhilarated and then you are breathing not mere air but something rich and sweet and fluid, a thing a whole lot like the inside of your body. You breathe in this new element—this frantic, fluid prose—and read like you have never read before."—Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth and The Last Time I Saw You

"In 1955, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an attack on the conformity and the alienation of that era. Now here’s another great paean to a counterculture of hustlers, junkies and visionary angels to wash the taste of the Bush years out of our mouths. Instead of incantation, it is a hooker’s pillowbook that describes a community of physical uproar and activism based on doubt. What a tonic this books is—that people fuck with such conviction and attention to detail! It’s like a treasure map of a San Francisco with orgasms instead of doubloons. . . . The map is the body, volcanic, weary, sick, fragile and tough."—Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist and Denny Smith Stories

From the Publisher