So Many Ways to Sleep Badly by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (1-Oct-2008) Paperback

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's new 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.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Queer Lit, Novels, Humor, Sexuality

Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore lives in Seattle, and her new book, Touching the Art, will be released on November 7, 2023.

Reviews

[Imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

And then nobody was surprised when Mattilda created literally the gayest thing in the whole world. I loved it. What I wasn't expecting was for it to be a fibromyalgia memoir. It's kind of hard to critique or say anything really intelligent about- much like Pulling Taffy, there isn't really a plot with a conflict or resolution- it's just a bunch of stuff that happened to a bunch of people. So also just like Pulling Taffy, the most prominent reference point is Michelle Tea.

Grownups! Gotta go!

Edit, 6 hours later : Okay, they're gone. Don't sponge internet access at work.

Anyway, what I was going to say is, when I fell in love with Michelle Tea and read all her books one week a couple years ago, somebody said to me "I read her and she's just, like, 'we went here, then we did this, then we did this, then we went here and did this, then we met her, then we did this,' and by the end of the book I was completely exhausted." Mattilda does this too. It's a pretty hectic book, and I think whether anybody likes it is gonna depend entirely on how much they like to read about queeny faggots running around being queeny and faggoty.

So yeah. When I called it the gayest thing in the world, that, like, took into account all the coming on faces and hustling and craigslist sex posting and, y'know, explicitly, concretely gay things, but darlin those are not the extent of the gayness. There's vegan food; there's gay pride parade protesting; there's processing; there's empty sex and good sex and mediocre sex and mostly just lots of sex; there are outfits consisting of 'contrasting plaids' and oh! here is what I hated:

there's lots of the word 'tranny.' I don't get why people think that's okay. Trannyboy this and trannygirl that, and at one point she talks about telling somebody's a tranny 'cause of her broad shoulders. Gross! I get linking oppressions; I don't get appropriating the language of the oppressed. I *do* get that nobody else in the world, apparently, cares about how insidious and fucked up that word is, but I expected better from the editor of Nobody Passes and That's Revolting!, you know? It hurt my little heart a little bit how comfortable Mattilda is slinging around language that's such a fuckin button for me.

But anyone, whatever. That's the only read I can't call it a five-star book. I still like it a lot and am kind of surprised that, for all the gay gayness, I'm more interested in talking about this book as a fibromyalgia book instead of a gay book.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book made my body mimic the feelings of the narrator's, all exhausted & tripped out & careening through the days carefully. one of those narratives that makes you narrate your own life in its voice.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

So Many Ways To Sleep Badly could be read as monotonous, or, to quote Publishers Weekly, "[t]he 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." Of course, Publishers Weekly is right if you'd rather read fiction held together by contrived, coherent narratives that lead to climax and then boring, happy endings. If you're interested in something that actually says something (by nearly saying everything) about drug culture, consumerism, queers and gays, protests, assimilationism, abuse, and disability, read this book. I chuckled frequently during "the bitchy play-by-play" and the book's insomniatic energy was enough to keep me up late at night. At least in a year as boring as 2008 (Olympics! McCain v. Obama!) we have this gem.

[Damien · Rating 3 out of 5]

It makes me think a tweaker tape-recorded their diary and had it transcribed, but apparently the author didn't do those kinds of drugs when this was written.
At first it had me feeling like I was completely sober and subjected to endure the heated rantings of a tweaker, a drunk, AND a junkie. It was amusing and annoying at the same time, but after finishing about a third of it, I started to feel like I could relate and even join in every so often.
San Francisco is a horrible place; I've lived here off and on since 1985, and I've lived here longer than any where else. This book has caught the essence of life in this city. And I thought it was just me and the fact that I don't have enough money to enjoy living here.
This book is also very depressing. There is nothing in it any where to help you feel good about ANY thing. However, I got a few great laughs here and there, and I often found myself nodding in agreement with many of the observations.

[Liza]

Have you ever had a friend you meet and it is like love at first sight and they are like kind of exciting and living on the edge a little bit, like a little more out there than you but more real seeming too, and you really get each other and you are in this whirlwind of going down alleys you wouldn't have late at night and to weird bars and it's exhilarating... then suddenly exhausting and you're like, this person has problems bigger than I can solve and actually it would be nice to just go to bed early and go to my square job and it's easy to do because they've already moved on and have three new best friends and when you don't respond to their text for a few days then finally do they write back "who is this?"? That's kind of how this book felt to me.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an instant classic of a new generation as far as I'm concerned. Written almost like a diary, it is a constant feed of Sycamore's daily life and routine. The words and ideas flow like a steady stream of data tape. It's very poetic, unconventional, confrontational and moving.
Sometimes it is hard to read because pain wafts off the pages. The cutting commentary on just about everything that is within Sycamore's range had me either laughing or gaping.
It didn't leave my hands from the moment I started, and strangely I didn't read the last page. I couldn't accept that it was over.

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yoga. Sinus headaches. Tricks. Roaches. Rats. Sea lions. Blowjobs. Insomnia. Pain. Iraq War. Pride. Acupuncture.

These are topics that are ever-present in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's stream-of-consciousness novel 'So Many Ways to Sleep Badly'. The title character, named eponymously, drifts in and out of a reality filled with pain, pleasure, and every feeling in-between. In one telling line, she laments feeling "strung out, even though she's not." That is the tone for this entire novel, set against the backdrop of Bush-era San Francisco set at the height of the illegal Iraq war and the queer radical pushback against gay assimilationist culture that still permeates to this day.

In true first person stream-of-consciousness, no character is ever truly expanded upon. We see them only as they drift in and out of Mattilda's days and lives, as she sees them. Some characters remain consistent: Jeremy [have you ever met anyone good named Jeremy?], Chrissie, Ralowe, Rue. Some are mentioned once or twice, and then never again. There's no point in going back to try and find earlier mention of a character brought up 200 pages in because this might be the first time they're ever mentioned, and they won't be mentioned again.

Sycamore's command of stream-of-consciousness through the eyes of a working class, queer sex worker creates a "wall of sound" of sorts where you are immersed in this dreary and yet, blissful and radical existence. You want so badly for there to be a happy resolution, but I know there isn't. This is merely a snapshot of a poor, working class queer's life, and there isn't meant to be closure because in reality, closure is not always afforded to us.

A superb book. I like it as much as I liked 'Sketchtasy'.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

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


Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating new novel is a gender-bending queer tale about the struggle to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco: roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, cops, chronic pain, the gay vote, Vegan restaurants. Our gay hero(ine) survives it all with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions, and sleeping pills.


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

Praise for So Many Ways to Sleep Badly:

"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

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

mattilda and i both love david wojnarowicz and i love stream-of-consciousness memoirs. this takes it way past the limit of s-o-c and that's exhausting but satisfying. also mattilda has more chronic pain than i can imagine as well as more pests, but on the other hand much more gay sex. "really i just want a ten-hour hug," doesn't that sound like the absolute best???????

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes me love San Francisco again! Oh, I miss what the city used to be.

[Corvus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally got around to reading this in anticipation for Sycamore's newest book, Sketchtasy. This stream of consciousness memoir-esque book really captures so many scenes and feelings quite well. My rowdy days are mostly over, but this drew me back in to remembering queer partying, hook-up, drug, etc culture as well as what it is like to try to navigate life amongst these cultures along with activism, sleep, self care, health care, and so on with fibromyalgia. Among many other things, Mattilda and I seem to share the searing pain, fatigue, digestive, and other nervous system and body issues that make doing everything awful and we both seem to share regular attempts to do things we shouldn't that we know will be too much for our bodies and minds.

"...my hands hurt, arms burn, neck feels broken with with plants growing in the cracks between my bones then pulling the tendons tight, tighter. Everywhere on my face it feels like there are bruises like stones, groans, loans, lost retribution, pollution, articles of dissolution: my head, and everything that's below; my feet, and everything that's above."

I have not heard a more poetic and accurate description of fibromyalgia pain.

This book doesn't really have a plot, per say. It is just a long accounting of day to day life as a gender non-conforming queer vegan sex worker with fibromyalgia during the HW Bush era. It is never boring and held my attention the entire time.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unselfconscious stream of consciousness, visceral and raw. The narrative jumbles up space and time, jumping from subject to subject, but you can feel the rhythm of the days punctuated by sleepless nights and internet cruising. A scatter brained masterpiece, a litany of revelations from the queer subculture permeating a San Francisco that no longer exists. So inside the gritty tenderloin but there’s a glimmer of romance. Bright friendships and a crystallized beauty penetrating the mundanity of pain and days stretched thin and wild.

[meow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms Mattilda, you are so awesome. Thank you for showing me around San Francisco it was very fun. Sorry you’re feeling bad much of the time.

Love the speed at which this goes, like finding the lingering effects of the last week upon now and riding the momentum into the next work, the next night out, the next tragedy, the next exercise, the next kiss, the next boyfriend, the next dissolution, the next sunstormy day, always endearingly tied to one’s meat envelope and those of others

[Marlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

my favourite MBS book, and the first i read. mattilda's striving, yearning, deeply feeling voice is like no other... performs the repetitious nature of daily living, in particular pain and disappointment, in a way that is never boring or depressing

[Brandon Desiderio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Mattilda. This is a beautiful book that reads like raw poetry. I’ll always like reading her work at this point. Excited to bite into The End of San Francisco later this year.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is to be plunged, five senses searing, into the frenetic, poetic prose universe of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's unique design. No doubt, to share this world is both a privilege and a punishment, faced as we are with the blow-by-blow accounts of the highs and lows of the human body and psyche. The crippling emotional pain of a past tainted by incest is never far from the tremulous outer edges of Sycamore's mind as she spars daily with fibromyalgia and turns tricks for rent money. "Heavy" does not begin to cover it. And yet the book is sprinkled with welcome moments of levity that balloon unexpectedly, and shrink just as quickly.

Like the most restless of sleepless nights, this book is rife with visions and manic streams of consciousness, the narrative a pulsing throb of a heartbeat on the ever-thinner line between awake and asleep, dream and nightmare. The roaches and pigeons and rats are poised to torture or comfort as the situation demands, a resilient army of constant companions. Egocentric in the extreme, the lens of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly keeps a tight focus on Sycamore, though the book would not exist without the backdrop of the San Francisco, and the cast of players that call her home: tweakers, hookers, queens, fags, dykes, johns, all alive and unwell.

This book is as mentally trying to read as it seems to have challenged Sycamore in the writing of it. Chapter breaks and dialogue provide short pit stops on the all-night train of thoughts and ideas that characterize this manic narrative style. Exhausted and wired at once, you have no option but to trail in the shadow of our gender-bending hooker hero(ine). This book is not for the inattentive; too much slips through the cracks. Nor is it for the weak-hearted, unable or unwilling to bear the persistent pain of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. And yet space remains for chances and scraps of relief: love in a craigslist hook-up; sea lions on the pier; a restful night (or day) of sleep; one more hallway, or stretch of sidewalk, just begging to be a runway. Hold out for those moments, if you can.

Review by Kelly Moritz

[Brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reviews on the back jacket of this cover pretty much say exactly what I would write about this book. Awesome reviews from Michelle Tea and the Scissor Sisters. Really, what else could anyone ask for? I definitely see the resemblance to Tea's work, being stream of consciousness, set in SF, and about being down and out and living the street life/party life. And yet it is very separate from Tea's work. Mattilda has her own unique voice and story.

I have to say I had sort of a love/hate relationship with this book. I wanted to stop reading it the whole first half because it felt kind of whiney and self indulgent and rambly without a point. I was also kind of turned off and daunted by how much text was in the box (maybe this is because I love white space on the page). Anyhow, I couldn't actually stop reading it, and by the second half, I was really into and didn't want to stop. I think it just took a little while for the themes to start emerging, and for the repetitiveness of some of the themes/images/thoughts to stick for me.

Like others, I did feel this book in my body and experience it. I love books that are experiences! I also loved loved loved the way Mattilda structured dreams into this book. There are so many moments where reality and dream are blurred and the way it is done is so crafty and yet not gimmicky at all.

Also, all of the key emotional moments are so nice and subtle and I really appreciated that. The way the story about the father is woven into the text is tight.

This book breaks so many stereotypes about sex workers and transvestites and gay culture in general (it does however also perpetuate some stereotypes). Mattilda is a complicated and whole person, not just a sex worker or a fag, and this book pays homage to that. Also, I love the switching around of pronouns throughout.

Tags: Gender Bending, Isolation, Getting By, "The Times" (2000s), Incest, Late-Twenties/Early Thirties, Gay, Sex worker, San Francisco, Chronic Health, Radical Politics, Iraq War, Non-conformity to 9-5 Corporate Mainstream America

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost didn't bother to finish the book. For all the sex and colorful places and characters, it managed to get boring. The author is obviously smart, literate and expressive, and troubled. S/he is also very self-involved, and came across to me as self-righteous and snobby--dismissive of people who don't measure up to her queer and quirky standards. The stream of consciousness got monotonous at times. I like the blurring of gender lines by mixing pronouns. The San Francisco queer vegan activist scene comes across clearly (though I can't comment on all the sex; I know nothing about that). I find that scene frustrating in that they are so very sure of their opinions that they are willing to disrespect anyone who they think is wrong (as in doing confrontational "actions" that get semi-violent). I also find it frustrating how he lives with the roaches, rodents, and fibromyalgia without taking effective steps to improve things--yoga and diet will only go so far with a partying lifestyle and lots of (what sounds like) unsafe sex. All that said, I'm glad I finished reading. The later parts seemed to pull things together somewhat, and upped it from the 2-star rating I would have given for the earlier parts.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great read. Scathing stream-of-consciousness San Francisco from the point of view of Mattilda, a transy faggoty whore with a host of chronic maladies, a sub-standard living situation and surprisingly few chemical dependencies. A paragraph will start out talking about pigeons and rats, and end with sex in a hotel room with someone who smells funny, processing with friends in the middle. Then off to a sex club, then the anti-war protest and hop in a taxi for another trick. The book's actually relentless. For the first hundred pages I clutched it in my hands everywhere I went, riding the manic euphoria, but by the the end I was almost as sick of her problems as she was. This book wore me out. Imagine what it must be like to be Mattilda!

[Yasmin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s brilliant new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, is either about the end of queer politics or its beginning. It’s either a record of how dismal the contemporary gay movement has become with its relentless pursuit of assimilation or about the possibility for a politics that challenges the same...You could leave feeling frightened by the vision of a sexy gay world that pays no heed to the destruction around it. Or you could exult, as I do, in the revelations offered here."

You can read the rest of my review here:

http://www.yasminnair.net/content/mat...

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wavered - I stood in Modern Times for a long time being like "wait for the library or spend the money?" I spent the money because I was drawn to the book and I needed something to read on my way to pussy school in Vegas. A lot of the reviews I've read have been confused or irritated by the form Mattilda chose, or flumoxed by the lack of traditional plot, stream of consciousness speedy yet fibro-fogged narrative voice. I really liked Mattilda's capturing of the disaster and love as we know it of queer "SF, or what remains of it"

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

A kind of stream-of-consciousness affair that I just couldn't warm to I suppose I'm a bit of a traditionalist but I do like a novel to have some sort of beginning middle and end. This was confusing the narrator slips from recounting his day to recounting his dreams and you can't always work out which is which or if anything is even true - like his childhood memories which his family deny. It was certainly a window onto a different world (not one I want to stay in though!) and some of the wordplay was amusing.

[Margaret Killjoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not usually a fan of abstract/cut-up styles of writing, which is probably the only reason this book didn't do better. I saw Mattilda read from this book at Red Emmas, in Baltimore, last December and was pretty blown away by their presentation of it. Anyhow, I really appreciated the book as a window into west coast queer radicalism, sex-work, and romantic entanglements.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

bought this book while in portland over the weekend (at in other words, a radical independent bookshop), excitedly began the first chapter on my red-eye home, and then promptly left it in the seat back pocket. curses! i'm crossing my fingers that jet blue "lost and found" will return it to me ASAP (or just at all), since i'm pretty keen on reading it.

[Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read that Mattilda had just published a new book, I put down my copy of Bitch and walked over and bought it. Just like that, I was so excited. I've just barely started reading it though, it's got a crazy kind of flow and I haven't had the attention span to continue it.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir of the early oughts anti-capitalist genderqueer scene in San Francisco, particularly evocative of the way in which so many people became chronically ill at distressingly young ages.

[Ryry · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this book so much! like i related to it heaps, and i kind of love stream of concious rants, but if your not 100% for stream of conciousness writing [about bein queer, whoring, life and sex] then its probz not the book for you.

[Joey Diamond · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blah I keep trying to get through this but I have to say, reading it just makes me feel anxious and bored. And nothing is happening. Sigh.

[Marlies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to return to the library. Will try again another time.

[Rachele Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fun read about a completely nuts person: one of those books where you can't help but laugh about the pain.