So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, the second novel by radical queer activist and outrageously snappy dresser Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, comes out this month after several painstaking years in the making. "It’s about when you get to a point in your life and nothing is coming together as you expected," says Sycamore, "and you face the overwhelm of the everyday."
Sycamore has edited several anthologies of writing on queer and gender politics, as well as published two works of gloriously disjointed autobiographical fiction. Like her first novel Pulling Taffy, 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.
"For me what makes it a novel is not necessarily whether the exact events that happened in the book actually happened to me — most of them did," says Sycamore. "Memoir has become that dominant publishing industry buzz word for anything considered a little different. But, as we know, most of those memoirs are just lies. So I’d rather express my truth in fiction than present lies as if they are something that actually happened to me."
