Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly published in September 2008 by City Lights I recently got a chance to talk to Mattilda about the new book. He is also the author of “That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation” and the editor of “Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.”
Hi Mattilda, thanks so much for giving me this interview
But of course!
Your book, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, is one of the most harrowing book I have ever journeyed through. I haven’t finished it yet and to tell you the truth I might not. There are joyous, fun, and empowering moments in it but overall I was in tears as I read it.
There is so much we have in common I think. That’s often where the problem starts with book reviewing. Personal involvement in a story. Whether culturally, emotionally, politically, religiously. One thing I saw was that you, like me, also walk the borderlands. We concern ourselves with alliances, with repairing the world, with the finding of true relationships and decent people who love their neighbors as themselves. As I said, we have so much in common. But wow! We are also different in many ways. As I read I thought, “Uhm, this author and I would probably get along very well on a day-to-day level but I’d probably try to steer clear of political discussions with him.” So, ready to be interviewed by a Black Christian woman who also walks the borderlands.
Absolutely — let's walk the borderlands together!
First of all, I’ve got to say that your story was nicely stream-of-consciousness. A bit on the rhapsodic side sometimes but definitely a book written by a talented author. It really touches the soul. I felt I was in the hands of a very skilled wordsmith. You are one great writer! Clear, accessible, opinionated, poetic. A fiction that feels like a memoir and which, I felt, had much of its author in it – although I kinda hope the cocaine bits wasn’t true.
It's all true, and it's all lies.
(Laughing) I totally understand. There is such thing as “soul” I think and few writers – few that I’ve read lately, anyway—have the gift of getting their soul into a book and touching the readers’ soul. Hey, I’m religious so I pride myself on being able to see “soul” in a work of art. And yet our ideas of what fills the soul veer away in different, often opposite directions.
First of all, your hero is pretty much a revolutionary in search of normalcy, decency and allies. At least I got that impression. I thought he (she) sought for kindness and good and loving open-minded people who are not enslaved to culture, the love of mammon (at the expense of others) and who are free-thinkers. Am I right?
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