The Freezer Door

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

Included in O, the Oprah Magazine‘s list of “The 42 Best LGBTQ Books of 2020.”

“There is much to love here. The pacing of the work, with its often fragmentary form, allows readers to sit with poignant moments for a beat, unpacking a sentence only to return later to unpack it again…There are no questions answered in this book. Instead, questions create further questions, further attempts at rediscovery and at blurring boundaries. Hers is a welcome blurring and, in a culture of relentless demarcation, a necessary one.”
–New York Times Book Review


“The Freezer Door is an aching, playful memoir of vivid desire amid the desperation of midlife disconnection…this book brims with slippery sentences that reach their truths like rivers finding the sea. With an intellect that supersedes social boundaries through sheer insistence, Sycamore chronicles the paradox of inhabiting a fluid life in a rigid world.”
–Washington Post Book World

“I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door. In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone. I so admire its appetite to get down and dirty, to wield non sequitur with grace and power, to ponder the past while sticking with the present, to quest unceasingly. I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty.”
– Maggie Nelson

“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts sex and gender, suffering and gentrification, encounter and solitude, at the center of a book that defies borders and uses language to dive directly into mystery. I admire Sycamore’s gossamer refusal ever to land anywhere definitive; the sentences travel further and further into trauma’s backyard, where complex ideas find a habitat among the simplest formulations. Sycamore, by breathing into the prose, treats the act of bookbuilding as a practice strange and organic as sleeping, walking, bathing, eating. The Freezer Door delves into the philosophy of the sexual meetingplace with a virtually unprecedented aplomb.”
– Wayne Koestenbaum

“The acclaimed queer writer connects the social and economic forces that threaten to freeze out the possibility of deep human connection.”
– Shelf Awareness