A review by Barbara Purcell

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is a thoughtful, lyrical analysis on hookups, hegemony, and the myth of the American city. In her latest book, cruising culture features as prominently as colonialism; gentrification as much as gender identity.  

The Freezer Door mostly reads as a memoir, save for the ice cube and ice cube tray presented as characters in deep conversation throughout. But even in a deep freeze, Sycamore’s observations about toxic masculinity, queer culture, fake relationships, and real estate are a hot knife through butter. 

The book is primarily set in Seattle, and much time is spent in Volunteer Park, where Mattilda, a genderqueer 40-something, revels in her encounters with strangers and lovers, trading intimacy for intensity, in the bliss of the dark. Bodies against bark or bodies pressing into the cool earth—Sycamore pays as much attention to nature as whatever is being nurtured in that moment.

Even in a deep freeze, Sycamore’s observations about toxic masculinity, queer culture, fake relationships, and real estate are a hot knife through butter. 

Volunteer Park is named in honor of the volunteers of the Spanish-American War: colonialism is always there, she points out, even among the trees. In a way, the author also feels colonized; not just by white heteronormative American culture encroaching on her city, but by the city’s male-socialized queer scene:  “Every gay bar is an accidental comedy routine,” she muses, in the hope that tyranny of masculinity, and the masculinity of gay culture, and therefore the tyranny of gay culture, doesn’t overthrow her own existence in those smoke-filled spaces. 

Sycamore is very clear about the trauma brought on by “mandatory masculinity,” starting with her abusive father and stopping somewhere short of pretending to be happy during Pride. Feminism, veganism, and a certain gentleness about Seattle (after leaving San Francisco for a third time), assist in her quest to feel safe, and more embodied. 

A body which has been hijacked by norms and sanctions and an exquisitely delicate digestive system: chronic pain and discomfort and dietary issues speak to a possible gluten intolerance, but certainly a societal intolerance.

“I feel like my body will never have a home,” she writes early on, though home seems more about feeling intact than finding a physical space. Home and belonging are major themes in this book. San Francisco felt like home twice, she recalls, and New York could have been home, but only after she left. Boston never felt like home. Her new city is a distinct possibility, but only if gentrification doesn’t kill it first.

According to Sycamore, Seattle is the fastest growing city in the U.S. though its urban explosion is more like a suburban implosion, a drab destination for the wealthy and soon-to-be wealthy. What is the point, she asks: the city has simply become another desiccated landscape where art and ideas have been razed to make way for high-end condos. 

But the myth of the city is also the myth of nostalgia, and Sycamore boldly takes on Patti Smith as one of its false prophets, whose best-selling memoir Just Kids is often hailed as a tribute to New York City’s lost edge. Sycamore lovingly takes that hot knife through butter by arguing Smith wasn’t an artist who happened upon something hip, but a hustler who clawed her way into a star-studded scene. 

Sycamore’s sociological skewering is spot on, particularly when it stings the most. 

loneliness is the most beautifully detailed analysis

With urbanization comes atomization; loneliness is the most beautifully detailed analysis in The Freezer Door. Friendship is as elusive as love, since one typically gets switched out for the other. Or the other simply never existed. Why is it wrong to want an actual connection, Sycamore ponders.

We see this in Mattilda’s friendship with Adrian, whose flakiness lets her down even as she brushes it off. Or Alyssa, who bails when their weekly hangouts become too much of a burden. As well as Brian, who lets months go by without a word—even though he walks by her block every day with his dog.

“Don’t tell anyone, but I just looked on craigslist missed connections,” she writes. “When you lack the energy to find the alternatives because you’re so exhausted by the lack of alternatives.”

The prognosis is even worse when it comes to romance. Swapping phone numbers is the stuff of dreams. Even when dreams come true, everybody prefers to text. Phone calls are forbidden. And voicemail is an act of love.

“When did I start relying on unreliable people?” she laments. 

And then there is the ice cube, a hopeless romantic, and the ice cube tray, more of a pragmatist, clinging to each other in the cold dark. The ice cube, so sweet and vulnerable, has so many questions about the world; the tray tells it like it is. 

What is it like to gamble, inquires the ice cube, to which the tray flatly replies, open the freezer door. 

I am happy for their presence in this otherwise autobiographical account. Even as the ice cube struggles to stay intact in a city where it is infamously difficult to make new friends, a phenomenon called the Seattle freeze.

Mattilda isn’t vexed by her city exclusively; more so the growing disconnect in every city: “people don’t come to cities for that surprising interaction anymore, they just want to redraw the borders from the places they aren’t even escaping.” 

The streets of Seattle become internalized in her own thought process and cultural critiques. Sycamore never wastes time with either/or opinions; she continually crafts passages which invert words and play with their meaning until they are neither or both. 

“Without feminism there would be no queer, but without queer there would be no feminism, at least not for queers like me.”

These observations are well-placed tangents of the transitive property (if A=B and B=C then A=C), creating circuitous associations that eliminate any need for the binary. 

Sycamore’s narrative elegantly calls out urban conformity, social isolation, and the silent dullness taking over daily life. “Who invented the refrigerator, asks the ice cube. Someone who doesn't like us, says the ice cube tray.” The Freezer Door invites us in from the cold.  

November 2020