Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of multiple novels and memoirs, including Touching the Art and The Freezer Door. She is also the editor of a wide range of books including Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, and Nobody Passes. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, is the story of a trans woman who grew up during the AIDS crisis, looking back on those years while going through the COVID pandemic in 2020. Both take place during formative points in Terry’s own life, moments when ordinary behavior suddenly means something very different.
Reading about Sycamore’s activism, one often finds phrases like “anti-assimilationist” thrown around for how she writes about gender nonconformity. Those ideas are a part of the novel, in particular adult Terry’s relationship with her two moms, but Terry Dactyl is a work of art above all, one that is epic and personal in equal measure. Just as it toggles between the AIDS pandemic and the COVID pandemic, the book is about the club scene and the art scene. About gender freaks and assimilationist respectability. About New York and Seattle. About activism and acquiescence. About how there is always more than one choice. Terry Dactyl is a book that understands that family and friendship change over time in unpredictable ways, that we are shaped by and tethered to the past in inescapable ways, and that survival can mean many things.
It is a book about queer joy and possibility that got me emotional when reading it, and got us both emotional talking about it. We spoke by phone about how we deal with the contradictions of our lives, club culture, and how no matter what our childhoods were like, they’re always normal to us.
Alex Dueben: Where did the book begin? How do you typically work as far as writing fiction?
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: It began with the character. It was in 2020 or 2021 and I was going on a lot of walks. Somewhere at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic I just thought of this character and I kept obsessing. I would find this house and I’d think, okay, that’s where Terry Dactyl grew up. Or I would imagine different scenarios. I was still finishing Touching the Art. I was like, I can’t work on this now, so it just kept spinning in my head for months and went in all these different directions. I started thinking about things that I wanted to include in Terry Dactyl’s life. That’s where it started. Because I had so much in my head when I started writing, the process was very organic. What ended up on the page wasn’t necessarily what was in my head, but it would come from that, I had all the background information.
AD: It’s interesting that it began with Seattle and was so place-based. She spends the first half of the book in New York before moving back to Seattle during Covid.
I wanted to show the contradictions of the club world, of the art world, of survival.
MBS: The first half of the book is looking back, so it’s in past tense. It’s 2020 and Terry has been working at this gallery in New York for more than twenty years. During Covid lockdown in New York, she’s ruminating on her formative moments. I wrote it in the order that it’s written. I think my writing in general is very place-based. I want that sensory aspect, that multi-dimensionality of place, to come through in the writing.
AD: Terry is this club kid and uses a lot of drugs and partying.
MBS: Terry is living in the reverse reality of club culture where everything takes place at night. Also in the reality of: You create your own self on your own terms. Her world for about fifteen years from the early ‘90s on is fueled by drugs—her immersion in drug culture and club culture and the pageantry of getting dressed up and going out. Also in this chosen family of gender freaks who are living outside of conventional norms of gender and sexuality and refusing the terms of the nine-to-five world. Even though she ends up working in a gallery, to do that she has to stay up all night in order to get to work. It becomes the continuation of her nightlife during the daytime.
AD: I wish the novel had more scenes between Terry and Sabine [the owner of the gallery where Terry works] because they understand each other and don’t understand each other in a way that was very interesting.
MBS: I always love when people say they want more of something because that means that I’ve succeeded. I think that relationship is a really interesting one because here’s this art world insider. She’s a Rothschild who changed her name to Roth so that no one would know she was a Rothschild, and therefore everyone knows her as the Rothschild who changed her name. She’s been in this art world for so long and has played by the rules, but is ready to do something else. She offers Terry a structure that allows her to play and create these really over the top shows that become the toast of the art world almost accidentally. Accidentally to Terry, not accidentally for Sabine.
What Terry knows about is club culture. She knows about getting dressed up and creating some outfit that is so mesmerizing and scary that you can’t possibly avoid being mesmerized. She’s applying that skill to the art world by bringing club kids who also have these wacky ideas and allowing them space to create. The first show, which she calls Club Kid Diaspora, happens when all the clubs are being shut down by Giuliani so she brings the club into the gallery. Instead of white walls, she takes every piece of garbage she can find at the thrift stores and glues it all to the walls. There are these neon installations by another club kid who’s in her circle. There’s a DJ playing essentially a loop, just taking the music and breaking it down to the elements, fracturing the sound into abstraction. Club Kid Diaspora becomes a sensation and then Terry has her own space in the art world.
AD: The book is titled Terry Dactyl, but it’s defined by her relationships with people and about this large community and family over time.
MBS: I think friendship is the defining theme of the book. There are a lot of people that Terry loses. There are a lot of people who die of AIDS or people who disappear or people who abandon her, but there are other friends that remain. Sometimes the ones who remain aren’t the ones you would expect. She has a line where she says sometimes the most selfish people are the most generous. This is a theme in the book, all the contradictions that form a life and can even sustain you.
It’s not a linear narrative—it starts in 1991 on the dance floor at the Limelight; in the next chapter, Terry is in high school in Seattle; the chapter after that, she’s at the gallery in the present-day of the book, which is 2020. It’s moving around very fast, and this is because of panic. Terry’s panic at this new pandemic and all of her formative experiences of growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis and being in these worlds where she’s lost so many people. Even though in reality she’s by herself for so much of the book, so much of it is about those relationships. She’s 47 in the present day so it’s going from childhood to 47. It’s this narrative about a trans girl who survives, and the people around her who also survive, and what happens when you survive.
AD: That idea of who survives and who stays, and that it’s not always who you expect…
There’s a lot of pageantry in the book, a lot of glamour, but there’s always an undercurrent of grief.
MBS: I wanted to show the contradictions of the club world. The contradictions of the art world. The contradictions of survival. And also of friendship. The person who, in the present day, is Terry’s closest friend is Jaysun Jaysin, another club kid. Jaysun ended up moving to Seattle with a boyfriend who got him a job at Amazon. In the book it’s never named, it’s always the Evil Empire. [laughs] Jaysun became the embodiment of bougie gay consumerist culture. At the same time, Jaysun has a critique. It’s complicated. Their relationship is based in the awareness of these contradictions that Jaysun actually flaunts.
AD: It’s a very emotional book, a book where you look at grief in a lot of different, interesting ways. The AIDS assembly at school where Terry starts talking about people she knew who have died. The long scene after Sid dies and you detailed the days that followed when Terry is lost in that sort of numb haze. You have a line that’s specifically about COVID but it describes grief in many ways too: “The way time broke open and closed open and closed and you had to figure out how to do the things you’d always done but with all the risks that before weren’t risks.”
MBS: The book is structured by emotion, emotion is what drives it. That generational aspect that you’re pointing to. Terry grows up in Seattle. Her mothers are dykes, they’re party girls, and all their friends are queens. They have after hours parties at their house when Terry is like three, four, five, six, seven. She wakes up in the middle of the night and goes downstairs and dances with these queens. Then when she’s about 10, 11, 12, 13, all these queens start dying of AIDS. That’s her formation. Because it happens when she’s so young, she doesn’t know anything else.
The assembly you mentioned is when she’s at school and they’re having an AIDS awareness assembly—she thinks an AIDS awareness assembly means talking about all the people you know who died. Everyone else thinks it means how to put a condom on a banana. When she starts talking about all the queens she knows who have died, everyone is shocked. It separates her from everyone else. That separation from the world is a different generational experience than you expect. The experience you expect is the experience of all these dancing queens. Not that of a child in those worlds, realizing she’s a trans girl through her relationships with her mothers, and all these queens. For me, that relational aspect is both generational and about the ways that different kinds of friendships form you. Also the ways that trauma forms you. These larger structural experiences that are very felt. There’s a lot of pageantry in the book, a lot of glamour, but there’s always an undercurrent of grief.
AD: There’s a scene towards the end of the book where one of Terry’s moms says, “Sometimes I regret that we didn’t provide better role models.” Terry says, “Don’t say that—they were perfect. Those were the girls who taught me how to live.” Terry’s other mom says, “but they didn’t live.” It’s just one of the most heartbreaking lines in the book.
I don’t believe in resolution in writing. Our lives might have resolution when we’re dead, but they don’t tend to be resolved before then.
MBS: Thank you. You’re making me emotional. I really wanted that intergenerational experience. Also that experience of addiction. Her mothers are addicts when she is a child. One of them ends up going to rehab. That’s their response to seeing all their friends dying. Terry just grows up with it. It doesn’t bother her to see a bottle of liquor on the table or to see everyone drugged out in the morning because that’s literally what she grows up with. She doesn’t feel like she was ever in danger. The book tracks the mothers’ trajectory too because they were party girls. In a way they were a model for what Terry becomes. Terry as a child realizes that she’s a dyke. Her mothers are like, that’s not possible. [laughs] She’s like, but you taught me. How could you tell me it’s not possible? The mothers response once they get sober is to assimilate into the lesbian and gay power structure.
AD: They become very “respectability politics.”
MBS: Exactly. They become entrenched in that world. It’s a world that Terry does not understand, and doesn’t want to understand. She’s shocked by it. So there is this tension and this different way of experiencing personal history and legacy and the AIDS crisis, and queerness as well, that always is present in their relationship and becomes more pronounced as Terry gets older.
AD: The book opens on the dance floor and closes with Terry dancing. You write these long sentences that run the length of a thought. You wrote it in a way that is all about the constant present that Terry lives in.
MBS: I want the language to shift with the emotion. Dancing is a place of freedom, and a place of escape. For Terry, the dancing at the beginning or in the clubs is fueled by drugs. Later on, it’s Terry really dancing by herself, in the world. Again, as a kind of survival mechanism amidst this new trauma, this new pandemic, where now it’s dangerous to be together. Terry has saved herself by being together and also by being very solitary at different times. Both of those things seem unworkable in the context of this new pandemic. When Terry moves back to Seattle, within a month or two there are the protests after the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. She’s in this world that allows her to self-actualize politically in a way that she did not have access to before because club culture is so depoliticized.
AD: In Terry Dactyl, and I feel this is true in some of your other work, there is this tension between place and community and family and belonging. There’s never really a resolution, but that’s one of those themes that runs through so much of your work.
MBS: I agree. I don’t believe in resolution in writing. It’s something that I’m desperate to find in my life, but in writing, I think resolution often ruins it. Because it doesn’t feel organic. It feels like it’s being imposed by an outside force. I want the writing to really have its own pulse. Our lives might have resolution when we’re dead, but they don’t tend to be resolved before then. [laughs] I want to keep all of the loose ends, all of the questioning, all of the brokenness, all of the searching. Terry is always searching, right? Searching for a way to survive, searching for intimacy, searching for a way we can hold one another, a way to grow in a world that isn’t really offering that. You have to make it. I write into the gaps. I’m not writing into the gaps to close them, I’m writing to open them up more and see how that opens up experience. I think it’s that openness that really allows for everything to come through.
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