Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an unstoppable force of writing, activism, and originality. Her latest novel, Terry Dactyl (Coffee House Press, 11/11/25), is a wonderfully and unapologetically queer trip through connection, emotion, and survival. As Terry reflects on her life during the standstill of the pandemic lockdown, we’re introduced to a beautiful mess of an existence from adolescence to adulthood. Through hypnotic stream-of-consciousness prose, we follow our titular character from the 1990s club scene to 2020, from NYC to Seattle, from HIV/AIDS to the COVID pandemic and BLM protests. Throughout Terry’s story, Mattilda doesn’t shy away from the complexities and contradictions of queer life. While there’s community drama, there’s also friendship. While there’s struggle, there’s also hope and grit. Terry Dactyl speaks to our current times while also connecting us to the experiences of the past.

Mattilda was kind enough to sit down with me for an interview about this propulsive and unforgettable novel.

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Milo Todd: I loved this book, Mattilda. There’s so much I enjoyed about it. As a big sucker for voice, that was the first thing that jumped out at me. You bring such wonderful voice to Terry Dactyl, and it’s very much in a stream-of-consciousness style. Did you actually write this in a stream-of-consciousness way, or is it actually meticulous writing disguised as stream-of-consciousness?

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: I love that. Well, I think the voice for Terry Dactyl the character emerged as I was walking around Seattle in 2020, 2021. And so I started obsessively thinking about all the details in her life. But I was finishing another book, my previous book, Touching the Art, then. So I was like, “Well, I can't start that.” So I did that literally for probably 6, 8, 9 months. It was all in my head. And so when I started writing it, it was very organic. I always write for voice and edit anything that gets in the way of that. In this case, I didn't know where I was going exactly, but because of thinking about it for so much, I had this kind of framework in my head. And so when I wrote it, of course, it is stream-of-consciousness.

But I'm a really meticulous editor, so I edited everything over and over and over, and what I'm editing for is what it gets in the way of that voice. I wanted to maintain the kind of spontaneity and unexpected twists and turns of when someone is actually in the moment of the experience.

MT: That’s wonderful. So if I’m hearing you right, you had it planned in your head, but then you let it kind of organically come out, and then edited it to make sure that flow and organic feel stayed.

MBS: I mean, I didn't have the book planned out in my head, I just had the voice and some of the framework. And then as I was writing, it came together.

MT: Ahh, got it. Related to this organic coming together, Terry feels big emotions throughout the book, strong emotions, and it all felt so natural within the context of her life. Was this a difficult mindset to get into for you or was it more of a familiar one? Or perhaps something you didn’t even necessarily plan to happen, but organically came out while you were writing?

MBS: Oh, that's an interesting question. I'm always writing toward vulnerability and toward emotion. I always want that to be coming through. For me, it maintains that intimacy, right? For Terry, the present day of the book is 2020 during lockdown, and Terry is kind of spinning out into all these formative moments of her life. And so the book is structured, in a sense, by how emotion for her is grounding. It allows her…not really to escape, but it's a way of experiencing everything at once. And I think that's what the writing is also aiming for.

MT: And you nail it, you really do. That was the other thing that really came across for me. I loved the amount of emotion that you were able to bring into it, and it felt so real and so raw in the most beautiful way possible.

MBS: Oh, I love that, thank you.

MT: And that somewhat moves into one of my other questions: what inspired you specifically to connect the 1990s with the year of 2020? What spoke to you about putting those two eras together in particular?

MBS: Yeah, so Terry’s raised by lesbian mothers in Seattle. They're kind of party girls, they have these after-hours parties at their house. All their friends are queens, and they're kind of Terry's role models as a young trans girl. And then when she's 10, 11, 12, they all start dying of AIDS, right? And so that is her formation, the generational experience of growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis and internalizing that trauma as part of becoming queer. That’s something that I explore in one of my anthologies, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, and so I was thinking about that generational frame as I was thinking about Terry's character, and also her experience with her mothers and their generational frame, and the way that all of this intergenerational trauma…Terry forms it in a very specific way.

Then, with this new pandemic in 2020, all that trauma comes back into focus, so I wanted to explore that interrelation. People were talking about it in the moment of 2020, but in ways that felt oversimplified, and so I wanted to look at it in all of its nuance.

MT: That resonates so well in Terry Dactyl. It also makes me wonder: did you or do you imagine any adventures that Terry may have had between those two timelines? Like, how do you see her killing time between those two eras of telling her story?

MBS: Oh, interesting. Well, in the first half of the book, she’s spinning through all of her formative moments, so some of them are when she's a kid in Seattle, some of them are when she moved to New York in the early 90s and becomes a club kid, where’s she’s also a drug dealer for quite a long time. You know, living in this world of pageantry and on your own time, where everything starts at 1am. The she accidentally becomes part of the art world, so she's working in a gallery, and does that for more than 20 years. So the book is filled with all the things that come in that entire period of time. And although it spins very fast, and sometimes maybe you don't know exactly where you are located, because that’s her emotional frame of reference in that moment.

MT: I love that. So jumping off the club kid and art world bits, I’m so into Terry’s outfits and fashion sense. I love how you explain her outfits; they’re original and detailed, and yet you make it so easy to visualize them. Were Terry's outfits inspired by anything or anyone in real life?

MBS: Well, in a way, when Terry moved to New York and becomes a club kid, and sort of dressing up and going out and turning it out, that’s a mode of survival. And Terry, unlike a lot of people, keeps hold of that as she gets older, into the present day of the book when she’s in her 40s. It’s not modeled on anyone in particular since I wanted to sort of create her own world.

MT: That makes a lot of sense. So besides Terry, there are plenty of other club kids and loved ones in her life, some that show up in the 2020 scenes, too. Were there any favorite characters or scenes for you? Or on the flip side, any scenes or characters that were particularly difficult to write? Whether that be craft or content or anything? 

MBS: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. As I was writing the book, I was speeding through it because I was trying to get to the protest in Seattle in 2020, which is the second half of the book, after the murders of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But actually, when I thought that part would be really easy because I'm writing about the recent past—and also I was writing this book in Seattle—it turned out that part was the hardest to write. And the earlier parts, the ones that took place on the dance floor in 1991 New York, those parts felt more like I was there when I was writing it. So what surprised me as I was writing it, and especially going back and reading it, was how much is encapsulated in such a short space.

A character I created in some ways to show the epitome of hypocrisy was Jaysun Jaysin, who is one of Terry Dactyl’s club kid friends. They meet in the early 90s. They're in the same little circle that sort of is a chosen family, taking care of one another, and also just, like, losing it and having high drama falling out, like, all the time. And then Jaysun Jaysin becomes an Amazon executive and is the epitome of the most over-the-top, bougie queen. Like getting dressed up in Versace to go to protests, you know? But while I created the character to show some of the hypocrisy, I actually really fell in love with that character while writing. I think it’s like what Terry says at one point: sometimes the most unethical people can be the most reliable.

So Jaysun Jaysin and Terry Dactyl are close friends over many years, but also have this tension I wanted to create about the protests in 2020, which suffused Terry's neighborhood. It's the same neighborhood where she grew up, now this hyper-gentrified Capitol Hill. Terry has radical politics in certain ways, but also lived in an extremely depoliticized world. Club culture, totally depoliticized. The art world, what could be more depoliticized, right? And so the protests become an opportunity for, one, connecting with other people in this moment of racial justice and anti-police organizing, but also, two, it’s a moment of both self-actualization and seeing contradictions within the protests themselves. So I wanted all these contradictory people in this environment and still able to have political engagement with it. I wanted to show the humor, the sort of sassiness and wildness that happened throughout these relationships.

MT: Yeah, absolutely. And once again, I feel you nailed it. The way you're able to show these different relationships in the book was wonderful. You brought in the sincerity, the messiness, and then also the concept of time with these relationships between people. As you grow, or change or don't change, or reminisce, and all of that.

MBS: Oh, thank you. Yeah, and along that line, the book is also about what happens to the people who survive, right? Because there's so many people who die, you know, in Terry's childhood, and then also, when she's in New York in the early 90s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. And so there's a lot of death and a lot of loss. But then in 2020, in that moment of lockdown, I also wanted to show how things were frozen in time, where people are locked in place in a certain way, which brings the mind into overdrive, you know? So showing all of that, both the transformation and the repetition, the specificity of all those emotional states. 

MT: Oh definitely, and you show it well. So moving away from prose for a moment, I wanted to bring up your cover art. It’s so catching and feels so queer to me. I love it. Did you have any say in it? What do you think of your cover?

MBS: Oh, thank you. I love the cover. I always think about the cover a lot for my books. And I do it really early. I'm, like, in my head, “What should this be?” And then I come up with a pretty detailed concept. I came up with a few concepts for Terry Dactyl, specificity about color and the feeling. Then the publisher gave me two initial options, and one of them became the cover. I was just, like, “Woah!” I just felt like the designer, Sarah Schulte, took it all the way there. We talked about some specifics, like the glitter gem pills floating across the cover to be in spot gloss, and I’m like, “They look so good!” I feel like it really conjures the feeling of the book, and I know that Sarah was thinking about the club flyers of that time period, too. It all brings out the nightlife and the excitement and the glamour and the extravagance. But also the fracturedness. So all that coming through the cover, that’s everything for me.

MT: It’s so special when all the elements come together in a cover, especially in a way that stands out. Here’s hoping the cover gets people’s attention at the bookstore once it goes on sale.

MBS: I hope so, too.

MT: So a couple of final questions, classic ones, but is there anything you’re reading right now or anything you recommend? And what’s going on in your writing life right now? Any new projects?

MBS: I just started Hurricane Envy by Sara Jaffe. What I love about this book is it's like you're inside of a song. And sometimes you're trying to get the specificity of the song, so the beat and the rhythm and the tone and the texture. And sometimes you're trying to remember how the song goes, and sometimes you're trying to figure out how this song became your life, or how your life became the song, and maybe there's not even a song there, it's just kind of the beats or the rhythm. There’s a kind of a familiarity and also a feeling of being lost. And I'm interested in the sort of dynamic between those two.

I’m also reading the latest reissue of Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück. I think this is the third edition. First one was ’85, the second one was ’95. He has a way of making gossip and small talk and reading one another that forms a throughline of intimacy that refuses borders, but then also ends up creating them as well. 

I’m currently working on a new anthology, which is called ACT UP Beyond New York: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis. So I’ve been reading all these books about ACT UP or about the AIDS crisis. One of them is Memories That Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz, which he wrote as he was dying of AIDS. It actually came out just before he died. And it includes images and drawings and watercolors as well as the text, and it's very visceral. 

MT: Oh wow, can you talk a little more about your next anthology? Where are you in the process? When can we expect that one to come out?

MBS: Oh, thank you, yes. So right now, I'm in the process of soliciting contributions. So, if anyone out there was involved in an ACT UP chapter other than New York and you want to write about that experience, please reach out.

What I'm trying to do is something like an historical corrective, because there's this notion that ACT UP was only in New York, when actually it was a national and, in some ways, international movement to end the AIDS crisis. I also really want the specificity of people's experiences in each of these different places, so whether someone's writing about ACT UP Milwaukee or ACT UP Los Angeles or, you know, ACT UP Evansville, Indiana. Each chapter had its own specific story, and they're all very different, and so I wanted to put those experiences side by side so we can both remember and learn from all of these struggles that people are engaging with and continue to engage with today. 

MT: That’s wonderful. I’m looking forward to that anthology. Well, that’s it on my end, Mattilda, I really had a lovely time talking with you. Thank you for being so generous with your time and so thoughtful with your answers.

MBS: Thank you. Thank you so much for your support. It's been a great conversation.