Book Preview: Touching the Art

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's new memoir will be released this November.

I wanted to share with readers in preparation for the interview that I’m conducting with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (featured next week on A Poet’s Notebook) a short excerpt from her incredible forthcoming memoir Touching the Art, to be released by Soft Skull in November.

Here’s how the back cover blurb positions the book:

Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Sycamore as a young artist, then disparaged her work as “vulgar” and a “waste of talent” once it became unapologetically queer.

As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys’s paintings and handmade paperbacks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she reaches for Gladys’s place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving

As you might see, this is a book about intergenerations, the origin of art, but also the principal trauma related to queer and trans being: being raised in (and rejected by) the family.

This chapter that has no title (like the rest of the book, as well as The Freezer Door) comes about sixteen pages in, so it’s very much the beginning of the beginning. Content warning: these excerpted pages discuss sexual abuse by a family member and the ensuing stigma of speaking out. Please ignore my pencil marginalia scribbles.