TERRY DACTYL

“A remarkably grounded look at what it means to be fully alive.”
—Trish Bendix, New York Times Book Review

“[A] shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic… With Terry, Sycamore has crafted an arresting voice, equal parts youthful energy and hard-won wisdom, that swerves from offhanded aphorisms to lyrical images: ‘Yes, the best way to dance is with a broken heart. A dead leaf flying through the air like a butterfly.’ It’s indelible.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“I can’t think of any other American novel that traces the AIDS pandemic to the early months of the COVID pandemic with as much heart, humor, and radical style as Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Terry Dactyl. There’s a cultural amnesia around 2020, a preference to believe it never happened, as if denying memory will protect us from grief. Instead, Sycamore, a longtime activist, editor, and the author of multiple groundbreaking memoirs and novels, chooses to depict the early months of the pandemic with political exuberance and shimmering prose, and we are lucky to have it.”
—Lisa Ko, Electric Literature Recommended Reading

“In what is possibly her most ambitious and memorable novel to date, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore synthesizes the formative grief of the early AIDS crisis with the stark isolation imposed during COVID-19 lockdowns. Absorbing it all, the vivacious club kid Terry Dactyl is an endearing narrator that leaves her indelible mark on both New York City’s art scene and Seattle’s public parks.”
—Dave Wheeler, Publishers Lunch

“In her dynamic new novel, Lambda Literary Award-winning author Sycamore explores joy, grief, and the transcendence of the dance floor… Full of glitter and grit… Sycamore’s prose is fluid and funny, tender and propulsive, as she brings us along on Terry’s journey of love, loss, and finding herself.”
—Rebecca Hopman, Booklist

“Terry Dactyl is a raw, radical and nonlinear journey through a queer life that calls on readers to bear witness to history… a prismatic account of coming-of-age and community resistance.”
—H.D. Vogel, BookPage

“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an unstoppable force of writing, activism, and originality. Her latest novel, Terry Dactyl, is a wonderfully and unapologetically queer trip through connection, emotion, and survival.”
—Milo Todd, Foglifter

“Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a deeply intimate and transcendent novel… Through rich lyrical prose, Terry Dactyl serves as an urgent reminder of what it means to overcome and survive in times of immense turmoil.”
—Andrés Ordorica, The Skinny

“[A] searing excursion into love, loss, friendship, family, and identity.”
—Shelf Awareness

“[Terry Dactyl] is at once a subtle, outrageous, energetic and kaleidoscopic look at queerness, with Sycamore’s trademark energy and high literary style.”
—Veronica Esposito, Xtra Magazine

“The historical novel on acid.  Terry Dactyl, our new emblematic American, has lesbian parents and is born into the AIDS crisis. Terry’s existence—between protesting George Floyd's murder, and chatting about a new cruising app called Sniffies—creates a recognition of social absurdity that Mattilda elevates with her iconoclastic stylish beauty into a work that has as much to say about vulnerability as it does about trees, and about time itself. This is a book about consciousness, art and "getting ready" to be part of a world that will never be ready for you.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity

“Terry Dactyl is the realest fiction I've read in a long time. It's the exact sort of novel we need at this (or any) historical juncture: hilarious, moving and radically political. The writing sparkles. Sycamore has excelled herself and that's saying something.”
—Isabel Waidner, author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

"Terry Dactyl made me cry and made me laugh out loud. It has all the pain and joy, struggle and delight of the lives of those who color outside the lines. It's a book about family and friendship and love and knowing when and how to change your life."
—McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death

"Expansive and confidential, nostalgic and hopeful, Terry Dactyl follows its singular, indelible heroine and her search for meaning and community over the span of several decades, from growing up in the AIDS crisis to the club and art scenes of the 1990s to the isolation of the early COVID pandemic, all through the voice of Sycamore’s piercing, mesmerizing prose. You won’t be able to put it down."
—Lisa Ko, author of Memory Piece