A powerful memoir that will speak to anyone interested in race, queerness, class, social action, and the intersectionality of so many more issues. Not an easy read because of the heaviness of its subject matter, but what I most appreciated was the frankness of Mattilda's experience as a white queer social activist and her continuous and inspiring intention to be a part of a cohesive (rather than exclusionary) radical movement.

The complexity of relationships and radical politics is not reduced or softened in this memoir. If you're looking for a narrative or comfy resolution look elsewhere. Many things fall apart in this book. I think it's brave.

read this in like 2013 after I went to hear her read at the Olympia library. She was super bitter and sarcastic and so I was kinda pissed at her for a while but I think the book is a really good cross section of punk queer life and is very real. It is sort of like Michelle Tea’s work in terms of writing about the fucked up things one was part of and did in this self aware way that doesn’t quite excuse them but explains why they seemed okay at the time. She is writing about gentrification and bei...

I only got about a fifth of the way through. Can't say it's not a good book. The writing style is interesting. I just could not get on board with that narrator.

This character is me: “He’d eat a whole pint of Rice Dream and then vomit it back into the container and eat it again.” This book enlivened me as a queer person and helped me understand how identity can be a starting point, not an end.

A lyrical and devastating non-linear memoir. This work reads like memories occur--disjointed, uncensored, by turns cruel, insightful, funny. Not for the faint of heart, this book addresses issues of trauma, activism, and disappointment.

Deja vu: "The dot-com frenzy was in full swing, so I found myself entering buildings without front doors, walking down bare hallways lit by exposed bulbs, to enter moldy $1200-a-month studio apartments facing out into other people's fire escapes. Often I didn't have enough time to wonder if it was possible to live in these dumps, because they were already taken. Or there would be a dozen people with computer jobs, checkbooks in hand, all vying for the manager's or realtor's attention: Is the nei...

this one feels like the san francisco mirror to my own queer journey in l.a. so many similarities, down to the era, like reading myself. beyond that, sycamore's use of language, her radical queerness. just, *swoon.*another one of those reads the universe had a hand in bringing to me...and of course she's published by city lights...

Mattilda is an icon. This memoir should be a must-read for queers, especially all the cis-male queenies who’d benefit from some real engagement with the absurd in the real — or the reality in the absurd. I’m not sure what else to say other than that she’s probably one of my absolute favorite voices, and a real inspirational visionary. This has been my summer of Mattilda, and I’m happy to say it’s not the last of hers I’ll read by a long shot. <3

This book blew me away. I had made it a point to read a few books in a row by women and it wasn't until feeling confused during the first story collected in THE END OF SAN FRANCISCO that I began to suspect the validity or at least the plasticity of pronouns. The story of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is heroic. From incest to hooking to activism to love to fear to drugs to dancing, it was like trying to focus a spotlight on a disco ball and count the stars. The point is it all becomes one life liv...

The stream of consciousness narrative is only intermittently successful. Occasionally there is a brilliant sentence. Overall, however, the reader is expected to enter the narrative on Sycamore's terms; communication is not the goal here. Sycamore is extraordinarily judgemental about everyone; not even friends and lovers and sister-activists can live up to the impossible ideal. A bit of irony during a discussion of "trans men" who are inhabiting traditional masculinity, and who caused Sycamore to...

This book is uncomfortable to read. And its not uncomfortable because its challenging you to think & process in a different or because it written in stream of consciousness. It feels uncomfortable to read this book because many parts come across as though the author is stating she did certain activites such as drugs, sex work, or activist better than those she uses as an example. And if only they would have followed her example than things might have been better.

"Mattilda is a dazzling writer of uncommon truths, a challenging writer who refuses to conform to conventionality. Her agitation is an inspiration." -- Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

indebted to mattilda because i would have not been able to attend my university w/o her student activism lol thank you for your service. but seriously nonfic/fiction/memoir literally anything she writes is raw and beautiful. this is a good book to read about gentrification and a long-gone age of queer communities that make me pine in a very sad, but nostalgic way. read this.

From page 66: "There were things I knew then that I couldn't possibly know now, and there are things I know now that I couldn't possibly know then." That conflict between youthful idealism/naivete and older cynicism/wisdom (c.f. Ferdydurke) runs through this book.I could make this review about how our ships have passed in the night and how we have each negotiated oppositional queer politics and culture in our own way. But that'll have to wait for my own memoir.The book begins and ends with famil...

This book captured so many things and times and feelings. In some ways, reading all of the struggles and losses was comforting. If only because there was someone else out there who had seen and felt the things I have. The drugs, the sex, the idealism, the group dynamics, the highs and lows, the giving but rarely getting, the cruelty, the laughter, the love, the violence, the betrayal, the chronic pain and fatigue, the caring... the needing... I am grateful to have read and been met by this. It h...

some compelling reflections on activism, abuse, and the queer anti-assimilationist struggle. got a little muddled in the internecine politics of Gay Shame, and frankly, whiteness is completely uninterrogated here.

The End of San Francisco manages to hold so much in its hands, while never feeling forced. This book is about loss, dealing with loss, relationships formed through creating a culture worth living in, relationships lost in cultures that went horribly wrong, dealing with incest, accountability, drugs, gentrification; so much. Mattilda has an ability to hold contradictions and conflict together to produce a beautiful degree of tension and emotion. The book is also about cities and spaces that seeme...

As someone who's lived in San Francisco and brushed arms with Mattilda and the entourage of characters in this book, I found it a fascinating "her-story" of queer San Francisco. Beyond that, Mattilda's stream of consciousness and writing style engaged me. Mattilda's awareness and enlightenment is wonderful. And also real, down to earth (or cement) and humble. Definitely a City Light's type of book... expanding and twisting upon the Beats and such works as Keroauc's On The Road or Bukowski's Ham

Sycamore presents his audience with a literature memoir of his young adolescents through a lens of activism, radical queerness, sex work, drugs and explorative growth he embraces. Similar to the template of the Hero's Journey, Sycamore begins his transformation upon dropping out of Brown and venturing out west, swallowing queer politicized life in san francisco during the 90's decade. He comes to full cycle through self-reflection that his attempts of beating his parents of fulfillment of the am...