Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

I lost sleep. I retraced my steps but sleep wasnt following me. It had broken free and I was wandering through the night without it. The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who cant.

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children dying. Once they leave home, will she finally be able to sleep again

Or, she wonders, will writing this book help her to sleep again

In Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writersas if writing were not sleepingOvid, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec and others (some of whom claim a connection between insomnia and creativity). With her inimitable humour, she describes her dealings with a somnologist and her attempts to find a remedyshe tries all manner of sleeping pills, cannabis, alcohol, bedtime rituals, acupuncture, yoga, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, a gravity blanket and a range of sleep-aid devices.

Darrieussecq considers bedrooms, beds, clinophilia (the tendency to remain in a prone position without sleeping for prolonged periods of time), her need to be alone in bed, those without beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma and capitalisms role in sleeplessness, our constant wakefulness online, the forest as a hypnogogic zone, and how our relationship with animals is connected to our sleep, or lack of it.

Sleep or no sleep: it matters to all of us. Sleepless will awaken you to the otherness of our world, to erased presences, ghosts, endangered species. Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.

Reviews

Sleepless is a feast. Darrieussecq brings a world of personal experience to an examination of insomnia from every possible perspective, from the bodily to the cultural. Her range of reference is extraordinary. The result is intoxicating. * Michael McGirr, author of Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep *
Amid the torrent of publications in the new sleep science, this is the only book I know that concedes to sleep its proper majesty and its own dark poetry. * J. M. Coetzee *
A funny, moving, metaphysical and novelistic self-portrait that is also a portrait of our times. * Elle *
A masterful work on the art of sleep. * Les Inrockuptibles *
An exciting and poetic work, both an intimate narrative and a meditative essay. * Tlrama *
An exhilarating book that kept me up and got me thinking. * Le Canard Enchan *
A personal meditation that opens your eyes, in every sense of the wordBeware: this book may make you lose sleep! * Ouest France *
A hypnotic, inexhaustible book. * Philosophie Magazine *
In this book on insomnia, part essay and part autobiography, Marie Darrieussecq calls on many writers who have suffered from not closing their eyes at night (four o'clock in the morning literature); she lists the techniques she has tried in vain in order to get to sleep, and talks frankly about her addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills. She links her personal case to the global syndrome of our erapermanent internet connection. * Libration *
Marie Darrieussecq opens our eyes, although all she wants to do is close her own eyes, and sleepShe gives us an account of everything to do with insomnia, both the rational and irrational aspects. * Le Journal du Dimanche *
Sleepless is an wonderful book, between prose and document, reflection and quotation, ranging from Kant to the film Alien, from Kafka to Gilles Barbier, from Gabon to the Basque country, and through various hotel rooms occupied by sleepless nightsIf what we read is extremely intimate and personal, everything about us, everything in us, can also be found in these pages. One can read Sleepless to project oneself into an insomniac sister; one can read it for the authors sparkling stories and analyses, for her incredibly smart readings of Kafka and Perec, or for her reflections on capitalism, burn-out and the race for productivity that repudiates everything that does not fit into its master plan. Above all, one can read Sleepless for the staggering object it is. * Diacritik *
What a delight: a book that is erudite, funny, sensitive, moving, forthright, intimate. * Paris-Normandie *

Author Bio

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognised as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby, Crossed Lines and Sleepless. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Mdicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libration and Charlie Hebdo, is a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. Sleepless is her third non-fiction title published by Text. Marie lives in Paris.

mariedarrieussecq.com