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Summary
Summary
"Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author's nighttime demons." -- Kirkus Reviews
In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.
The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from "this generation's Virginia Woolf" ( Telegraph ).
"Captures the essence of fractious emotions--anxiety, fear, grief, rage--in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish." --Sarah Waters, New York Times -bestselling author
"Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about--well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about 'shapeless unease' is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life." -- Daily Mail
"What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country." --Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny
Author Notes
Samantha Harvey is the author of The Wilderness , All Is Song , Dear Thief , and The Western Wind . Her work has been longlisted for the Bailey's Prize and the Man Booker, and finalist for the James Tait Black Award, the Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness won the Betty Trask Award in 2009. She teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
Insomnia is the long night's journey into day, where the repetitive cycles of sleep are reduced to a single, unending interlude that can go on and on - in the case of novelist Samantha Harvey, for 40 or 50 excruciating hours. In a 2018 online essay, which appears to have served as a taster for her new memoir, The Shapeless Unease, she likens sleeplessness to the kind of reflective postmortem that follows the end of a relationship. "What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back?" Not unlike Marina Benjamin's elegant 2018 study, Insomnia, Harvey's examination of her year-long insomnia is an excavation of the emotions that might cause sleeplessness. It's a kind of philosophical detective story strewn with submerged clues. Lying awake at 3am, she circles the shrinking perimeter of her mind for answers, like "a polar bear in its grubby blue-white plastic enclosure with fake icecaps and water that turns out to have no depth". How, Harvey wonders, do you go from 40 years of blissful slumbering to the common but misunderstood condition that doesn't even afford the sufferer the "sad prestige of being unwell"? Clues are there from her book's first pages when she mourns the sudden death of a cousin who suffered from, and succumbed to, epileptic seizures: death came for him; sleep left her. One sleepless night soon after, she's lured, through her computer's search engine, into addressing the stages of her cousin's decomposing corpse, clumsily put back together after the postmortem with his windpipe missing, bacteria feeding on his gut and skin. Heightened thoughts of her own mortality and myriad other candidates for insomnia, including the menopause, are considered as Harvey edges towards a psychological root, which she can't name confidently. But what's the point of being awake, she asks, on permanent amber alert, for no good physical reason? Though a friend tells her that "there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn't exist", Harvey argues that sleep deprivation is a real threat to good health. Fear of not sleeping renews and increases the fear such that it becomes "a vicious circle of Euclidean perfection". Just as much as insomnia, though, The Shapeless Unease is a meditation on the nature of creativity (writing in particular); how it emerges even in the course of a fractured life. Harvey takes comfort from and marvels at lines in poetry such as Philip Larkin's "the million-petalled flower of being here" in The Old Fools for their uncanny, revelatory ability to "knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis". The same is true of the best of Harvey's prose. Her countless aphorisms ("fiction is the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words") are a delight to read. And she has great comedic timing. During a respite from sleeplessness, she is seduced by "the knowledge that I must be dreaming and therefore partly asleep, and with the realisation of this I have the swiftest moment of triumph - I'm asleep! - before waking up". Harvey's inability to sleep plunges her into a vertiginous world. Left alone with recursive thoughts within thoughts, she wonders about the following: why so many TV programmes have the word "secret" in the title; why Larkin's aforementioned poem has a Zen-like reassurance about death ("it's only oblivion"); why she's started writing a story about a David Bowie-loving man who robs a cash machine and loses a wedding ring (the short story works its way into the memoir); why caravans are called things such as Pegasus, Sprite, Unicorn; whether the Pirahã (indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest), who live in the present with no capacity for abstract thought, ever have trouble sleeping; and whether she might have inherited fatal familial insomnia (which is as bad as it sounds). The fragmentary style of the memoir chimes with the temporal nature of Harvey's condition; it is an account of her slippery present life that's suffused with the sense of a timeless fable. The writing slips in and out of the first and third person; sometimes composed from the perspective of sleeplessness as a malevolent protagonist bent on reducing her to a state of learned helplessness. There's no recognised cure for insomnia, but for Harvey swimming comes close. Her reflections on dipping into a lake ("she's like a seed-head that's been scattered - pale, insubstantial, resilient and journeying") have the quality of a lucid dream. At last sleeplessness is interrupted, removing her need for the "blunt, anaesthetised, dreamless, coffin-like oblivion of sleeping pills". The clinical psychologist Rubin Naiman once bemoaned that "sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical". With The Shapeless Unease, Samantha Harvey has reversed that process in ways that are ineffably rewarding.
Kirkus Review
Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author's nighttime demons. In her attempt to make sense of why she can't sleep, Betty Trask Award-winning novelist Harvey meditates, often poetically, on a wide range of topics. Her sleep issues began in the summer of 2016. A few months later, the author had self-diagnosed "possible chronic Post Brexit Insomnia" along with the "existence of persistent panic." She began suffering three or four nights per week of no sleep. She tried everything: sleeping aids, prescription drugs, visits to a CBT sleep clinic, acupuncture, "learning French, making mosaics, playing solitaire, doing jigsaws," watching episodes of Poldark and The Crown, and listening to "an audio edition of Remembrance of Things Past." Eventually, Harvey began to feel "increasingly feral, like a wild animal enduring a cage." She stopped writing and was teaching on zero hours of sleep, and her thoughts fragmented further, a process that she captures with vivid clarity, darkly tinged yet unblurred. The author thought about writing a story about a man who, while robbing a cash machine, loses his wedding ring. It unfurls in sections, floating along in the darkness like quiet waves. "Is the story going anywhere?" Harvey asks herself. Also, is insomnia caused by fear or anxiety? "Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger," she writes. "But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn't a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation." Finally, "one day when you're done with it, it will lose its footing and fall away, and you'll drop each night into sleep without knowing how you once found it impossible." Though the narrative is a highly personal interior monologue, others who have suffered insomnia will find abundant resonance. An exquisitely rendered voyage into the "shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Harvey's insomnia came on accompanied by waves of frustration and sadness. Shortly after she moved, she began to be awakened by the sounds of traffic, and not long after that her anger over the passage of Brexit left her feeling restless. Added to that was a wave of personal losses--the death of her cousin, who was found in his apartment after two days; the separation of her sister and her partner; the dementia diagnosis of her father's partner with dementia--all occurred as she stopped being able to fall, or stay, asleep. But as Harvey makes clear in this masterful and captivating memoir, insomnia is not easily defined by its causes, and it's certainly not easily defeated. At once intensely personal and universal, Harvey's ruminations on the agony of sleepless nights and the way exhaustion ravages every aspect of waking life. Despairing at the useless advice she's given and feeling powerless to solve her severe sleeping problems, Harvey nonetheless finds courage to fight on.
Library Journal Review
The death of her cousin in 2016 was the catalyst for an existential crisis that had novelist Harvey (The Wilderness) continually reflecting on the concept of death and the inevitable dissolution of the physical presence. The thought of her relative in his coffin underground would stimulate rapid heart palpitations and uncontrollable panic, and Harvey began to suffer from insomnia as a result of her anxiety. The desire for sleep, and the denial of it, created feelings of anger, loneliness, despair, and fear. She tried multiple remedies to solve her issues, including medication and therapy, without success. Harvey argues the writing process saved her during this period, providing her with an escape from her thoughts of death and bringing some happiness to her life. VERDICT Recommended for those curious about the creative process and the devastating effects of sleep deprivation. [See Prepub Alert, 11/25/19.]--Gary Medina, El Camino Coll., Torrance, CA
