Author(s): Marie Darrieussecq; Penny Hueston (translator)

Essay | Medicine | Psychology | Fitzcarraldo Editions

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 writers - 'as if writing were not sleeping' - Ovid, 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 remedy - trying 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 capitalism's 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. Of erased presences, ghosts, endangered species. Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.

Review:

'Marie Darrieussecq invites us on an extended patrol of the corridors of Hotel Insomnia in the company of the ghosts of the famous sleep-deprived, then turns to the story of her own intimate tussle with sleep that will not come. 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

'An exhilarating book that kept me up and got me thinking.'
- Le Canard Enchaine

'A funny, moving, metaphysical and novelistic self-portrait that is also a portrait of our times.'
- Elle

'Sleepless reaches far into our sleepless nights.... The result is a masterful work on the art of sleep.'
- Les Inrockuptibles

'An exciting and poetic work, both an intimate narrative and a meditative essay.'
- Telerama

'A hypnotic, inexhaustible book.'
- Philosophie Magazine

'Sleepless is an amazing text, between prose and document, reflection and quotation, 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 nights.... If 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 author's 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.'
- Diacritik

Author Biography:

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognized 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 and Crossed Lines. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Medicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Liberation and Charlie Hebdo, and is also a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.