Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023
While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.
This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.
She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.
In her survey of what she calls “four-in-the-morning literature,” she finds a whole canon of insomniacs, “as if writing were not-sleeping.” Its techniques cannot put her to sleep (she cites Virginia Woolf’s prescription, after an overdose of veronal: “Drink a lot of milk, eat, sleep, and do not write”—a command which could just as easily be read as sleep, which is to say, do not write). For Darrieussecq, writing seems antithetical to sleep. She describes, “at the very moment I was falling asleep, I started to recount, in my head, the drama of our situation in life. . . Instead of sleeping I was recounting and recounting, mentally laying out life in words. . . It was no longer life that was stopping me from sleeping but the twists and turns of its telling.” Sleeping is chased out of the bedroom by a writing mind, but also, and perhaps more importantly, not sleeping can be a gift to a writer in the way it renders the world and its language strange. “Every speaking being is aware that words more or less adhere to the world. But writers are forever struggling with that, because their material is words. In insomnia, writes Mari Akasaka . . . ‘I’d seen words falling to pieces.’ There are a thousand reasons not to sleep, but that’s just one of them.” And yet: “If writing means pushing away the ego in order to make room, is sleeping the same?” Sleeping is writing is not-sleeping is writing, and around again until morning.
Darrieussecq’s writing has the gracefulness of the best essayists and the propulsion of a thriller, detailing the absurdity of sleeplessness and its solutions. She tries chocolate soy milk before bed after reading in Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry that Ezra Blazer, the character based on Philip Roth, did the same to help him sleep. “In short,” she concludes, “Philip Roth has found a female fan.” She is also honest—though perhaps it is not quite right to say clear-eyed—about her dependence on alcohol and sleeping pills: “I’ve been running on barbiturates for almost thirty years. I savor soporifics, I booze on benzodiazepines, I stagnate on sedatives, I’m hypnotic with narcotics.” She is attentive to rhythm in the way of both someone who self-soothes and someone who is driven to delusion by a pop song playing in their head. “Craving preceded by obsession—the two tempos of alcohol dependence,” she writes, and these are also the two tempos of this desperate, desiring, and wondering book.
Obsession, Darriessecq writes, “means death,” and no one obsesses like one up alone at “four o’clock or whatever time in the morning”—but then, too, “to sleep is to die a little: this truism is one of the keys to insomnia.” A friend and fellow non-sleeper tells Darriessecq that he has calculated that by sleeping just four hours a night, “every six days, I was gaining twenty-four waking hours, twenty-four hours of conscious living. . . So, over the forty-one years I’ve been an insomniac, that comes to 3,551.972 days, or 6.731 years that I’ve gained.”
Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips. “Insomnia,” Darrieussecq writes, “has its own news cycle. It occurs absolutely in the present. Only sleepers are kept awake by what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow.” For the sleepless, “[m]eaning is erased, lived time is compressed,” Darrieussecq notes, and this perpetual present is also partially manufactured by the sleeping pills its sufferers subsist on, which can damage short-term memory. “And you can die from those memory lapses,” she writes, explaining the risks of accidental overdoses—a second sleeping pill after a forgotten first. But while insomnia creates the sense of a perpetual present, it is also “first and foremost an experiment in time. It is the place where memory is written, the room containing the rooms of the past.” The insomniac cannot stop time, instead it extends days. The morning offers no relief; insomnia “never leaves you, it is there during the day, it clings to you. . . Nothing time that consumes you nonetheless.”
In the insomniac night, “[t]he world is on the cusp. Time is on hold. We speak to ghosts and spirits.” She doesn’t shy away from the strangeness of sleeplessness, its bleary vision of reality. She quotes a diary entry of Kafka’s, in which he wrote that as he slept, or didn’t, a “small ghost, a child, appeared at the end of the dark corridor. That visit was all that was missing, because if truth be told I was waiting.” This is a “ghost quote,” one Darrieussecq wrote down but can no longer find. For her part, the child hovering on the edges of sleep is her unknown brother (born after his death, she grew up in “a haunted house, obviously”). “Would I,” she wonders, “sleep if I were not haunted by this child? And if others around me weren’t? And what does haunted mean?” Is it, perhaps, another way of saying sleepless?
“There is no sleep when the emptiness is inhabited,” Darrieussecq writes, and she knows that the ghosts of past tragedy and ongoing catastrophe are everywhere. She thinks of Georges Perec, whose family were murdered in the Holocaust, and of his novel A Void, in which, Darrieussecq writes, “[l]ost sleep is the sign of what has been voided” and insomnia is “the hole left by the deaths during the Shoah.” For Darrieussecq, the novel raises the question, “[a]fter such harm to human relationships, how could we sleep?” To sleep after Auschwitz, she seems to suggest (after Adorno), is barbaric. How can one sleep amidst genocide, capitalism, catastrophe? For those who know of global extinctions, of what humans have done and continue to do to each other, sleep “unravels. It is populated with ghosts.”
But for the sleepless, hauntings seep into the waking world the way night fades into day. Darrieussecq is familiar with the “half-asleep, half-awake state” in which one can dream without sleeping. Her maternal grandmother often saw her dead daughter-in-law sitting at the edge of her bed. “Amaxi,” Darrieussecq writes, “was not mad and was not lying. She was ‘in the zone.’ We could choose to follow her, or not. I believed her and I didn’t believe her.” Her paternal grandmother “was in all likelihood psychotic. . . . And she was an insomniac. . . . She talked in circles, or spirals.” Darrieussecq knows that, in the words of “Eduardo Kohn, a forest thinker . . . ‘dreams are not commentaries on the world; they take place in it.’”
Sleeplessness puts its sufferers in touch with the surreal, but also teaches them that this surreality is in the world, not apart from it. Darrieussecq recounts watching from her coronavirus lockdown as Ukrainian firefighters fought the climate change-precipitated fires on the site of the Chernobyl disaster: the firefighters exposed simultaneously to a virus, radiation, and the fire, the rest of the world watching impassively. “I’m trying,” she writes, “to imagine the effect that sentence, out of science fiction, would have had on me as a child.” In her references she displays a particular fondness for science fiction and horror, genres glimpsed through half-closed eyes. This is not because these genres are dreamlike or nightmarish, but precisely because they are not. Science fiction, she writes, is the genre best “able to account for a dislocated reality,” which is the reality of the sleepless and of a sleepless world.
Like all efforts to explain insomnia and solve it, Darrieussecq’s thoughtful tracing of the impact of trauma and terror on sleeplessness doubles back. “‘Real’ insomnia,” she writes, “does not care in the slightest about objective causes.” Among the survivors of genocide she spoke to, some sleep and sleep and others sleep hardly at all. On a reporting trip to a refugee camp, Darrieussecq writes that she “saw their last place of refuge—sleeping bags—soaked in tear gas. . . And there I was, at four in the morning, with my Holiday Inn insomnia.”
Sleepless is a struggle to understand this persistent awakeness, its causes and its causelessness, its lessons and its losses. Darrieussecq wants to know, “where does insomnia come from? From ghosts? From the brain? From a troubled soul? From the world?” In this pursuit, she proceeds like many an insomniac, assigning each question an answer only to find that the question remains unanswered. Almost desperately, she considers a potential book she might write: “Will I manage to sleep the day I have written it?”
Meghan Racklin is a writer and editor. Her work can be found at meghanracklin.com.
*****
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