A year without sleep: 'At night, I felt feral, like a wild animal'

Samantha Harvey, author of The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Photo / Getty Images

A year without sleep drove Samantha Harvey to the brink of madness, so she wrote her way back. Helen Brown meets her.

"Dust and ashes though I am, I sleep the sleep of angels," runs the opening line of Samantha Harvey's 2018 novel, The Western Wind, a thoughtful historical whodunit that drew comparisons with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Two years later, Harvey is cradling an oat milk coffee in a cosy London café and telling me: "I don't know the person who wrote that line."

Months of chronic insomnia have left the 45-year-old writer looking back on her former self, "a heroic sleeper", as at a distant stranger. In her raw new memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, Harvey transports the reader into the squirming mind of her recent sleeplessness.

We join her on the dark pillow where she condemns herself as "a little fraudster" whose novels would blithely appropriate the experience of insomnia before she yet understood the true depths of its torments. In the lonely anxiety of the night, she unpicks a successful literary career that has seen her clever and compassionate fiction considered for all the major awards, including the Booker, Orange, Baileys and James Tait Black Memorial prizes.

By day a teacher of creative writing at Bath Spa University, at 3am Harvey finds the very idea of writing fiction has become absurd to her. According to the National Institute of Health, roughly 30 per cent of us suffer from disrupted sleep, and about 10 per cent have associated symptoms of daytime functional impairment consistent with a diagnosis of insomnia.

Some 63 per cent of British women and 54 per cent of men struggle at least a few nights per week. But Harvey is a more extreme case, experiencing many nights with no sleep at all and plenty with only a few hours' respite from her increasingly panicky consciousness.

"I think it all began around my 40th birthday," she tells me. "There was anxiety for a few years before the sleeplessness. Then suddenly I was cresting a hill and could see everything on the other side of it very clearly for the first time: the death of my parents, my own decline and death." The wakefulness began – twitchily at first – when Harvey moved to a house by a busy road and found herself disturbed by the traffic.

Things worsened after she became angry at the result of the EU referendum in June 2016. She found herself conflating the two issues and "arguing" about politics with passing cars, vans and lorries. She tried earplugs and "alcohol slightly exceeding the recommended upper range"; neither helped.

Then came the family stuff. In the autumn of 2016, her sister's relationship collapsed. Her father broke his leg and his partner was diagnosed with dementia – another condition Harvey had explored in fiction, in her award-winning debut novel, The Wilderness (2009). And then her cousin Paul died, suddenly and alone, after an epileptic seizure. In the book, she recalls the wailing sound her aunt made at his funeral.

Harvey wonders how Paul, who had travelled the world, managed to live with such verve while she was such a coward herself. He had cycled 112km on the day he died. "Epilepsy could kill him at any time," she writes, but "he dodged it all those times. Yet it caught him that once, and with death that's all it takes."

"He was 41, or 42," she tells me. "About my age. We weren't close as adults, but we had been as children. I felt the shock of how quickly life could be snatched away. I mean, it's nothing new. But sometimes it just catches you: "Oh! We're all going to die!" Sometimes that feels like the most normal thing in the world and other times it punches you in the stomach. You know? That crunch?"

She talks quietly with the wincing caution of a precise, nuanced writer who would rather plant her words carefully in private, not scatter them into my dictaphone. Even though her personal life is the subject of her book, I feel invasive asking her about it: like a child groping for a harvest mouse in its elegant orb of a nest.

63 per cent of British women and 54 per cent of men struggle at least a few nights per week. Photo / 123RF

I'm reminded of a passage in her third novel, Dear Thief, in which Harvey writes of all people as "encroachments" on the lives of others. She knows that anxiety often has its roots in childhood, so we talk about her memories of that time, about how literature made its way into the bones of this working-class girl, raised on Findus Crispy Pancakes and boil-in-the-bag curries.

Harvey was born in 1975, near Maidstone, Kent. Her father was a builder who would soothe her by plaiting her long, blonde hair with his calloused hands. He also installed "a dartboard, a bar and some fake Tudor beams in our living room", says Harvey, and decorated it with china carthorses and a statue of John Wayne. "He basically turned it into a pub."

Harvey's mother worked as a ghostwriter. "I remember her bashing away at our huge old computer for seven to eight hours a day," she says. "She ghostwrote all sorts of things – novels, non-fiction. And she played the piano. I stood around with my sister and we sang the complete Simon and Garfunkel canon." It all sounds rather cosy.

But in her book she recalls the trauma of her parents' divorce, when she was 12. Her father got custody of their "big, bewitching" dog and then left the animal alone in the family home when he met his second wife and moved into her house around the corner. Harvey's account of the abandoned dog, left to howl all day in stale, flea-infested misery, is heartbreaking.

The dog died on a Hallowe'en morning and that evening Harvey was with her father when he went home to find his new wife had thrown his clothes all over their front lawn. So that night, father and daughter traipsed back to the cold, old house with the redundant dog bowl. Despite the sadness, little Harvey imagined her bed "was a rowing boat on a vast night-time sea", and she slept.

"Reading that back," she tells me, "I did wonder if it was too exposing and depressing. I have had lots of good times in my life! But the book does the same thing as a sleepless night. It compresses all the most traumatic experiences of my life into a small space."

The book also expands those personal details into bigger ideas, allowing Harvey to meditate on the nature of time, culture, gender and language. We learn that the French, perversely, describe a sleepless night as a "petite nuit" even though wakefulness makes it feel longer. We also learn that the Pirahã language (spoken in the Brazilian Amazon) has almost no words that describe time, no past or future tense. Does this, Harvey wonders, allow them to live in a perpetual present? Free from past regrets or worries about what the next day might bring?

Writing The Western Wind forced Harvey to ask similar questions about the mindset of her medieval characters. In an online essay, she listed the many causes for fear in the 15th century – "disease, hunger, the weather, fire, penances, the early death of one's children or wife or father, the constant surveillance of God, the arbitrary cruelty of the so-called justice system, the unbanishable dark" – yet concluded that these concrete "worries" might be different from modern "anxiety": a "self-referencing battle with one's own thoughts".

Harvey says she has always had "a worrier's disposition", even as a child. Reading philosophy at York University helped teach her to enjoy thinking. "Philosophy changed my whole life," she says. "It made me feel it was all right to be interested in stuff and ask big questions that didn't have to be religious questions. It helped me build those questions into narratives."

Inspired by two novels in particular – A S Byatt's Still Life and Graham Swift's Waterland – she began writing fiction in her late 20s to explore how the philosophical theory she'd studied would affect complicated people. Her 2012 novel, All is Song, is about a man called William who approaches 21st-century life like Socrates, the Ancient Greek philosopher.

Socrates was executed for questioning everything and Harvey wanted to find out if modern society would be any more or less tolerant of that kind of attitude. Questioning everything certainly wasn't helping Harvey in the small hours. Neither were over-the-counter or prescription medications. She went to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and a sleep clinic.

She tried acupuncture, mindfulness, sleep reduction, gratitude diaries, dietary supplements, abstention from caffeine and sugar and a sleep device emitting alpha, beta and theta waves to mimic the stages of sleep. She made mosaics, learnt French, counted her breaths, chanted in Sanskrit and listened to episodes of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. At night she felt "increasingly feral, like a wild animal", pulling at her hair and howling. During the day she was subdued. She could not write.

But doctors refused to take her agonising condition seriously. "I was spoken to in a way I had never been spoken to before. Doctors were very condescending. I learned that when all the rules and rhythms you've lived by your whole life break down, the world rushes in with new rules: use lavender spray, keep your bedroom cool, don't look at your phone. You are chastised if this bullshit doesn't work. They use the phrase 'sleep hygiene', which suggests that if you can't sleep then you are somehow unhygienic. A dirty sleeper."

Writing The Shapeless Unease began as "a salve" and she admits that "there are parts of it I don't even remember writing". She hadn't planned on publishing it but says that she began to realise that "things were coming out of me in a purer form while I was in that twilight state. There's a real dredging up from the sediment of yourself. The book began to take its own shape. The idea of narrative is so baked into me by now that I instinctively felt for the themes and heard the resonances. To my surprise, it amounted to a music of its own."

The memoir includes conversations with friends and doctors and even a short piece of fiction about a man who loses his wedding ring while stealing banknotes from a cashpoint. The shifts of view, tone and reality perfectly reflect the insomniac's struggle.

"Working at it, in snippets, got me through some really hard times and I thought: maybe there's some solace in there for other people. I don't know. But we live in such a divided, fragmented, garrulous time that it seems anything you can do with some thought and sincerity feels good."

Harvey does not write from the smug perspective of the cured. Sleep still evades her, although she tentatively confirms that "at the moment things are not as bad as they were". She concludes her book with the image of her sleepless phase as a wave, one that rises to the height of two houses, causing her to scream silently as it arcs over her. But the water does not make contact with her skin and she eventually emerges from the liquid tunnel dry as dust and ashes.