Early in Sleepless, the French writer Marie Darrieussecq states: “The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t.” She falls into the latter category, particularly since the birth of a child 20 years ago. The book began as columns for a weekly magazine in 2017, which Darrieussecq kept up for two years before beginning to write again on the subject in long form. It retains a chatty, intimate tone and bristles with prodigious research, some of which is incidental but always lively. Insomnia has consumed her intellectually and creatively, as well as wreaking occasional havoc on her domestic and family life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many writers suffer from insomnia and many have written about it, including Gide, Plath, Sontag, Dostoevsky, Duras and Borges. Kafka she names as the “patron saint of insomnia”, though she spends more time analysing Proust’s appalling lack of sleep, linked with chronic asthma, which exhausted him. “He had no appetite when he was exhausted, and was incapable of sleeping when he was no longer eating.”
The writer character in his In Search of Lost Time took chloral hydrate, trional, veronal and tetronal, all early sedatives, and sometimes also heroin, Pantopon, datura, hemp, ether, belladonna and valerian. It is likely Proust himself resorted to this impressive pharmacopoeia. Darrieussecq’s is no less so.
Not only has she waged war against her insomnia with sleep rituals, weighted blankets, herbal teas, cranial osteopathy, psychoanalysis, yoga and meditation, afternoon naps and the pursuit of a clear conscience, but she’s also given drugs a fine workout. She lists benzodiazepines, Lemoxil and Stilnox and remarks “Imovane, Atarax, Temesta, Donormyl are my usuals”. She admits to trying cannabis oil, but was “wasted all day”.
Like many insomniacs, she has gone through periods of drinking heavily to bring on sleep. For a time, she was prescribed baclofen, a drug usually prescribed for the spasms of cerebral palsy and also hiccups in some instances, but which may also be used to treat alcohol disorder.
It is alcohol that is often responsible for insomniacs waking at about 4am. This is “liver o’clock”, or what the Germans call “Schnapps o’clock”. The advice to abstain from alcohol is commonly handed out to the sleepless, and the writer is now a teetotaller.
One of the more appealing aspects of the book is the author’s honesty. She has had more than 30 lovers, she tells us, and links the urge to sleep with the urge to eat or have sex. It is a human right, which she discusses later in the book with regard to the “undocumented”, the dismal, unsleeping lives of corralled refugees and boat people.
Before she became a writer – she is well known in France as a novelist, intellectual and translator – Darrieussecq was a psychoanalyst. She owns that psychoanalysis saved her life when she was going through a difficult period, and that she trained in the field to cure herself of clinophilia – the love of reclining in bed but not sleeping. She and her husband have separate beds in separate rooms in order to promote sleep – he is insomniac, too. “Bed is a magical place of one’s own,” she writes. She later notes, with dry humour, “The secret to successful insomnia is to sleep alone and flee any close contact, absolutely avoid others.”
Sleepless is a delight for its wide literary, cultural and historical references, and powerful analysis of the insomniac state. But be warned, this reviewer found it a dangerous book to read in bed. For the few nights it took to consume it, I suffered from insomnia as I never have before.
Sleepless, by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston (Text, $40)
