A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given phenomenon, so that each may illuminate the other. Mellow introspection and anecdotal whimsy are spliced with tidbits of cultural criticism; the prose is meandering and associative rather than linearly expository.
This format can feel a little gimmicky, but in the case of Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia it is apt: the book’s digressive expansiveness and collage-like structure evoke the feeling of lying in bed at night with your thoughts racing –
the freewheeling, seemingly autonomous tripping through utter banality, the night-time regurgitation of daytime crud… that moves like an arm-linked chain of cancan dancers through a demi-wakefulness that exists beyond any conscious control.
A passage on stimulants winds its way back to the political economy of the colonial-era sugar trade; a meditation on the isolation of the insomniac prompts a series of reflections on Robinson Crusoe; a segment on psychoanalytical dream theories examines interpretations of dreams experienced by people living under dictatorships. Elsewhere Benjamin revisits such 19th-century quackeries as Silas Weir Mitchell’s notorious ‘rest cure’, which inspired Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. There are cameos from David Hume, Roberto Bolaño and, inevitably, Freud. In the midst of all this is Benjamin herself, zombified by exhaustion: ‘My head lolls with the effort of keeping myself upright. My eyes are glassed over. I am out of sorts with myself.’
She has tried all manner of remedies, from valerian root and meditation to Temazepam and Nytol. A hypnotic agent called Zopiclone ‘puts you to sleep for six or seven hours, but the next day it’s as if a cat pissed in your mouth’. She finds artificially induced sleep a poor substitute for the real thing — it renders her ‘heavy-limbed, lug-headed, one-dimensional’.
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