To sleep or not to sleep – that is the question the French writer Marie Darrieussecq asks in her latest book, which explores the insomnia that has haunted her for 20 years since the birth of her first child. From that date, she writes, it ‘has attached itself to me like a small ghost’.
Darrieussecq is best known for her surreal novel Pig Tales (1996), but Sleepless is an account of her search for a cure to insomnia and the solace she finds in discovering writers such as Franz Kafka (‘the patron saint of insomnia’), Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Haruki Murakami, Aimé Césaire, Jorge Luis Borges and Tchicaya U Tam’si have all suffered from sans sommeil.
Reading about these ‘champions of fatigue’ gives the distinct impression that to sleep soundly is terribly bourgeois. As Roland Barthes said: ‘Insomnia is classier than sleep. Only the tragic hero is an insomniac.’ The ageing Immanuel Kant was ‘an insomniac, besieged by ghosts’ and once cried out: ‘Don’t switch the light off, Célèste… There’s a big fat woman in the room… a horrible big fat woman in black.’
In the quest for alleviation, Darrieussecq has tried it all – gravity blankets, the Alexander Technique, yoga nidra, cranial osteopathy, drinking alcohol and not drinking alcohol – to no avail. She is candid about her battle with wine and how it became her mandragora: ‘I had lost the freedom not to drink.’ She uses literary medicine – ‘I’ve tried metaphors’ – and real medicine: ‘I booze on benzodiazepines.’ Pills work, but attack her short-term memory, echoing Proust, who complained that sleeping pills ‘make holes in my brain’.
Darrieussecq enlists the services of a somnologist, who hooks her up to wires to monitor her sleep.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in