I can attest to the accuracy of her telling, both of the deepening desperation through the nights and weeks and months, and the zombie-like trance of dealing with people during the day who have actually slept.
She distinguishes her narrative by presenting it with honesty, and the sense that there’s an end to the vicious cycle (there is).
She also intersperses passages of stories she’s writing, or thinking about writing, and of random-seeming observations and reflections on consciousness and philosophy. For example she disagrees with William James about how life can be conquered with reason and intellect. She dwells for a time on the Parahã tribe in the Amazon, unencroached upon by the modern world. This group has no concept of the past or the future, no words for before or after; the concepts “tomorrow” or “yesterday” are utterly foreign. They never put a dependent clause in a sentence.
Her memoir includes snippets of a story she’s tentatively writing of a man who robs cash machines, calling it “jackpotting” them. She describes her frustrating visits to the doctor—she alternates between thinking she must sound like a crabby child, and feeling rage at being so helpless and living in Britain, where health care can apparently feel like a constant struggle with a vast bureaucracy.
She gets better for a few weeks on sleeping pills, only to quickly relapse. Finally she describes the process of swimming in a lake, where she concentrates on currents and waves, and how to counter them, and how to go with their flow. She finishes by writing about getting over it all through some subtle inevitable, natural process, and how the memory of the interval faded into an unreality.
The Shapeless Unease is vivid, sympathy-inducing in those of us who’ve suffered sleeplessness, and so real that it I worried I might start a spell of insomnia of my own. (I didn’t.) To anyone who’s wondered about the disorder, Harvey’s book is exceedingly honest and accurate, and her odd musings intriguing. Her writing, of course, reinforces what we know about her matchless talent.
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