{"id":5388,"date":"2020-05-23T20:37:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-23T15:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mymedicplus.com\/news\/?p=5388"},"modified":"2021-03-31T00:53:27","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T19:23:27","slug":"samantha-harveys-the-shapeless-unease-delves-into-the-quotidian-torture-of-insomnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mymedicplus.com\/blog\/samantha-harveys-the-shapeless-unease-delves-into-the-quotidian-torture-of-insomnia\/","title":{"rendered":"Samantha Harvey\u2019s \u2018The Shapeless Unease\u2019 delves into the quotidian torture of insomnia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

source:- washingtonpostcom<\/p>\n

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Insomnia is about chasing the impossible, about lying awake and trying not to focus on the only thing you can think about, occasionally drifting down the slope toward sleep and then \u2014 sensing this! \u2014 jolting awake once more. Like money, sleep functions on a delicate web of trust, and Samantha Harvey\u2019s often brilliant and sometimes frustrating new book anatomizes what happens when we stop believing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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Harvey is a British novelist who has published four novels to critical acclaim but muted sales, and was well on her way to the uncoveted status of writer\u2019s writer when in mid-2016, disaster struck. Moving to a new home on a noisy road, and with her equilibrium unbalanced by anger at the United Kingdom\u2019s vote to leave the European Union, she stopped sleeping.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe Shapeless Unease\u201d is subtitled \u201cA Year of Not Sleeping,\u201d but this is doubly misleading: First, Harvey suffered for more than a year (it was still happening late in 2018, when she published an essay about it); and second, it wasn\u2019t quite not sleeping. Most nights Harvey did sleep, but fitfully, unsatisfactorily, which she deliciously details. The outline will be familiar to anyone who has ever struggled to get to sleep or to get back to sleep: the quantity-surveying (it\u2019s still only two o\u2019clock; I can get four hours\u2019 sleep if I go now), the going-to-bed routine recommended by sleep experts that only serves to emphasize the problem.<\/p>\n

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Harvey conveys the hell of insomnia with the precision and passion of one who has come to know it too well. \u201cThere\u2019s terror when a basic animal need isn\u2019t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens \u2014 you fear life. You no longer want your life, not on these terms.\u201d For her, the body\u2019s last job each night has become the thing she dreads all day, right from the moment she wakes up, or more often doesn\u2019t wake up. \u201cI go up to bed at night, I get beaten up, I come downstairs in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The cause of Harvey\u2019s sleeplessness was plainly anxiety, an inability of the mind to sit still, initiated by Brexit and the upheaval of a new home but then efficiently self-sustaining. She discussed it with her doctor and therapist and reproduces extracts from these circular, combative conversations, where, if you look hard enough, there\u2019s black humor in a champion insomniac being told that it might help if she could learn to relax before bed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When \u201cThe Shapeless Unease\u201d remains focused on its subject, it engages and grips. Harvey complains about the futility of describing the feeling of insomnia, but she does as good a job as you would expect a gifted novelist to at relaying the brain fog, the mind turning in on itself. Her relationship with writing becomes ambiguous: On the one hand, it is impossible (\u201cI sit there and start a sentence and have no idea what word will come next or how I\u2019ll find my way to the end of it\u201d \u2014 wait, that\u2019s not normal?). On the other hand, \u201cwriting has saved my life,\u201d she writes. \u201cI am sane when I write, my nerves settle.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This may explain why so much of the book contains writing that seems to be there purely for its own pleasure. Harvey fills pages with rants about British jingoism, presumably representative of the flailings of the nocturnal mind, but sounding like an op-ed columnist making bricks without straw. She includes a story she wrote during her period of insomnia, about a man who steals vast sums of money from ATMs, which takes up around one-sixth of the book but seems untethered to the subject.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And she includes numerous digressions of tangential relevance: Buddhism, William James on reason, the limitations of language used by the Amazonian Pirah\u00e3 people. There\u2019s no question that these are all beautifully done \u2014 particularly a half-page portrait of Harvey\u2019s deceased cousin \u2014 but the creaks are audible as she tries to link them back to her topic.<\/p>\n

More frustrating still is when she gives us tantalizing glimpses of other material which surely must be relevant to the state of mind feeding her insomnia: her ambivalent relationship to being without children; her childhood with a semiliterate father (\u201cfirst book he ever read was the first book [I] wrote\u201d). And there is nothing on the science of insomnia, nor its cultural history. Harvey does gesture outward a few pages before the end, with discussion of Shakespeare\u2019s references to sleep. But, like finally falling into peaceable slumber at 6 a.m., it\u2019s just too late.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3448,2874,3439,3453,3475],"class_list":["post-5388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-experts-dr-sleep-charts-advise","tag-insomnia","tag-insomnia-difficulty-sleeping","tag-insomnia-risk-factors","tag-samantha-harvey-story"],"yoast_head":"\nSamantha Harvey\u2019s \u2018The Shapeless Unease\u2019 delves into the quotidian torture of insomnia - MyMedicPlus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mymedicplus.com\/blog\/samantha-harveys-the-shapeless-unease-delves-into-the-quotidian-torture-of-insomnia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Samantha Harvey\u2019s \u2018The Shapeless Unease\u2019 delves into the quotidian torture of insomnia - 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