Sleepless

The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t.

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later.

In Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers, some of whom claim a connection between insomnia and creativity. With her inimitable humour, she describes her countless attempts to find a remedy, including consulting a somnologist.

Darrieussecq discusses bedrooms, beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma, our wakefulness online, and how our relationship with animals is connected to whether we can sleep.

Sleepless will awaken you to the otherness of our world.

Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognised as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written more than twenty books. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby, Crossed Lines and Sleepless. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libération and Charlie Hebdo, is a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. Sleepless is her third non-fiction title published by Text. Marie lives in Paris.

mariedarrieussecq.com

Penny Hueston’s translations from French include novels by Patrick Modiano (Little Jewel), Emmanuelle Pagano (One Day I’ll Tell You Everything), Sarah Cohen-Scali (Max) and Raphaël Jerusalmy (Evacuation). She has translated seven books by Marie Darrieussecq and has been shortlisted for the JQ-Wingate Prize, the Scott Moncrief Prize, and twice for the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize. She was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.

‘Amid the torrent of publications in the new sleep science, this is the only book I know that concedes to sleep its proper majesty and its own dark poetry.’ J. M. Coetzee

‘Sleepless is a feast. Darrieussecq brings a world of personal experience to an examination of insomnia from every possible perspective, from the bodily to the cultural. Her range of reference is extraordinary. The result is intoxicating.’ Michael McGirr, author of Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep

‘A funny, moving, metaphysical and novelistic self-portrait that is also a portrait of our times.’ Elle