Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia
Marie Darrieussecq, Penny Hueston (translation)Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the next day, Darrieussecq turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol, pills, & meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical history, psychoanalysis, & her own experience to better understand where insomnia comes from & what it might mean. There are those, she writes, in Rwanda, whose vivid memories of genocide leave them awake & transfixed by complete horror; there is the insomnia of the unhoused, who have nowhere to put their heads down. The hyperconnection of urban professional life transforms her bedroom from a haven to a dormant electrified node. Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation, & criticism, Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation by one of the most daring, inventive novelists writing today.
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Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in the Basque Country, France. A student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she wrote a Ph.D. about autofiction & autobiography in 1997. She has released 20+ books, novels, short stories, biography, theater, non-fiction, & translation. She was a psycho-analyst for a while before turning exclusively to writing. Since her debut bestselling novel Truismes in 1996 (American translation under the title Pig Tales, 1998), she has remained faithful to her French publisher POL. She earned a laureate of the Prix Médicis & of the Prix des Prix (award of awards) in 2013 for her novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Men).