Reading the concept of this book I was feeling anxious at the idea of reading about someone suffering from an extreme lack of sleep. But this was very engaging and funny. It was artfully done.

A quick read, as fascinating as its author. I'm a fan of stream-of-consciousness writing, so this one may not be for everyone, but there were so many moments of beauty throughout.

Thanks to Grove Press and NetGalley for the e-copy.
DNF at 10%
An overwhelming stream-of-consciousness anxiety spiral about grief and death and decaying.

A short but powerful read. Harvey shares her experience of her ‘year of not sleeping’ interlaced with childhood memories, reflections on her life, her efforts to seek treatment and the creative process. The lonely death of her cousin echoes throughout the text.. Honest and insightful, a unique invitation to share the author’s journey. Highly recommended.

My sole response to reaching the end of Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease was gratitude, not to Harvey, but to reaching the end and not giving up. It was a long, difficult slog, but I made it, sheer stubbornness propelling me forward to its vague conclusion. It’s not a terrible book, not by litfic, and not memfic, standards: it has the requisite lyrical prose, occasional, brilliant insight, only to lapse into lyrical existential-babble that hopes to dissolve the self, or digressive, tangential passages, never coming together with what came before, or what comes after.

Initially, I was drawn to the topic, but driven away by the style. As someone who has experienced bouts of insomnia, one in particular, I’d say, debilitating, and is an obsessive lover of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the greatest account of insomnias ever written, I wanted to read Harvey’s memoir. It started out great: Harvey, a regular sleeper pre-year-of-not-sleeping, recounts the incident at the heart of her not-sleeping: her cousin’s death. My understanding, and who knows, given the impenetrable style, I may be wrong, is that Harvey’s insomnia is linked to an existential dread of death, triggered by her cousin’s loss: “my cousin’s death has invited all deaths”.

Her analysis of her problem was insightful and compelling. Her initial scene-setting an echo of every insomniac’s experience: “Into bed and lie down. Head goes on pillow. And with the light out, here they come, all of them, the holy and the horrifying; here they are.” Yes, “for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come”. In this pandemic year, goodness knows, no one sleeps well. At first I did, well and deep, released from the worries of work, which is the only thing that keeps me awake; when the world “opened up” again, ugh, the early morning wake-up, with the whirring mind, started up again. But Harvey’s sleeplessness cannot bear comparison: she didn’t sleep for days, weeks, months. And her initial descriptions of it are compelling and fascinating. But not too long after the first pages, it began: “the desire for sleep is also the denial of it”. The thing that sent me away from contemporary writing to genre fiction and nonfiction (which this is and isn’t, more of that later): the statement that isn’t a statement except insofar as it states the obvious. But I stuck it through to the end, because it’s a short book, “novella” length, and skimmed the parts where Harvey tells a fictional account of a man who robs ATMs because he loves his wife and wants to offer her money. I never figured out what this had to do with her horrific insomnia. And it is horrific and I feel terrible for her and I hope she can sleep like a baby for years and years, but I’m glad not to be in her experience, head, and prose anymore.

Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease is published by Grove. It was released in May and you may find it at your preferred vendors. I received an e-galley from Grove, via Netgalley.

Relentless and Uneasy

Samantha Harvey’s stream of conscious writing put me to sleep so I could not read her memoir The Restless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping anywhere other than bed, oh but the guilt of being lulled to slumber by her endless awareness of staying awake long into the night. Her writing captures all of the many sometimes weighty, sometimes minor as a breath thoughts that fly through or lie down in her mind when she should be sleeping. She shares rough patches from her childhood, discussions with her doctor, bits of fiction she’s working on, thoughts of death: “If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. that’s a thought we spend too cheaply. Live each day as if it’s your last, and then we don’t. everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.” (I don’t know if her random capitalization is purposeful because I read this book on a Kindle, but it’s annoying.)

She writes about her worry and anxiety: “I see all of this as indulgent, self-centered and a little mad.” She’s not wrong, but she was right to think she could write a whole book about the experience of not sleeping and she writes equally beautiful about sleeping too: “Rest awaits. the relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. there’s nothing for you to do or to work out.”

Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/

ent. Harvey plays with perspective in a way that I found inappropriate for non-fiction but that might have worked better in a novel; for example she imagines in great detail the thoughts one of her doctors might have to suit her narrative and I could not get on board with it (I don’t even want to imagine what her point was when she compared a homeless person to a bin bag and imagined their thoughts that she assumed would be filled with self-loathing).

Content warning: death of a loved one, death of a pet, insomnia, suicidal idolation, divorce

Deeply moving and evocative, Samantha Harvey's book about insomnia is a curious mix of personal memoir and flash fiction braided together with expert narration. Filled with breathtaking details on Harvey's struggles with sleeplessness, the book is contemplative and at times even philosophical, yet easy to read and empathise with. Whilst on the subject, Harvey touches upon something like stigma (and exasperation), insomnia seems to evoke in doctors who are unable to help her with either medication or otherwise. The physical unease of her sleeplessness that sometimes lasts for a whole week, described with the help of illuminating metaphors, makes the book one of the emotionally powerful memoirs to be released this year.

The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey is the author’s memoir of her battle with insomnia. Having never had problems with sleeping until her early 40s, she tried everything from drugs to sleep clinics to acupuncture with limited or no success. Living on a busy main road, anger at the result of the EU referendum, the death of her cousin, memories of traumatic events in her past and the beginning of the menopause further exacerbated the problem. The title is fitting - the book itself is shapeless and baggy, an uneasy and disjointed stream of consciousness which blends memoir, flash fiction and essay. Harvey captures the frustrating and unsatisfying nature of insomnia very well and I hope that writing the book was a cathartic experience for her, although I think ‘The Shapeless Unease’ might have worked better as an extended essay without the flash fiction elements.

wonderfully written, unputdownable, utterly fascinated until the very end. Have been hand selling since it arrived in store.

Having had periods of insomnia, I thought this would be an interesting and relatable read. However, this was not what I expected as the stream of consciousness worrying style just didn't gel with me.

I LOVED this one. Easy to read, interesting, and a really great story. I'd read further books by the author. I'm rating it 4.5/5 stars.

This memoir of not-sleeping is stylistically similar to Jenny Offill, Pond, Sleepless Nights, Speedboat, etc. -- connected fragments of reflections and some longer meditations. For me, the central thread (insomnia) connecting the reflections (anxiety disorders, politics, being a writer, the human condition) worked, as well as the quality of the writing. Thanks @groveatlantic and @netgalley for the e-ARC.

I have sleep issues. The CVD-19 quarantine has only made them worse. I thought this book written by an award-winning author about her own struggles would provide, if not answers, at least some comfort. Let me tell you, it did not. It was like being pushed headfirst into someone else’s nightmare. It was all I could do to extricate myself before going mad myself. Please heed my warning. This is not for the faint of heart.
I received a copy of this from Netgalley.com for an honest review, and that Is what I am writing.

Insomnia. 'A state of longing.' That *other* new book on the midlife crisis-slash-epidemic of insomnia among Gen X women was interesting but for firsthand sufferers, it's rather macro and not particularly helpful. I felt at a distance from it, like a case study under glass. So: instead I highly recommend Samantha Harvey’s forthcoming extreme sleep deprivation memoir THE SHAPELESS UNEASE. It's spectacular. Meandering existential meditations on memory and creativity and life, with an inventive mosaic structure as fragmentary as sleeplessness itself. The language, too, is exquisite. A solace to reach for in the deep black of night.

The Shapeless Unease is a stream-of-consciousness retrospective on a year of sleeplessness by Samantha Harvey. Released 22nd May 2020 by Grove Atlantic, it's 192 pages and available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.

If this had just been a flat personal recollection of a year of insomnia (with recipes and a subchapter on how to increase melatonin), it wouldn't have affected me nearly so much. The book's pace is irregular and moves with a jerky rhythm which is edgy and anxious. The author writes with devastating simpicity about the sudden loss of a family member (a cousin with epilepsy) and her subsequent difficulty with anxiety, loss of sleep, emotional changes, and the devastating far-reaching effects of sleep deprivation on her life.

The writing is poetic, sharp, philosophical, insightful, and sometimes terrifying. It affected me deeply, so much that I am seeing out her other work. Possibly worth noting for American readers, the writing uses British spelling and vernacular. It didn't distract me, and certainly shouldn't prove cumbersome for the majority of readers. She's such a very gifted author and worth seeking out. Her writing is sublime.

Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Sadly, this is the first book In many years that I didn’t finish. The concept was unique and the writing was good but there wasn’t anything to hold my interest or anyone to keep me engaged. The stream of consciousness got tiresome after a few chapters. This book just wasn’t for me.

DNF at 20%. This is not what I was expecting when I requested the book. I was thinking it would be a more straightforward memoir. I should have been clued in by the term "immersive interior monologue" in the blurb. The book is written in a stream of consciousness style. At times it was too abstract and felt way over my head. I have an anxiety disorder and this writing style, combined with the author's obsession with her cousin's death made me very distressed while reading. I suppose that's a sign of great writing, but it didn't work for me. I appreciate the exploration of what happens to one's mind when she can't sleep, but I don't like this. I won't recommend it unless someone is looking for something really abstract.

I've been having trouble sleeping lately myself and thought maybe this book would give some answers on how to deal with that. Uhh - no. Or if there were answers, they were very well hidden in the rambling style of writing. There was a lot of rather disturbing stuff the author wrote about - not a pleasant reading experience.

I gave this book 3 stars because being an insomniac myself, I felt I could've easily written the same book. It was writings and musings of the author and little snippets of her thoughts during the night. I'm sorry, this book just wasn't for me or didn't live up to my expectations, having the same condition myself. Still, it may be a book some people do enjoy. I would've liked to give it a 2.5 but I just feel for the author myself, as I know how terrible insomnia is.


A special thanks to Grove Atlantic Publishing and NetGalley for my ARC copy of this book for my honest opinion.