The history of literature is strewn with bad sleepers. Proust, Kafka, and Hugo are some of the names called upon in Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless to articulate the experiences of minds that keep turning once the lights are out. Darrieussecq is one of the afflicted, and her story of “the appalling consciousness of sleeplessness” and her endless search for a cure are interwoven into an intellectually rich, formally inventive consideration of insomnia; the personal, circumstantial, societal and cultural influences behind it, and how it has been depicted in the arts.

Memoirs on sleeplessness can slip into woe-is-me territory, but not here, as Darrieussecq broadens her gaze to ponder the importance of not only sleep, but the surroundings in which we do it, how we inhabit the world in general, and how a sleep crises may be symptomatic of the discrepancies between our techno-capitalist society and our relationship with nature. Bad sleepers do not necessarily make great writers, and vice versa, but in Sleepless, Darrieussecq shows she a is a great writer, one who is very much awake, and that maybe all those nocturnal hours were not lost after all; she has provided us with a luminous exploration of life after dark.