JOHN FLEMINGreviews Wide Awake: a Memoir of InsomniaBy Patricia Morrisroe Sceptre 276pp, £16.99
EYE-OPENING facts about sleep leap like countable sheep in this memoir – an exploration of a dark side of life, the nocturnal afterhours that link sunset and dawn through which most of us feel obliged – by both nature and society – to sleep. Patricia Morrisroe’s premise is that, however soundly you slumber, you should never take sleep for granted. Seeking explanations for her own lifelong insomnia and hopeful of finding a cure, she embarks on a breezy voyage to the end of the night.
The book is comfortably quilted with distilled sociological and scientific research. We learn there are 70 million Americans who struggle to close their eyes, each suffering from one of 80 recognised sleep disorders. Sound sleepers on average get 6.9 hours a night during the week and 7.5 at the weekend. As she flits through Drs-This and Profs-That, she reports on sleeping pills, jet lag, shift work, therapies, dreams and nodding off at the wheel.
Morrisroe writes clearly, lacing her quest to get to the black heart of sleep with mildly grating self-characterisation. Under decorative headings (The House of Punk Sleep, More Dangerous Than Al-Qaeda), she stretches an upbeat and superficial biography.
We get her memories of childhood wakefulness as she stays up to try to glimpse Santa’s reindeer. We get her husband Lee always in the background. Despite navigating dangerously close to mindless lifestyle journalism, the unlikely biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe captures some of the complexity of sleep.
Perhaps her background in magazine writing immures her from baulking at simplifying Freud and Jung in to snappy summaries. But watery generalisations about archetypes and collective unconsciousness are compensated for when she quotes that “dreams have meaning but no purpose”.
A weekend supplement world view is the tool of her light excavation: friends and strangers drift in and out, assisting her in her quest. A friend called Alan advises her on moving house and then dies of a heart attack while asleep. She tends to reduce people to descriptions of their handbags and jangling jewellery. But, ever the lifestyle journalist, she transforms annoying women at night classes into marginally more dignified humans with whom she can empathise.
As a “jaded” critic you may be irritated by Morrisroe’s constant capacity for self-discovery and her luxury of seeking a problem. Yet go a little more gently into the night and this study of insomnia slides down quite easily, its unchallenging prose like warm and frothy Ovaltine.
John Fleming is an Irish Timesjournalist. His fiction writing includes radio plays for BBC and RTÉ
