The shapeless unease: a year of not sleeping
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 3185
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Jonathan Cape
- ISBN
- 9781787332027
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In 2017 I developed severe insomnia, and The Shapeless Unease is a memoir written from the depths of that condition. It is not so much about not sleeping as a simulation of it – a reflexive expression in language, form and structure of how it is to be awake for too long and the hallucinatory effect of sleep deprivation.
Though a memoir, it has no one genre. It is an amalgam of forms told in different registers and voices, each form and register dictated by the experience of the moment in which it was written. As a result, the book contains, among other things, memories and excerpts from my own life, essays, play-like dialogue, fragments of poetry or thought, reflections on the function and meaning of writing, a medical case study and a short story. It is written in first person, second person and third person voices, depending upon whether, in any given section, I am its subject or object – the thing seeing or being seen. This is part of the attempt to capture the disorientation of insomnia and the way it challenges one’s sense of self and sanity.
One of the central contentions in The Shapeless Unease is that the body of knowledge around insomnia in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and other disciplines, though vast, is inadequate in understanding the nature of the problem as it is experienced by the sufferer. The book might provide some insight into this complex condition by trying to conjure it in language – where language is not just words but tone, atmosphere, music and form. The book brings some understanding to the psychological field of insomnia, and some shape to a condition that feels distressingly shapeless and unbounded.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
