Back to 3am

and not writing an insomnia memoir

August has thrown curveballs, and not good ones, which I suppose is the point of the saying, and so I am back to 3am waking, and 1 and 2 and 4, falling asleep most mornings some time short of 5. I recently learnt this is insomnia. Before learning this I thought insomnia involved staying up all night, a kind of extreme sport involving no sleep at all, but seemingly you tell a health professional about your sleeping, and they tell you what it’s called, while swiftly recommending a sleep clinic. I imagine this clinic to be white walls, white bedding, open windows, a slight breeze. In it, the drawers will close the way ones in expensive kitchens do, silently. There will be no tangled wires in them, no miscellaneous junk jamming them just a tiny bit open. This, I think, is how the clinic will be. I will go to it to sleep. I will sleep. I will wake up and all the curveballs will be lined up nicely. The tedium of this white room, with silent drawers and soft closing doors is exactly the kind of tedium I have been craving. The clinic will not be like this. I have been to enough clinics to know this. In it I will be asked questions, specific things will be recommended, I will be expected to change in return for sleep. Resistant to treatment my medical notes used to say. I sometimes wonder if doctors still see this every time they open my file. How stubborn I am, I used to think, as if that was something to be proud of.

In the normal way of writing things, what would follow next would be a paragraph about the curveballs. About why I’m not sleeping. Perhaps this would become a memoir of insomnia. I have been plagued by sleep problems my whole life. As a child I trained myself to stay awake for most of the night, only falling asleep when the milkman came. After all, the apocalypse is something to look out for, be on the watch, the bible urged, I was not going to be one of the foolish virgins. Hypervigilance is the name I was given for this recently, during another diagnosis. In this sleep memoir, I would tell you about this diagnosis, about a long phone call, about the relief of finally handing over responsibility coupled with the fear of finally handing over responsibility. I would allow myself to be tired on the page, things would turn ragged, reality would bleed a little at the edges, as it does when you’re running on four hours sleep for years at a time. I would tell you about the long intake of breath on the other end of the phone when she asked how long certain symptoms had been going on, and I said I couldn’t remember exactly when they began, when I was seven, maybe, I offer, and then the breath is sucked in, and she pauses to write this down. I would tell you this, somewhere near the beginning, it would be part of the set up, the inciting incident, I’d build a book around it; would there be a mirroring phone call near the end? Would I learn to sleep, would I end up in a white room, with white linen, softly closing drawers? Would it be a room of my own? Would I, in the end, like or despise this tedium? But this is not a sleep memoir. I do not need to answer these questions.

I am telling this then, why? I am telling this because recently in the nights of not sleeping, I have been thinking about how you characterise yourself in memoir. I have also, in the waking working day, been characterising two real women for two different projects, both with incredible legacies and lives. There’s a chance I might be sleeping better if say I was working on one project, they might suggest this at the clinic, I hope not, resistant to treatment. When it comes to writing the dead, I feel more of a responsibility than I do about writing the living. The living can defend themselves. Before, and during writing The Last Days, I made choices about how much I wrote about my children, and I have since written and spoken about the choice I’ve made not to write about them. They’re minors, the issues of consent and privacy are very real, and in a world obsessed with sharing and validation, these issues often become secondary concerns, when they shouldn’t be. Adults are protected by defamation laws, and while those can be difficult to work within from a writer’s perspective, they’re there for a reason; children don’t have these same protections, they probably should. But when it comes to the dead, they can’t defend themselves. This is why it’s important to at least try and get it right, to spend time in archives, in their own writings (these are a gift, if they’re available), to leave your head, agenda and ideas, to inhabit them as fully as is possible, in the same way you leave yourself when you’re writing any character. If you’re writing about someone from the past in the hope to use them as some sort of prop or to further your own point, you’re doing them and your own work, a disservice; it’s about getting under their skin, not them getting under yours. I’m thinking about this in part because I’m working on the projects I am, but also because I’m tutoring for Arvon in October with Alexander Masters, who pieces peoples’ lives together in the most inventive and sensitive ways. We are looking at writing real people, living or dead, in memoir and biography across mediums, and so I’m really thinking about it all the time, or as the course description more eloquently describes it, exploring the art and ethics of creating people from real life.

When I think about writing, I think about making. I find I often call it making. Maybe it’s coming from a textiles background and a childhood of sewing. Maybe it’s also because writing is more tactile than maybe non-writers, or a lot of other writers possibly too, might imagine it is. This sleep memoir I am not writing, or ever going to write, would need built. Already I am talking about the inciting incident, or more easily understood as what kicks the story in motion. Without an inciting incident, there’s only a collection of events. This is why story is underpinned by the mechanics of plot, inciting incidents give the story wheels, and drop the reader into the action, as if on street view. Recently, I often think of story in the same way I think of Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison, a series of works I wrote about in the London Magazine and am writing about and so am almost daily preoccupied by. The Femme Maison I am the most interested in and have learnt the most from is the final one in the series, and being the culmination, is perhaps the one that most effectively carries what she wanted to say. I became fascinated by it at The Woven Child exhibition at The Hayward last year, visiting it so often I was scared I’d have my membership rescinded, was there a tacit etiquette to how often you could visit? Was I exceeding this?

Much of Bourgeois’ life centred around textiles, her later life work marks a return to textiles, as if drawn by a thread, or the action of a stitch - forward and back - or to enact acts of repair, drawing her masculine practice situated around her father, back to her feminine, mother, practice, reuniting them perhaps, ever the child engulfed by the trauma of their separation. Most of these textile pieces have a bodily quality, as all textiles do, it’s what they’re for after all, but hers often assume bodily shapes and are roughly, almost crudely stuffed. But not Femme Maison, its shape is held by the steel armature under the textile pieces, giving it a solidity rare in her textile work. I think of this often when I’m making my own work, where’s the support, what holds it in place? The answer always comes back to the mechanics, to structure and plot, to the ways books are underpinned, before they can ever be layered up. I’m also thinking about this because I’m about to start mentoring a handful of writers. I’ve gone back and forward on this often, am I qualified enough, will I be able to give enough in return, how do I help people add value to their writing practice, am I a charlatan? All very real and relevant questions. But, with a memoir published by Penguin, a forthcoming novel with Orion, an MA in Creative Writing with distinction and the class medal - gathering dust in a drawer that definitely doesn’t close softly - some good bylines, and increasingly exciting/interesting work, maybe I need to quiet the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 am self doubt, and realise, when it comes to making written things, I sort of know what I’m doing now. Maybe, I’ll even learn to sleep soon. White walls, white curtains, a slight breeze…

(and yes, the cover image is Louise Bourgeois drinking a coke, by Herlinde Koelbl, one of my favourite photographs of her, the glee in her eyes.)