The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping Samantha Harvey (Zoom Meeting 23 October 2020)

The Lit. Soc. delighted once again in welcoming Samantha Harvey, albeit on this occasion as a Zoom mediated apparition, who elucidated the process which yielded her latest book  The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She mapped the battlefield of her years-long struggle with insomnia, explaining how this generated a tortured creative process resulting in her  latest  book, which veered dramatically away from the course set by her earlier works.  

She opened with the first of several  readings from Shapeless Unease and detailed her encounter with unsolicited, nocturnal wakefulness and revealed how intimidating the prospect of “the yawning expanse of a night awake” was.   Linking Sleep and Death, a recurring pairing through the talk, she confessed how in the restless throes of insomnia she was haunted by an image of herself as the reluctant centrepiece of groups assembled in medieval death-bed scenes. The evening started to assume the form of a case presentation by some late Victorian medical luminary theatrically unveiling a patient’s inner torments to an audience of medical students, junior doctors and speculative, intelligent laymen. On this occasion the normal denoument in which the professor, exuding Olympian detachment and an assured serenity, pulls the rabbit of  diagnosis from his top hat and moves on to the morale boosting topic of treatment failed to materialise and Samantha remained mentally embattled.

In the absence of a treatable cause and a therapeutic silver bullet, Samantha’s intractable guerrilla war with insomnia dragged on, draining but devoid of any dramatic focus or likely resolution. It might have started with domestic anxieties but precise recollection was proving difficult. GP consultations resulted in a strained relationship and a refractory malaise. Discussions with a Christian friend and scrutinising her situation through the prism of religion only increased nervous tension and feelings of vulnerability. Driven in desperation to the wild side, she found cold water swimming – particularly that initial immersion of head and face – produced a transient, pleasing distraction but no cure. Writing in her customary, conventional style proved an unattainable objective; she could not maintain the narrative arc for a novel but found some solace  in an intimate, self - searching  approach. Her output was fragmented; some of the shards identified with an indigenous Amazonian tribe, others managed to embed a complete and  coherent short story in the body of her text while the rest were elements from her autobiography. She became absorbed by the nature and structure of this new work and the possible well springs of her new Muse – a distillation of  multiple conversations with herself, a veiled truth- telling exercise?  Was all this mental thrashing about sucking her down into psychological quicksand – denied dreams now; had writing become a way to process her subconscious?  Uninvited images from these wakeful vigils were incorporated into her text.  Startling conclusions ricocheted round her cranial vault; the mind was a prison, love was the escape of the self from the self and could proliferate.  She found she wrote easily, writing  “helped”;  this last book completed in 4 months as against her previous average of 2-3 years   

The memoir of this  anguished internal reflection was coaxed from her by her publisher with a view to printing it as a magazine article but the plan was  changed to marketing it as a book. But what had she written?  Self-indulgence?  Self-help?  Female auto – fiction? Psycho-masochistic trauma porn?  Where were the boundaries these days between fiction and non-fiction?  Whatever others say, Harvey is convinced the book is genuine and is prepared to stand by it. 

The audience almost palpably ached for a happy ending – the serial long dark nights of the soul would end and Joy would "cometh in the morning".  Reality was more prosaic; Samantha remained a martyr to insomnia but could  manage it and her expectations better. She quotes from Macbeth and reveals she knows what she is missing   

……….the innocent sleep

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.        

Resignation has proven a sturdy carapace – others’ judgement of her work intrigues rather than enrages, she accepts she cannot control the book’s journey post-publication,  politics is viewed with detached equanimity even if alloyed with disappointment. 

A lively Q&A session indicated that the Winchelsea audience was fully engaged with this highly original foray into experimental writing. 

William Doherty