Sleepless Nights

Sally Rooney: High intelligence and beauty.
Margo Jefferson: Extraordinary

Rediscover a lost American classic in this kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one womans memories, with a new introduction by Eimear McBride.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ...

First published in 1979, Sleepless Nightsis a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwicks experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor. Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and people I have buried. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the eras racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in.

Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed.