#30Authors
is an event started by The Book Wheel that connects readers,
bloggers, and authors. In it, 30 authors review their favorite recent reads on
30 blogs in 30 days. It takes place annually during the month
of September and has been met with incredible support from and
success in the literary community. It has also been turned into an anthology, which is currently available on Amazon and all author proceeds
go to charity. Previous #30Authors contributors include Celeste
Ng, Cynthia Bond, Brian Panowich, and M.O. Walsh. To see this year’s full
line-up, thebookwheelblog.com/30authors or follow along on Twitter @30Authors.
Review of Sleepless Nights
I bought Sleepless Nights on my first trip to
Paris. I was twenty years old, it was February, the sky leaden, and I was
passing hours in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.
It was the title that sold me - I was suffering from a bit of
sleeplessness myself. I consumed the book in two days like it was poetry. Who
is the narrator, from what point in time are they speaking? Who are these women
she shows us, the maids, neighbors, wives, and mistresses? What to make of this
kaleidoscope of landscapes and allegiances? What do these fragments add up
to? I had absolutely no idea what it was about.
I read it twice more in the decade that followed, the last time –
before research for my critical thesis on Hardwick plunged me fully into her
biography - just before my thirtieth birthday. I thought I could read it
quickly in an afternoon, use it to freshen up my own prose. But it was a
different book. I had to put it down every few pages, occasionally setting it
aside for days. Reading some passages felt like walking on broken glass. In a
decade of casual re-reading, I had never understood how sad it was.
I knew nothing about Hardwick – not her intellectual reputation
(formidable), not her volatile marriage to Robert Lowell (infamous), not that
she co-founded the New York Review of Books, not her friendships with Mary
McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and virtually every literary celebrity of the
mid-twentieth century. Hardwick didn’t make it into the women’s canon, maybe
because she wasn’t writing about politics or gender during a politically
charged time. She was known for her unflinching book reviews; her fellow
writers came to fear them. She put out Sleepless Nights, a slim hybrid masterpiece, in
1979, two years after Lowell died. It is part memoir, part collection of
anecdotes, part letters to a friend. It is mostly an extended examination of
the process of turning our lives into art. What I felt when reading was the
sensation of falling.
That vertigo is what happens when we remember. The form of the
book mimics a sleepless night, where scenes are elliptically and unconsciously
connected, where we flutter between what we actually remember and what we
pretend to. The book is connected only by the force of Elizabeth’s voice.
I picked it up again recently. Somehow the narrator Elizabeth is
still removed from Hardwick, despite my knowledge of her life. It stands as
near to an author-less autobiography as one can get, reading like a collage of
women suffering and triumphant. My own readings, the way that the book has
changed in my hands as I have suffered and triumphed, is further proof of how
successful it is as a novel, whatever that word may mean.
About Stephanie (author of Sweetbitter)
Stephanie Danler
is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing
from the New School.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/smdanler
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1MpR1n2
Thank you so much for all of your incredible support of and participation in #30Authors! Despite this being an older book, I've actually never heard of it so I'm looking forward to checking it out (and, of course, Sweetbitter is already on my TBR).
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