![]() That said, however, the novel still remains too formally and intellectually promiscuous to be consigned either to the cul-de-sac of “auto-fiction” or the imaginative straitjacket of memoir. In real life she spent time with Billie Holiday and, famously, did fall “out of the commonest of plurals” to become “no longer a we” when the poet Robert Lowell left her after 23 years of marriage. As a writer, she did hold a place at the centre of the literary world. ![]() She did move to New York and live in a mariage blanc with a young gay man. While published as a work of fiction, Sleepless Nights contains many verifiably autobiographical elements: Hardwick was born into a large family in Kentucky. This lack of interest in a rigid delineation of form also filters through into the book’s content. For the reader it is this encounter with a formidable mind working hard, mapping the journey from its root consciousness through myriad perceptions and recollections out into the physical world – where it may, or may not, allow itself to be changed by what it finds – which forms the spine of pleasure that holds the fragmented narrative together. The resultant restive narrative is a deep delve into the processes of her thinking as she sleeplessly rolls back and forth across ideas, memories and conclusions. This is a narrator who knows who she is and, pretty much, how she got to be that way. There is no confusion of selfhood or incoherence of purpose. Sleepless Nights – first published in 1979 when its author was 63, renowned and respected as one of the pre-eminent writers in her field – stands in polar opposition to this maternal model of the deserted self and, most particularly, of the deserted female self. Rather, in much the same way that she and her many siblings respond to their mother’s prodigious childbearing by offering up a singularly low birth rate of their own, she simply adopts a fundamentally different approach. Hardwick’s narrator – and fellow Elizabeth – doesn’t fault her mother for this dimly lit sense of self or lack of strongly asserted identity. It was as if she did not know who she was.” It’s an unsentimental, matter-of-fact kind of assessment of a life that, having failed to be the occasion of much self-examination in its possessor, is now dwindling unhindered into a soon-to-be-forgotten past. Within the first few pages of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights the narrator writes of her fondly remembered, now long-deceased mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. ![]()
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