Sleepless Nights

Sally Rooney: 'A series of fleeting images and memories. united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose. '. Rediscover a lost American classic: Sleepless Nights. , a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, here reissued with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. I am alone here in New York, no longer a. we. First published in 1979. , Sleepless Nights. is 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 Hardwick's. 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 era's 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.