Sleepless Nights

"There are two novels on my list. In terms of literary form and history, one of the interesting things is that Hardwick called it a novel, it was published as a novel, and it is now being written about as a hybrid form – as an early and potent example of what we are now calling experimental, hybrid non-fiction. Why do I think that’s fair? Because from the very beginning, even though she uses her own name, Elizabeth, and gives all kinds of details for those who know something about her life as a critic, and as a wife and widow of Robert Lowell etc. etc, she does so as a novelist – that is, she gives us all kinds of tantalising autobiographical detail but she refuses to privilege that life and those details above, let’s say, the stories of the women in the little hotels in New York in the 1950s, in those semi-genteel, semi-seedy little hotels she was living near; or Billie Holiday, whom she met and was entranced by as a young woman; or a rather difficult vain man who she’s known for years, who we have not seen at any other moment in the book. Suddenly, he appears and becomes the source of musings about ageing, about how men versus women age, about how a particular kind of man negotiates his way through the world of women. So she resists traditional autobiographical means and details except simply to use them as just so many other colours on the palette. Even though Holiday is a legend, she doesn’t, in the landscape of the book, loom over what we might call the minor or bit players. Yes, ‘The Cost of Living’: it’s the singular that implies the plural and goes quite beyond just the self as the constantly central figure. We all use that term to acknowledge our collective everyday struggle as human beings. Yes, I think that’s true – and I entirely agree with that – and yet, at the same time, the humility and the compassion in no way throws sweet clouds over a kind of ruthless precision that she also possesses towards herself and towards others. It’s never the only tone; ruthless precision is one tactic, if you will. And there can also be enormous precision without being ruthless. Is there such a thing as compassionate precision? Yes, there is."

"She is occupying space as a woman, but I would also say she’s occupying the space of her own memory, for which New York is a vessel, or a conduit. To occupy the space of one’s own memory sounds almost axiomatic, and yet I think for a woman it is something quietly radical, because it means, essentially, to take one’s subjectivity seriously. It is a sort of owning of self. I was just reading Joan Didion’s review of Sleepless Nights , and she writes, and this is 1979, “the mysterious and somnambulistic “difference” of being a woman has been, over 35 years, Elizabeth Hardwick’s great subject, the tropic to which she has returned incessantly” and also, “The method of the ‘I’ in Sleepless Nights is in fact that of the anthropologist, of the traveler on watch for the revealing detail: we are provided precise observations of strangers met in the course of the journey, close studies of their rituals”. “You become a New Yorker through being in New York, not through having been born in New York” Sleepless Nights is, or was, an unconventional novel—it’s essayistic, in a way we’re now familiar with. Its descendants are works by Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso and Jenny Offill—these digressive forms that take as their subject the writer’s own subjectivity. That all said, New York is the setting, it’s narrated by a young woman who recently moved to New York. She goes backwards in memory, but she also meets a lot of people. There’s an incidental quality to the book. It’s only quite recently that we’ve made space for the feminine version of the flâneur —the flâneuse —in fact, there’s a book by Lauren Elkin called Flâneuse that I’ve wanted to read since it came out. For a woman to watch and to observe, people get a bit freaked out by that. Woman aren’t really “meant” to stare. Kate, in my book, does a lot of staring at people and things. I think the gaze is always about desire, although not necessarily sexual desire. Looking and wanting have such an interesting, inextricable relationship. We gaze at stuff we want and advertising works by giving us things to look at that we want. Wanting to want things is, sort of, to be alive. Not in the gross, capitalistic sense, but in the humanistic sense. Desire is part of being human. To appraise the world, right? An appraisal is both a form of writing—it’s taking in and digesting—but it is also a realm of desire. Even now, it does seem as though the question of what women want—what we’re meant to want—is fraught in a way that it isn’t for men. I’m talking about normativity, by which I mean established narratives on how we should be. Sheila Heti’s amazing book How Should A Person Be? addresses this, the title is knowingly disingenuous (I think…) because it’s really How Should A Woman Be?"