BEST BOOKS ON... INSOMNIA
THe author and TV scriptwriter suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. I THINK the last really good night’s sleep I had was some time in the last century before I had my first child. If I had known that motherhood means waking up every time you hear a creak on the stair, or a fox barking in the street, I might have waited a few years.
I remember the great writer and barrister John Mortimer saying teenagers should be allowed to sleep as long as they want for as many years as possible, because in the end everyone wakes up at 5 am feeling lonely and scared.
Sleep is the first thing to go when I feel anxious or stressed and, of course, the lack of sleep means the anxiety and worry only gets worse. I force myself now to leave my phone downstairs so I can’t go online if I wake up, and if I can’t go back to sleep I reach for a soothing book — the more familiar the better.
P G Wodehouse’s The Code of The Woosters, which I have read a hundred times, is just right — funny enough to cheer me up, but not exciting enough to keep me awake. But the best fictional account of what it is like to be chronically sleep-deprived is in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
Walter Hartright, a young artist, finds himself unable to sleep, so he goes for a walk across Hampstead Heath. On the way he meets a woman in terrible distress who is dressed all in white. As you read this encounter you wonder whether the woman in white is real or whether she is an insomnia-induced hallucination.
I vividly remember in the first few sleepdeprived weeks after having a baby being convinced my tumble dryer was talking to me, in German.
For a month or so, the lack of sleep was turning me into someone like the unnamed first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 classic The Yellow Wallpaper.
She spends too much time in an old nursery, covered in yellow wallpaper, and like me she becomes obsessional. ‘It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.’ She descends into psychosis.
Luckily for me my daughter started to sleep through the night at three months and I slowly began to get my mind back. I still don’t sleep well but at least I know when I start thinking that the white goods are agents of a higher power that it’s probably time to go to bed.