AN UNUSUAL LOVE STORY UNFOLDING IN BIG APPLE

INSOMNIAC City is an unusual love story, about both a city and Oliver Sacks, everyone’s favourite neurologist. Sacks died in 2015 and penned such riveting books as The Man who Mistook his wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and a personal favourite, Hallucinations.

He was a man with a big heart who nevertheless led a mostly solitary life.

Born in England to medical parents, Sacks spent most of his life in America. As a gay man he was celibate for more than three decades before he met author and photographer Bill Hayes, some years younger than him, in New York.To Sacks’s surprise they fell in love, and Hayes’s devotion was an unexpected gift in the last years of his life.

This memoir, a gentle, observant and moving work, is also a praise song to New York, where Hayes fled to after his former lover had died on the West Coast of HIV/Aids.

Hayes began to photograph the great, thrumming city, in its many moods, at night, on the streets, under bypasses and in parks; and documented the multifaceted neighbourhoods and the many migrants who came, and stayed. He was one.

It’s a book that can quite easily be relished even if you have never heard of Oliver Sacks; for devotees of him, as I am, it is essential, often touching, reading. Hayes is careful not to rely too heavily on their relationship for this work, which includes many photographs by Hayes, nevertheless detailing the joy and pleasure in their relationship.

Sacks had a huge imagination, but there were many simple things of which he had no knowledge. When, in 2009, Hayes gives Sacks his first kiss, Sacks is astonished and asks him if that is what kissing is, “or is it something you’ve invented?” Hayes laughs and replies, “if I hold you closely enough, I can hear your brain”.

At first Sacks was shy about going public with their relationship; after they “came out” they travelled and shared their lives with touching affection, though they did not live together – Sacks needed his solitude to work… he was an inveterate scribbler.

He was so divorced from popular culture that when Michael Jackson died, he had to ask Hayes who this celebrity was that people kept mentioning.

The most creative of thinkers, he was oddly childlike in some aspects of his life; it was the more worldly Hayes who provided the balance.

Throughout Sacks’s final illness, Hayes cared for him, while continuing to document the New York he had also come to love and chronicle.

Insomniac City is not conventionally written, though easy to read. Crafted in a journal-like style, some chapters are mini-essays, while others are simple, random notes and quotes, photographs, captions, a couple of lines, or a digression – a window into their daily lives, their routines and the impact of randomness that they were both able to see and capture, though in differing ways.

A worthwhile and fascinating tribute to both Oliver Sacks, and to New York.