The Cure For Sleep

Tanya Shadrick Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 ★★★★☆

The world is not short of memoirs detailing the Damascene conversions that so often succeed a near-death experience. Be it in the suspended seconds following a collision, or the moment the oxygen masks come swinging into view as a plane descends – these instants provide the perfect springboard for a narrator to detail how everything then changed for the better. Their life is split neatly into a before and after, with the dawning of a new-found philosophy for living to the fullest in whatever time they have left.

The Cure For Sleep is a book that, from the outset, subverts expectations. Yes, it begins by describing the catastrophic events of a postnatal haemorrhage, but rather than detail what followed her miraculous survival, Shadrick begins to look backwards over her history, from an early, unhappy childhood to a lonely adolescence and safe but ‘strangely oldfashioned’ young marriage.

She peels back the years in forensic, lyrical detail – revealing the constraints of class and gender that led her to ‘hide in routine’ and ‘shrink from opportunity’. What develops is a commitment to awaken from a sleepwalking existence, and to live out a more creative, less prescriptive future. The result is a memoir that reads like a fable and invites us, however late in life, to step out of the confines we have made for ourselves. Along the way, the author draws on the fairytale characters she watches her life mirror, owing a debt to Angela Carter’s The

Bloody Chamber in her feminist reimaginings.

Every woman will see something of herself in the clinical dissection Shadrick performs on her own history, and in the cultivation of the woman she strives to become.

‘Sometimes,’ she writes, ‘we have to see our worst hurts as little deaths, and believe in our ability to be reborn by them.’