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The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

Samantha Harvey

4.02 · Rating details · 61 ratings · 23 reviews

In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.

The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic

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Kindle Edition, 192 pages

Expected publication: May 12th 2020 by Grove Press (first published January 9th 2020)

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Feb 11, 2020 Fatma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, 2020-releases, arcs, 2020-favs, want-to-own

". . . my friend looks at me with infinite compassion and says, une petite nuit? Oui, I say, une petite nuit, encore. In this expression, French has it all wrong; nights awake are the longest, largest, most cavernous of things. There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn't another soul to be found on the journey through to morning."

The Shapeless Unease is, as its subtitle puts it, about its author's year of not sleeping. But to say that this book is about insomnia ". . . my friend looks at me with infinite compassion and says, une petite nuit? Oui, I say, une petite nuit, encore. In this expression, French has it all wrong; nights awake are the longest, largest, most cavernous of things. There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn't another soul to be found on the journey through to morning."

The Shapeless Unease is, as its subtitle puts it, about its author's year of not sleeping. But to say that this book is about insomnia is to miss the soil that that insomnia grows in: the anxiety, the existential panic, the sheer exhaustion with life. This is what Harvey writes about: insomnia as an all-encompassing thing, an ouroboros eating its tail, sleeplessness breeding anxiety, anxiety pushing a full night's sleep further out of reach.

Harvey's book is more than anything, I think, a series of meditations on her insomnia, anxiety, and existential panic. It has no structure as such, but is moreso fluid in its movement from one subject to the other. In many ways Harvey's writing mirrors her condition throughout the book: slightly stream-of-consciousness, introspective, sometimes painfully aware of her physical being and sometimes transposing herself onto vivid snippets of memory. Because the book so inextricably follows her states of being and trains of thought, it reads as particularly organic in its layout, lending its writing a distinct feeling of being unfiltered and spur-of-the-moment. And this is not even to mention the absolute beauty of Harvey's writing. "Beauty" almost feels like the wrong word to use here, given the searing intimacy of Harvey's account, but her writing really is just exquisite. It's the kind of writing style that enhances rather than buries meaning—that is, it's not superficial or flowery for the sake of being flowery, but actually gives you a more intimate sense of Harvey's experiences.

The Shapeless Unease is a book that has some of the most beautiful, painfully honest writing I've read in a while. I think everyone will find something in this book that will speak to them in some measure. Highly recommend giving it a chance when it comes out on May 22.

Thanks to Grove Press for providing me an e-ARC of this via NetGalley! ...more

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Feb 10, 2020 Varsha Ravi (between.bookends) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Where do I even begin with The Shapeless Unease. It’s an amalgamation of personal memoir, essays, snippets of fiction that have been birthed from the author’s period of extreme sleep deprivation. One would assume the complete lack of such a fundamental need would result in something hazy and confused, but instead, it’s the polar opposite. Harvey’s musings, that span grief, death, philosophy and more are startlingly clear, profound, moving and deeply insightful. It really got under my skin. The Where do I even begin with The Shapeless Unease. It’s an amalgamation of personal memoir, essays, snippets of fiction that have been birthed from the author’s period of extreme sleep deprivation. One would assume the complete lack of such a fundamental need would result in something hazy and confused, but instead, it’s the polar opposite. Harvey’s musings, that span grief, death, philosophy and more are startlingly clear, profound, moving and deeply insightful. It really got under my skin. The ideas she ponders ping-ponged in my head, rattling my brain, looping, filling me with a kind of restive energy and making me consider things I haven’t ever before.

Harvey’s insomnia takes root after the sudden, untimely demise of her cousin whose body wasn’t found until a few days after. What begins as a meditation on grief, gradually unravels, and touches on various other topics ranging from personal anecdotes and incidents from Harvey’s childhood to philosophical musings and the nature of creativity. The narrative is dotted with stunning aphorisms like, “fiction is the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words”. There are phrases of such well-worded truths, “If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre; here are the players from the conscious mind, the fears, the desires, the ought and ought-not, but they are whittled down to a core cast and they re-emerge in costume.”

A particular section that left me lost in thought was Harvey’s observations on science and faith. She writes, “I don’t see much opposition between science and faith - isn’t science just another form of faith - the faith in reason? It struck me once that I can never be faithless, I am always putting my faith in something - be that agnosticism, atheism, violence, kindness, money, cynicism, writing, love, politics, compassion. Faith is a precondition for science, a precondition for everything.” She elucidates further, “The more the believer in science holds up reason as the arbiter of all things, the more the reason starts to look like a god being worshipped. Reason is a thing that proves only itself. If you use reason to work out what is valid, you’ll find that the only valid things are those you can reach by reason.”

Her condition of sleeplessness lands her in a vertiginous state, where the recursive nature of her thoughts loop into one another and play out on the page. There’s almost this pervasive quality to her writing, the stream of consciousness style of her narration allowing you to experience her thoughts in the closest way possible. I have quoted Harvey a great deal in this review because sometimes there just isn’t a better way to explain than by example. Perhaps I am not earning my keep as a reviewer. But sometimes, when an author is that good, you just need to get out of the way.
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Dec 24, 2019 Samantha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An absolute triumph. Harvey puts into words so perfectly the intimate terror of anxiety that feels impossible to articulate. I've already put a reminder in my diary to reread this in a year's time, but I doubt I'll need it.

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Jan 09, 2020 Natalie (CuriousReader) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Review originally published: https://curiousreaderr.wordpress.com/...

When I first stumbled upon The Shapeless Unease among upcoming releases, I thought it sounded a bit like Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation – which I along with most everyone I know loved. But while both books tackle sleep-problems and span a year, their resemblance ends there – Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease is a memoir of one year where she struggles with sleep and through this experience, she writes not about Review originally published: https://curiousreaderr.wordpress.com/...

When I first stumbled upon The Shapeless Unease among upcoming releases, I thought it sounded a bit like Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation – which I along with most everyone I know loved. But while both books tackle sleep-problems and span a year, their resemblance ends there – Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease is a memoir of one year where she struggles with sleep and through this experience, she writes not about sleep so much as everything else. As she puts it herself at one point, sleep like money is something that you only really think about when you have too little of it. Sleep then, to the insomniac, becomes the prism through which you see and move in the world – that is a pretty accurate representation of the book as well, sleep becomes the prism through which Harvey experiences, thinks, feels and narrates her life. It is rarely the subject of discussion but at the same time it’s always there, forming everything within the life it’s holding in its grip.

The Shapeless Unease is a memoir told in a stream-of-conciousness style, a literary style which for me has turned out to be kind of a marmite thing. Usually, I find it ends up allowing for too much fragmentation in writing – rather than staying with one thing, dedicating time and effort to dig deeper into it – the writer is allowed to flick from point to point without bothering to get beyond the most surface-level notes. On the other hand, it can at times bring out an authenticity of the truest sensory experience without the cloak of narrative rules, sense of propriety or time. Speaking from the heart, I suppose is the cheesy way of putting it. Harvey’s book is a mixture of both – the good and the bad with the form.

When her writing is at its weakest is when her words almost seem hollow; it’s short snappy phrases and over-written sentences that seem to weigh nothing else but conveying to the reader the emotional state of its creator. It does serve a purpose in reflecting the mind of an insomniac, the way her mind is in fact fragmented because she has not the energy or the sense of presence to keep hold of longer strains of thought or form true order of what she’s narrating. It all ends up being mushy, with deprived thoughts hardly worth printing. As a reader, I felt I could appreciate the technical value in the writing form and what it does to the book – how it tells a story beyond the actual wording, how the shape of the book reflects the story (the shapelessness) it is holding in its covers. But there’s a difference between appreciation for worth and reading enjoyment, in this case it doesn’t work beyond its idea.

On the other hand, when Harvey’s is at the top of her game she appears to reach beyond the veil – there’s honesty and something akin to a vision, of seeing all the way to the core of things, stripping away the layers of accepted narrative and clichés, commonly accepted truths and comfortable thinking patterns – to reveal something recognisably true. She manages to do this with topics as varied as world politics, identity, death, relationships, writing, sleep, and philosophy. I found myself stopping at the way she writes about anxiety and fear, especially – she writes about the way anxiety, like sleeplessness, reproduces itself in an endless cycle and how worrying about worrying will only worsen the experience but there’s no stopping it. It’s a helpless feeling that she equals to that of her sleeplessness, “the more you want it the less it comes”.

Ultimately, she closes the book with questioning her own sense in the world and why she keeps on moving forward, even in the midst of this political and worldly turmoil – how do any of us keep on even when it feels like the sky is falling? Even when it seems everything is going to shit? “What is it that is leaning forward in me now, towards the world?” She doesn’t necessarily have the answers, but it’s a notion I can’t help but think we could all do with, in this current state of the world. Generations before us have struggled, have faced prejudice and hatred and wars and suffering and discrimination and injustice and many struggles beside, we’re not alone in this experience and yet it is our experience now. How do we face it? Why do we keep on leaning in, towards the world, each other, ourselves? It seems a good thing to return to in times of trouble of the external or internal kind. To be reminded of that something which does, against the odds, lean forward towards the world and propels us to “swim with, with with”. ...more

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Dec 17, 2019 Jess Smiley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Sprawling meditations on insomnia, struggle, language, Great Britain, kinship, faith, reason, writing, a bank robbery, ineffable dreams.

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Feb 06, 2020 Kay Cardona rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I have no words to describe this book. The language, the detail, the atmosphere... it's an amazing , amazing book. What a wonderful writer. The beauty of realism! I loved every word, every emotion every observation of life. I will read it again as I am sure I missed out on some emotion as I was still surfing a previous one.

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Jan 22, 2020 Paul "Axl" Hurman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: first-published-in-2020-uk

I can't exactly pinpoint what it is that made me love this book as much as I do. It's a bit of a mish mash jumble of styles, but it feels totally natural. It is written in a way that somehow manages to read like how insomnia feels. Tangents and sidesteps and diversions, never settling into any one thing. It should be a confused mess of a book, but it is exquisitely written and utterly wonderful. Yeah, I loved it.

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Jan 17, 2020 Amber rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, non-fiction

How do you review something that resonates so deeply with you?

Blending essay, memoir, and fiction, Harvey’s fragmented prose reflects that of her sleepless state: she meanders through memories, existential anxieties and present emotions with a succinct style that articulates her courage in the face of a potentially life-shattering condition.

Harvey’s aphorisms resonated with me powerfully, intensely and searchingly. She deftly weaves together a narrative concerned not only with sleeplessness, ...more

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Jan 15, 2020 Nic Scanlan-Dyas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I’m not finished but I’m giving this five stars so far. The audio book delivery is magnificent, and the content is so bizarre and existential in a funny way, that is is a complete bullseye for me.

Essentially a collection of fabulous short stories linked by a common thread of despair. Not really about insomnia, more about the business of living and why we bother.

Finished it and highly recommend - not all narratives have to be about saving the world. Sometimes all we need is to try and save ...more

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Jan 05, 2020 Miranda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

What an extraordinary book. Courageous and compelling in equal measure.

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Nov 25, 2019 Ksenia Kulichik rated it liked it

Shelves: netgalley

“The Shapeless Unease” is a stream of consciousness mosaic of diary-entry-style notes, author’s experiences, memories and fragments of fiction in formation through which the author tries to explore and, perhaps, tackle her sudden insomnia. She talks about her childhood dog, her cousin and his death, her visits to the doctor... there is a lot of vulnerability exposed. There are also quite a few poignant and relatable moments, the flow of the book is leisurely and nice, though directionless. I ...more

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Nov 07, 2019 Kinsey rated it liked it · review of another edition

With a creeping sense of existential dread, The Shapeless Unease is a collection of run-of-consciousness essays that touches on everything from life and insomnia, to the inevitable death of loved ones. Written in a semi-diary style, this novel is haunting and feels a little like we're seeing the author at her most vulnerable and fatalistically humorous. Raw and real, this short collection is brutally honest while still being full of hope for the future.

A special thank you to Netgalley for ...more

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Nov 18, 2019 Graeme rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019

A relatable stream of conscious memoir about insomnia, anxiety, trauma and loss. Harvey is a novelist and she inserts entertaining fragments of an unwritten novel about ATM burglars within this memoir, with somewhat vague intentions. Her difficulties with sleep arise around the time of the Brexit referendums, the Trump inauguration, and the loss of her cousin, allowing readers to empathize and relate to her struggles with the unknown contributors and "cures" of insomnia.

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Nov 08, 2019 Janet rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: zz-2019ng-when-i-read, k-e-k

Superspeed readers like me can read 150 - 200+ pages/hour, so yes, I have read the book … and many more today. LOL

I received a temporary digital Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley, the publisher and the author in exchange for an honest review.

From the publisher, as I do not repeat the contents or story of books in reviews, I let them do it as they do it better than I do .

In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from ...more

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Nov 17, 2019 Amanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

What first caught my attention was the cover. Then the title. Then the description.
I have personally had many difficulties with sleep throughout the last couple of years. Some nights I will lie awake for hours before finally sleeping, other nights I will sleep relatively fast, but wake up many times throughout the night, and other nights (luckily these are rare) I will lie awake all night, staring into the darkness, feeling myself slowly going crazy from the lack of sleep.
I am frustrated, for ...more

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Jan 05, 2020 Chad Guarino rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

Insomnia can be a paralyzing medical condition, the sufferer soon buried under a crushing sleep debt and creatively crippled. Samantha Harvey, however, uses it as the catalyst for a harrowing collection of stream of consciousness essays, loosely revolving around her lack of sleep.

The book's strength comes from the moments where Harvey leaves her emotional state the most exposed, such as when she's describing a Friday morning doctor visit and tearfully trying to explain that she hasn't slept ...more

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Jan 26, 2020 Vicky rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I see I’m alone in this from the other reviews, but I really didn’t enjoy this one at all. It’s so meandering that to me it just didn’t hang together, and none of the parts about actual insomnia were particularly interesting to me, or new. In places I found the prose pretentious and had to really force myself to finish. The two stars I’m giving it are due to the parts with the GP, where I think she gives a brilliant description of how difficult it is to get out of a certain box or pigeonhole ...more

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Nov 30, 2019 Ksenia Kulichik rated it liked it · review of another edition

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Nov 28, 2019 ElleM rated it liked it

Shelves: netgalley-arcs

This has been an incredibly difficult book for me to rate because, although I can tell the concept and writing is quite brilliant, it just wasn't my taste.

I was initially drawn to the stunning cover art, and then when I read that it was about insomnia I was instantly hooked as I have been medically diagnosed with that myself. But although I certainly relate to the nocturnal mind wandering, which does indeed take me to some weird places, mine is of such a different nature that I couldn't relate ...more

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Jan 29, 2020 Susannah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A gem.

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Feb 14, 2020 Esme rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, non-fiction

Beautiful writing, descriptions of sleeplessness, grief, anxiety and living in the current environment. Didn’t enjoy the inset novella so much.

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Jan 21, 2020 Julia rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, international

When I read the description of this book, I was intrigued. We all have difficulty sleeping at times, so I was interested in how the author handled an extreme version of this problem. Unfortunately, this book was not what I was expecting and I found myself bored for much of the time. The style is very stream of consciousness and I prefer a more linear narrative. There were many extended rants on random topics. This book was not for me.

The scene where she goes to a doctor for treatment and all ...more

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About Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey

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Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and has lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.

Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man ...more