=books recently read: Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick=

A woman looks back on her life, her memories presented as a series of loosely-connected vignettes, in this short but extraordinary pseudo-autobiography. Hardwick claimed Sleepless Nights wasn't intended to be about her, but the parallels between the book and what is known about her life tend to belie that assertion. A Kentucky-born girl pulls up her small-town roots and transplants herself in New York City where she remakes herself into a sophisticated intellectual. She lives in a rarefied world of poets and patrons, artists and expatriates and is at one point married to a brilliant man. Hardwick's life followed the exact same trajectory and the brilliant man in her life was her husband, the poet Robert Lowell.

The memories are poignant, often touching, bitter and bittersweet. The characters that populate these memories are as prickly and uncomfortable as only real people can be, whether they are literati or cleaning women, wealthy dowagers or Billie Holiday. Elizabeth, the narrator, as well as Elizabeth, the author, is writing out of a place of heartbreak. Both have loved and lost, living in a kind of afterlife; in this case, parallel lines do seem to cross, as the lives of the author and her protagonist meet, fiction and memoir blurring. This "novel" having been written not long after the death of Hardwick's still-loved ex-husband.

(Elizabeth Hardwick)

Hardwick claimed that she never concerned herself much with plot in her novels. "If I want plot, I'll watch Dallas," she once quipped to an interviewer from The Paris Review. And Sleepless Nights bears out her aversion to plot points and conventional, clearly demarcated story lines. Instead she said that her goal in writing fiction was to create a hospitable environment in which her voice could speak. In Sleepless Nights, she manages exactly that. The book in structure and tone is entirely unique, a perfect vehicle for the "non-story" she has to tell. Of course, she does have a story to tell, the story of a lifetime told in vividly phosphorescent flashbacks, each fragmented memory within that life itself a story in miniature. Sleepless Nights is a kind of autobiographical mosaic; an anthology of multiple identity.

The writing is elliptical, poetic, compacted, beautiful. This is one of those books that comes to an author only rarely in a lifetime (and then only if he or she is both talented and lucky), a book that seems born a unique and fully-formed thing, complete and inarguable as a pearl or a revelation. I'm only guessing but I'd bet that once Hardwick got it started, Sleepless Nights poured from her fingertips as if it were being dictated. It's the kind of book that an author can't anticipate writing and can't repeat once having written it; that makes it the best, the rarest, and most essential of books: one that is thoroughly inimitable…though, having fallen under its spell, one feels compelled to try in one form or other. 

In Sleepless Nights Hardwick has created a powerful machine for recounting a life.