Insomnia

Brief and brilliant, refreshing and reassuring, INSOMNIA offers a singular way of understanding an affliction all too many of us grapple with, and invites us to question whether there aren't important lessons to be learned (about consciousness, human behavior, and ourselves) in the night-time hours we spend awake
Benjamin seamlessly weaves her personal struggles with and ambivalent relationship to insomnia among intertextual references to mythology, popular culture, art, history, science and more
INSOMNIA reads equal parts as a lyrical prose poem and a smart, feminist, cultural history
In contrast to her struggle for deep and uninterrupted sleep, Benjamin's husband is a champion sleeper; she affectionately, even cheekily refers to him throughout the book as to as Zzz. “Zzz is the New World, forward-looking and thrusting, and I am Europa, full of the old anxieties and guilt. … We are day and night to each other. We accommodate each other. We are complementary.”
Both symptom and condition, insomnia affects nearly one in three people (Sleep Health Foundation), and lucrative industries have sprung up around it (from prescription pills to over the counter herbal remedies, meditation apps to white noise machines and more). INSOMNIA is not a survey of medical causes or remedies, nor is it a clear condemnation of insomnia as an affliction to be overcome; rather, the book is an intimate history of our human relationships to sleep—in particular women's relationships to sleep—and a welcome reminder that we are not in fact alone in our midnight trials
Insomnia, anecdotally, appears to be something that particularly afflicts creative people, and so we expect this book to resonate with writers, critics, and booksellers