I’ve only ever read one other book about sleep — the brilliant Counting Sheep, by Paul Martin, which collates and describes everything we know about sleep in a way that is succinct and peerless. So this book is up against stiff opposition. Patricia Morrisroe, who has trouble sleeping, examines the science of sleep in the course of trying to find a cure. She goes to doctor after doctor. She tries everything — this drug and that drug, tapes, meditation, different mattresses, sleeping on blocks of ice, moving from Manhattan to the country. In the end, thank God, something works. I wonder if you can guess what it is.

At first, I had a bit of a problem with this book, and I kept wondering what it was. It’s perfectly well written, so it wasn’t that. Morrisroe is a professional journalist, and also the acclaimed biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. But every time I picked this book up, I would read a few pages, and then stop, and put the book down, and move on to something else. Why? Morrisroe describes her symptoms well, and she gives good accounts of her visits to doctors, her early sleeping problems, and so on. She manages to splice memoir and science in a way that appears seamless.

And then I realised what my problem was. Morrisroe is very good at describing the state of insomnia — a noxious mix of drowsiness and anxiety, of torpor and tension. I kept waking up in the morning, feeling not too bad, and plunging into this book, and then feeling exhausted. Sleep deprivation, it turns out, is a very hard thing to write about. It’s not exciting, and it doesn’t carry with it a sense of history or global importance. It does not feel like a matter of life or death. There are few comic possibilities. In fact, reading about sleep deprivation makes you think that you, yourself, are deprived of sleep.

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