2023/154: The Cure for Sleep — Tanya Shadrick

I went without rest, searching always for ways to escape my self and the pain of living. To slip my skin and merge, forever, with something beyond me. I tried mothering, unpaid acts of service, immersion in cold water, the making of art, and then – lastly, disastrously – I hoped to get lost in love. [loc. 3257]

When Tanya Shadrick was 33 years old, just after the birth of her first child, she suffered an arterial tear and almost died. The experience made her feel that she had to break free from marriage and motherhood: simultaneously, she knew that she had to stay. The Cure for Sleep is her account of making public art, coming to terms with her difficult relationships with her parents (meek mother, absent father, ogrish stepfather) and her loving but perhaps claustrophobic marriage. She sat by the lido in Lewes for two summers, writing a mile of text; she spent a year repainting the railings around a vandalised tree; she embarked upon an ill-omened affair. And she opened herself to the world, and to its opportunities.

Given the subtitle -- 'On Waking Up, Breaking Free and Making a More Creative Life' -- I'd put off reading this book, I think because I expected it to be prescriptive: to tell me, too, how to stop sleepwalking through my life and reawaken my creativity. It's actually more of a memoir, and Shadrick is a very different person, in a very different place, to myself. (I have the free time she craves; I don't think I have the desperate drive to create, or the desire to create as performatively.) Her writing is beautiful though sometimes over-poetic: I felt she'd bashed away at some sentences until they were beautiful, regardless of whether the raw meaning was retained. Her account of her solitary childhood and her longing to escape her childhood home rang horribly true, and I think perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book for me was her gradual acceptance of her mother, despite the continuing friction between them.

Fulfils the ‘Author who shares your name’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

How would it be to give to myself, for even a short while, such kindness? To spend time learning or recovering what I loved, what I yearned for? To ask for exactly what I needed, as my children were able to do? [loc. 1831]