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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and this week I'm joined by Samantha Harvey, a superb novelist whose works include the wilderness and the Western Wind most recently, a professor of creative writing, and now a memoirist, whose new book

is called The Shapeless Unease, A Year of Not Sleeping. It's the description of insomnia.

Samad that can you just, before we start talking about the book as a kind of literary artifact,

tell us a little bit about kind of the circumstances that gave rise to it what happened yeah well

it's a good place to start but in a way the question i feel least qualified to answer because i don't

really know what happened i was a really good strong robust sleeper and then within a matter of

weeks i was suddenly an extremely poor and almost non-sleeper.

And there were a few factors that played into it for sure. There was quite a very sudden bereavement

in the family, a few other things happening in my family that were impacting on all of us.

I'd moved house and there was a bit of road

noise. There were other things going on in life that I was kind of irritated by and upset by,

but I think taken together, they weren't really quite enough to account for this sort of catastrophic

loss of sleep.

And I think it's one of those great enigmas I'm not sure I'll really ever understand.

I think before I had insomnia, I'd had sort of quite persistent anxiety for a couple of years,

which seemed to dovetail in with sort of almost hilarious symbolism with my 40th birthday

if I sort of hit middle age and then thought right now it's time to fall apart.

Well it's kind of traditional in some respects.

It's traditional, yeah.

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