Showing results for "memoir" in Sleep Disorders

In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs experienced a series of bereavements. As she grieved, she kept busy by day, but at night sleep eluded her. And yet her sleeplessness led to a profound and unexpected discovery: her Night Self. As the night transformed into a place of creativity and liberation, Annabel found she wasn't alone. From the radical fifteenth-century philosopher Laura Cereta and subversive artist Louise Bourgeois, to Virginia Woolf and the activist Peace Pilgrim, women have long found sanctuary, inspiration and courage in darkness.

Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.