I stopped fighting three in the morning and started writing in it.
For six years I treated my insomnia as a fault to be corrected. I tried the apps, the pills, the blackout blinds and the advice of people who sleep easily and cannot explain how.
Then one night I gave up and opened a notebook instead. These essays came out of that surrender. They are not a cure and they are not an argument for staying awake. They are what I found once I stopped treating the night as lost time.
The small hours have a texture that daylight does not. Thoughts arrive undefended. Old conversations replay with the sound turned up. It is the least practical time of day and, for some of us, the most honest.
What changed for me was not sleeping more. It was noticing that the hours I dreaded were the only ones nobody wanted from me.
For the ones still awake
One adult in three sleeps badly, and nearly all of them do it alone and quietly, convinced it is a personal failing rather than an ordinary human condition.
This collection is company for those hours. It does not promise you will sleep. It promises you are not the only one who is not.
The N.I.G.H.T.S. essays
Six movements, from the first hour awake to the light coming back.
Noticing
The moment you know sleep is not coming.
Inventory
The mind's habit of auditing your life at two in the morning.
Ghosts
Conversations you have already had, replayed better.
Hunger
What the body asks for when the day's rules are off.
Traffic
The city at four, and the people awake in it with you.
Surrender
Giving up on the night as the thing that finally helps.
What is inside
- Twenty essays, none longer than a bad hour
- A chapter on the sleep industry, written by someone who bought all of it
- Notes on writing at night without romanticising it
- An index of small comforts that cost nothing
Why readers keep it
It reads at three in the morning
Short pieces, large type, nothing that needs a running start.
It does not sell you a cure
No routine, no supplement, no schedule to fail at.
It is funny more often than it is sad
Sleeplessness is absurd, and the book says so.
What readers say
I read three of these at four in the morning, which I suspect is the intended conditions.
Priya N., ten years of bad sleep
It is the first thing on the subject that has not tried to sell me a routine.
Sam T., night shift nurse
Funnier than a book about lying awake has any right to be.
Owen G., Dublin
Order Small Hours
$16.00
- Paperback, 204 pages
- Audiobook read by the author
- A night reading list