Smart memoir might keep you awake

Published 12 June 2010 in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia
By Patricia Morrisroe
Random House, 276 pages, $30

Reviewed by Mike Stimpson

Popular wisdom holds that the average adult needs eight hours of sleep nightly. Patricia Morrisroe rarely comes close to meeting that quota.

Genetics may be behind her chronic sleeplessness. By her reckoning, she's at least a fourth-generation insomniac.

Quite the entrepreneurial wordsmith, she has turned her bad relationship with Mr. Sandman into a smart, informative and entertaining memoir.

Wide Awake chronicles the New York magazine writer's varied efforts at understanding and conquering her insomnia.

She stays overnight at a "sleep lab" where physiologic patterns are monitored while she sleeps, or tries to.

She takes a medication called doxepin, which gives her a spooky psychedelic dream.

She meets with a scientist who got rich off a sleeping pill he invented, and interviews a doctor who tells her "sleeping pills kill."

A physician at New York's Sleep Disorders Institute reassures her that any risks from "appropriate treatment" are slight compared to the perils associated with insomnia.

Morrisroe tries Sonata, Ambien, other drugs, cognitive behaviour therapy and light therapy.

She attends a medical conference that seems like little more than a trade show for drug companies to sell doctors on the merits of sleeping pills.

On her way to a clinic for an interview, she takes a white-knuckle taxi ride in Las Vegas with a cabbie who tells her he never gets enough sleep between his 12-hour shifts.

And all that's just in Wide Awake's first 100 pages.

Hypnosis, a palm reader, bed shopping, meditation classes and house hunting figure in some of the adventures that follow.

Morrisroe, who previously authored a book on photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, peppers her storytelling with insomnia facts she has gathered in her research.

There are two basic categories of insomnia: sleep-onset and sleep-maintenance. Morrisroe's is of the latter kind, meaning getting to sleep's a relative breeze for her but she has trouble staying in her slumber for more than a few hours.

Some pharmaceutical treatments work well (but with side-effects) against one type of insomnia but not the other. And what's effective for one person with sleep-maintenance problems may be utterly ineffective for another.

After trying several drugs, Morrisroe focuses on finding a non-pharmaceutical solution. It appears by the end of Wide Awake that she has succeeded through a combination of meditation and a quiet country home.

The latter isn't a viable alternative for most people, of course. But then Morrisroe, a successful writer whose husband works on Wall Street, isn't most people.

It will occur to the class-conscious reader that Morrisroe spends more time and money on her problem than a person of modest or even average means could afford.

The overnight stay at the sleep lab, for example, carried a price tag of more than $3,000. It was covered by her health insurance, but anyone following the U.S. health-care debate knows that many people south of the border don't have policies to foot the bill.

Similarly, her voluminous arsenal of drugs and long line of therapists must have cost more than that tired Las Vegas taxi driver could afford.

Come to think of it, the cabbie's story might be more interesting to examine. Just how does a working-class family guy like him cope with insomnia? Does he have any hope of defeating it?

Wide Awake is a memoir, so the reader has no right to expect Morrisroe to delve deeply into other people's problems. She tells her own story.

And she tells it with wit, honesty and a crisp writing style. This is a good book for the sleepless and those who wish to better understand their plight.