Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted...is one of the grim pleasures of The Shapeless Unease ... This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed ... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories ... One feels deranged, reading it, and part of the book’s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers ... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases; she’s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand.

...novelist Samantha Harvey has produced, in The Shapeless Unease, a slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest ... Interrupted sleep is pretty much the norm for our high-velocity 21st-century life, but the miserable bagginess of days on end faced with no respite of oblivion, however brief, is a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance ... As a writer Harvey gets at not just the heart, but the soul of things ... Writing and nature — in particular outdoor swimming, dragonflies skimming over a summer lake — and the realisation that 'no things are fixed', are all conveyed in prose that glows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

Harvey’s memoir of sleeplessness is like a small and well-worn eiderdown quilt: It might not cover everything, but it both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity ... Harvey is a well-regarded novelist in the United Kingdom, and perhaps the only part of this book that feels a little lumpy and uncomfortable is her working out in its pages an O. Henry-like short story about a husband who loses his wedding ring while robbing an A.T.M. More compelled by her predicament, namely stretch after stretch of not only little sleep but no sleep at all, I found it difficult to care about this fictional character, or figure out if his crime and punishment represented anything larger about what disenchanted millennials have taken to describing as 'late-stage capitalism' ... Not for nothing does the author’s own experience take place in 2016...That these events have since been outdone by arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, with its attendant sleep disorders, only amplifies this small volume’s relevance and power ... A year might be a handy if arbitrary length for a memoir or novel, but a sleepless night stretches out like a blank page, the inability to fill it a writhing stasis ... considers science and spirituality but ultimately rests, as it were, on language: its limits, and its possibilities. Harvey appeals to science and spirituality but is most soothed by poetry, by Philip Larkin’s conception of existence as 'the million-petalled flower / Of being here.' If you too are a member of this lonely, late-night club that no one wants to belong to, you will find solace in his words, and hers.

... profound, earthshaking ... Harvey has been compared by the Telegraph with Virginia Woolf. The comparison holds up. She is a writer of both sparkling effusions and dark, twisted inquiry. The Shapeless Unease defies linear genre and offers a varied look at the somber affliction of insomnia ... What's constant is the restless energy propelling the prose: fervent, searching, luminous at times ... The best part of The Shapeless Unease, though, is the author's exploration of writing ... This memoir churns deep in the soul. Here is a talented writer plumbing her personal experience as deeply as she can. The results are staggeringly beautiful. The Shapeless Unease belongs on the nightstand of every literary-minded insomniac.

This book’s best, most successfully prickly vignettes take place in the offices of doctors and therapists, where Ms. Harvey is blandly chastised again and again for her failure to self-actualize ... Some of these tangents are more fun to follow than others. I, for one, could do without another Anglophone writer expressing surprise at the different conceptions of time and space implicit in the linguistic structures of far-flung indigenous peoples. Such digressions usually simply reflect a writer’s personal dissatisfaction with the difficulty of understanding and being understood ... Various tricks sprinkled throughout the book remind us that the author is, after all, a fiction writer by trade ... I wish Ms. Harvey had dispensed with these self-deprecating intrusions, which feel like a failure of nerve. Their silliness defangs the real, insoluble trouble of how the fields of mental and physical health might actually speak honestly about insomnia, without academic defensiveness or condescension. More important, the surface cleverness of these little embellishments suggests that Ms. Harvey hasn’t quite gotten the message her own book proclaims so clearly: Knowingness saves no one, and attempting to defeat insomnia by a battle of wits may be like drowning out an ugly noise with an abundance of color.

Harvey’s memoir in which she relives and dissects the sleepless year in question, is so exquisitely written it’s a challenge to review, as there is an impulse to quote nearly every precise, stylized line. Her chronicle of morality, mortality and memory is adept at capturing the ineffable reservations with — and appreciation for — being alive ... Harvey’s trenchant wit informs her indefatigable search for understanding. She uses humor as a cudgel to smash the obstacles that seek to obfuscate the causes of her distress. This is more than a meditation on anxiety and depression; Harvey whittles her own restive, revelatory mind.

With my history of sleep problems, I can vouch for the fact that the inability to sleep is one of the most infuriating experiences a person can go through. Harvey’s helplessness resonated with me as I read the book over the course of two nights of insomnolence while trying to eke out every second of sleep I could ... Sleeplessness is the pandemic of our generation and this book offers no universal solution. What it does offer, however, is the light at the end of a seemingly never-ending tunnel ... This memoir is a stimulating and hopeful book that gives us an intimate glimpse of a writer persevering through a challenging part of her life.

...[a] deeply felt memoir ... beautifully, if unsettlingly, Harvey captures the roiling exhaustion, the fuggy disbelief and irrational anger of this newly uncertain state when 'the world becomes profoundly unsafe' and the boundaries between the inner and outer self start to blur ... If you are looking for tips on improving your sleep hygiene this is not the book for you — though swimming helped for a bit. This is a creative account of a life with little sleep: it remains unclear how Harvey conquered her night-time demons. Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

The prose has the washed-out tone of a writer who has suffered too much for too long. Bleary-eyed, Harvey tends to ramble. She loosely corrals her thoughts in many stylistic kennels: stream of consciousness, the future tense, therapeutic fragments, a case study of herself; or in philosophical wanderings about, for example, the word great in British culture or how the language of the Amazonian Pirahã tribe has no way of expressing abstraction or recursiveness. Harvey also includes shards of fiction...The book’s shagginess is surely intentional—art mirroring life, as advertised in the title. Yet your patience for this strategy will depend on how much you recognize yourself in Harvey’s burnt-at-both-ends protagonist, as well as on your taste for very dry gallows humor ... Reading Harvey, I felt similarly adrift. I worried that she was unraveling on the page and wondered if she was being a little self-indulgent. She seems to sense this danger and abruptly changes tack, and then spins out again and again. I started to see her pain clinically, like one of her annoying doctors. But I couldn’t believe that I was that unfeeling—in some sense, I’ve been to the terrible place she’s writing from. So, I’m on her side. But then . . . what was she saying again? Where are we? The logic of no sleep is comparable to dream logic, but at least you get to wake up from a dream. Harvey knows this bind. An orderly rendering of a shapeless problem would be facile. So, she risks alienating us, pursuing a truer portrait of personal disintegration, sparing us no side of it. She anxiously stalks her pain in search of a revelation, hoping to discover why she couldn’t sleep, but, more pressingly, what insomnia means. That meaning never comes into focus—and sometimes suffering is just suffering ... But Harvey’s dark night of the soul is about death as much as it is about not sleeping. Writing about Paul, she brilliantly conveys what happens when death stops being just a word, a placeholder for a truism about existence that we stopped paying attention to. In these passages, the writing is urgent and unignorable.

Harvey’s examination of her year-long insomnia is an excavation of the emotions that might cause sleeplessness. It’s a kind of philosophical detective story strewn with submerged clues ... Just as much as insomnia, though, The Shapeless Unease is a meditation on the nature of creativity (writing in particular); how it emerges even in the course of a fractured life ... Her countless aphorisms...are a delight to read. And she has great comedic timing ... The fragmentary style of the memoir chimes with the temporal nature of Harvey’s condition; it is an account of her slippery present life that’s suffused with the sense of a timeless fable.

Even Samantha Harvey can’t figure out how best to sum up this genre-defying sort-of-autobiography, notionally pegged to her midlife battle with chronic insomnia in the months after Britain voted to leave the EU. 'What are you writing?' a friend asks the novelist. 'Not sure,' she says. 'Some essays. Not really essays. Not essays at all. Some things' ... The 'My Year Of X' strain of memoir has become something of a smuggler’s path for life stories that may not have found a niche. You can’t help wondering at exactly what stage Harvey decided there was a book in her insomnia: was there – I hate myself for asking – a certain allure to its grip? Either way, one senses she is too self-aware not to recognise that this bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her restless mind may ultimately reveal less about its headline subject than it does about the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

... a disturbing, vivid account. The prose is urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool ... The Shapeless Unease is cubistic, the fragments of text...fit together perfectly to reveal a subject that is there all right, exposed from every angle, but also just beyond reach ... for someone who otherwise possesses such talent for dissecting and assessing her emotions, she seems less self-aware, or perhaps less curious, about her political anger ... The Shapeless Unease is wry and funny as well as angry ... Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not unlike dipping into strange, unchartered waters: it is by turns bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a sense of time having slowed down.

This is an extremely curious book, and I mean that as a sincere compliment ... It is part of the new trend in non-fiction, a kind of jumble-up but carefully patterned. It doesn’t sit easily in one genre, but tiptoes around many different styles ... One of the book’s most astonishing sections involves the language of the Pirahã. Did I say it was a compendious volume for such a slender book? ... The this-and-that-ness of this book is what makes it a particular joy. It moves between topics with ease, and yet at its heart it is an emotional book, in which loss of sleep and loss of family are the poles.

Harvey is the author of four delicate, searching, if rather ponderous novels...but with this memoir she has found a more distinctive voice as a poet of sleeplessness ... There’s a vogue for memoirs that meander between personal history, essay, political musings, travelogue and the idiosyncrasies of their (usually female) author. Although the extreme inwardness brings certain frustrations — I would have liked to have learnt more about Harvey’s partner and how he experienced her insomnia — the form, or rather the formlessness, suits Harvey well ... Harvey manages to make a common problem feel familiar and mysterious.

... often brilliant and sometimes frustrating ... Harvey conveys the hell of insomnia with the precision and passion of one who has come to know it too well ... When The Shapeless Unease remains focused on its subject, it engages and grips. Harvey complains about the futility of describing the feeling of insomnia, but she does as good a job as you would expect a gifted novelist to at relaying the brain fog, the mind turning in on itself ... so much of the book contains writing that seems to be there purely for its own pleasure. Harvey fills pages with rants about British jingoism, presumably representative of the flailings of the nocturnal mind, but sounding like an op-ed columnist making bricks without straw. She includes a story she wrote during her period of insomnia, about a man who steals vast sums of money from ATMs, which takes up around one-sixth of the book but seems untethered to the subject ... There’s no question that these are all beautifully done — particularly a half-page portrait of Harvey’s deceased cousin — but the creaks are audible as she tries to link them back to her topic...More frustrating still is when she gives us tantalizing glimpses of other material which surely must be relevant to the state of mind feeding her insomnia ... there is nothing on the science of insomnia, nor its cultural history. Harvey does gesture outward a few pages before the end, with discussion of Shakespeare’s references to sleep. But, like finally falling into peaceable slumber at 6 a.m., it’s just too late.

The Shapeless Universe is a merciless and self-mocking memoir in which Harvey shows us the insomniac’s universe of 'edgeless expanse.' The register shifts throughout and so too does Harvey’s perspective on herself ... The fact I found myself falling asleep over this book is a compliment. The thoughts that kept Harvey awake send me into a coma; my own response to high levels of anxiety is to pull down the blinds and shut up house, so I sleep like a narcoleptic through grief, rage, and panic. Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go, and Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the darkness and feel the tiger in the room.

[Harvey] throws it all in: memories of her childhood, the text of a short story she is working on, her fear of the menopause, her regrets about childlessness, her encounters with her doctor... her experience of being assaulted once in Australia, her fascination with Daniel Everett’s great books about the Pirahã people of the Amazon whose language has no past or future tenses, her joy in wild swimming and again her anger about Brexit, factory farming, death and the way people speed through her village ... 'My mind is a cacophony,' she says — and her memoir, vividly well written in parts, is true to that, an unholy mess.

...as Harvey makes clear in this masterful and captivating memoir, insomnia is not easily defined by its causes, and it’s certainly not easily defeated. At once intensely personal and universal, Harvey’s ruminations on the agony of sleepless nights and the way exhaustion ravages every aspect of waking life. Despairing at the useless advice she’s given and feeling powerless to solve her severe sleeping problems, Harvey nonetheless finds courage to fight on.

Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons ...Though the narrative is a highly personal interior monologue, others who have suffered insomnia will find abundant resonance ... An exquisitely rendered voyage into the 'shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.'