Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

SLEEP DEMONS

Bill Hayes

An Insomniacs's Memoir

Reissued with a new preface by the author. Bill Hayes grew up in a family in which the question "How'd you sleep?" was as much a staple at the breakfast table as orange juice or coffee, a question that encouraged genuine reflection and a legacy of life-shaping implications.

Hayes' narrative affords an intimate look at one man's singular journey through contemporary lifefrom his over-caffeinated, sleep-disturbed childhood as the son of a Coca-Cola bottler to the height of his insomnia, when his partner struggles with AIDS and Hayes must face an increasingly troubling and debilitating sleep disorder. Armed with an infectious curiosity and an obsession with the mysteries of his personal demons, he leads readers on a fascinating exploration of sleep disorders and contends with all manner of theories and experimentation, from the conceptions of sleep in ancient mythology to today's state-of-the-art sleeping aids and clinics. BBill Hayes is a Guggenheim Fellow and an acclaimed journalist, photographer, and memoirist.. He is the author of INSOMNIAC CITY: New York, Oliver and Me, THE ANATOMIST: A True Story of "Gray's Anatomy," and FIVE QUARTS: A Personal and Natural History of Blood.

Available products
Book Published 2018-03-06 by University of Chicago Press

Comments

Like the most rewarding kind of travel writer, Bill Hayes is both informative and personal as he takes us through the borderlands of sleep and waking, mysterious yet familiar. I'm grateful for the way this intimate, reflective and factual guidebook captures the feeling of that terrain.

Engaging . . . captivating . . . fresh and amusing. . . . A rare mingling of curiosity and compassion.

Hayes has created something that goes beyond mere memoir; call it obsessional autobiography. . . . Hayes' polished writing and fearless revelations make it work beautifully.

Memoir, history, and science come together and apart again in a book that reads very much like a dream, switching genre and subject with a beautiful logic of its own, illuminated now and then with flashes of gorgeous insight. . . . Read this one, savor it, just don't take it to bed with you.

Reads like a journey of scientific discovery, a personal memoir, and a literary episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not. An intelligent, beautifully written book, Hayes' curious hybrid will delight readers who snore past dawn as well as those who pace away while the midnight oil burns.

Sleep Demons succeeds thanks to a crucial element that is often missing from memoirs: a genuinely likeable and interesting character.

A graceful hybrid of a book that's half research treatise and half memoir. . . . Lovely writing that may keep readers up late into the evening.

Sleep Demons is a lovely weave of memory and science, great characters and compassionate humor. Insomniacs will love it for the sense of connection and solution; the rest of you (grrr) for its wisdom and wonderful writing.

What if the hum [of sleep] never comes? That's what writer and photographer Bill Hayes explores in his magnificent book Sleep Demons, part reflection on his own lifelong turmoil in the nocturne, part sweeping inquiry into the sometimes converging, sometimes colliding worlds of sleep research, psychology, medicine, mythology, aging, and mental health.