"'I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man,' we are told near the beginning of Elizabeth Hardwick's subtle new book. 'It has come many times and many more than not. This began early.' . . . Sleepless Nights is a novel, but it is a novel in which the subject is memory and to which the 'I' whose memories are in question is entirely and deliberately the author: we recognize the events and addresses of Elizabeth Hardwick's life not only from her earlier work, but from the poems of her husband, the late Robert Lowell. We study in another light the rainy afternoons and dyed satin shoes and high-school drunkenness of the Kentucky adolescence, the thin coats and yearnings toward home of the graduate years at Columbia, the households in Maine and Europe and on Marlborough Street in Boston and West 67th Street in New York. We are presented the entire itinerary, shown all the punched tickets and transfers. The result is less a 'story about' or 'of' a life than a shattered meditation on it, a work as evocative and difficult to place as Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, which it oddly recalls. The author observes of her enigmatic narrative: 'It certainly hasn't the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all, I am a woman.' This strikes an interesting note, a balance of Oriental diffidence and exquisite contempt, of irony and direct statement, that exactly expresses the sensibility at work in Sleepless Nights. ..."
NY Times: Meditation on a Life By Joan Didion (April 1979)
New Yorker: A Singular Woman
The Paris Review: Elizabeth Hardwick, The Art of Fiction No. 87
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