Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Reflections on Maria Semple's novel and Anxiety Attacks

I downloaded Where'd You Go, Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple, months ago. Last October, if you want to know the truth, when I thought my life could still make room for books.

Just before we were out the door for our weekend visit with our son, I remembered that the book was idling on my iPad and grabbed the gizmo. iPad books are particularly effective in early morning hours in hotel rooms when you really don't want to wake your husband, but you can't sleep, either. Before the crack of dawn, in a Marriott, I started in on Bernadette.

This is the story of an imploding, MacArthur-winning architect (Bernadette) in a saturated town of too-many five-point intersections (Seattle) who has a TED talk star of a husband employed by Microsoft. It is the story of gossiping neighbors, mud slides, cruel interventions, and a very smart little girl who loses her mother and hopes that the fragments she assembles (email correspondence, letters, documents) will help her right her world.

It's satire. It's funny. It hurts. It is complex and sophisticated. It gets a little crazy and perhaps (for a few pages) self indulgent. And then it rights itself. I call this kind of risk-taking novel heroic. I marvel at the fluidity of the prose, despite Semple's calculated choice to tell her story in spliced segments.

I recommend.

I always quote from books I've liked, to help give the readers of this blog a sense of what they might be in for. Typically I choose passages for their literary spectaculariness. Today I choose the piece below because when I read it, late today, after 36 hours of intense work on no more than 1,600 words (1,600 words!!!), I cried for the precision of these sentences.

This is, indeed, how an anxiety attack feels. I know. Many nights of many weeks, I know for absolute sure. Sometimes the only thing that can save me is the face of my son or the garden outside my door.

Panic, as explicated by Maria Semple:

... Even sleeping makes my heart race! I'm lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It's a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee's lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I'VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE'S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness.

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how I saved myself from insomnia

Every now and then a journalist will ask me to reflect on a topic and then, for whatever reason, my thoughts are not quite germane to the story finally written and my words are swept aside.  A few weeks later I'll remember the hours I put into answering the question and think, well, What are blogs for?

Or this one, anyway.

And so today I share with you some thoughts I'd put together about what ultimately saved me from a terrifying bout of insomnia.  I share this because sleep—its challenges, its blessings—binds us all, and because perhaps this will be helpful to one or two souls out there.

Many years ago, I struggled with a terrifying bout of insomnia.  I would go days without sleep, then catch but an hour or so before the cycle would begin again.  I was a thin sheet of glass, always on the verge of fracture, and this went on for weeks, indeed months.  Desperate, long nights of no resolve.  Ridiculous home cures that did nothing but exacerbate the panic.  Useless doctor appointments.  It was as if adrenaline, and adrenaline alone, coursed through my veins, non-stop.  Nothing seemed big enough to stop it.  I was surprised, at the end of each day, that I was still alive.

You can’t really survive something like that.  You can’t let it continue.  From an utterly exhausted place, I had to find a cure.

And so I began to ask myself What if?  What if those desperate nights were actually gifts?  What if that moon was meant for me, and the night songs, and the play of shadows?  What if I simply hadn’t been seeing what I should have been seeing all along?  What if I stopped using that word “insomnia”—stopped trying to force myself to sleep, stopped looking at night as a curse? What if I re-purposed night, if only for a little while?

I made the decision, I’m saying, to move from despair to a sense of near expectancy.  I began (at first with great deliberation but, quite quickly, with ease) to look forward to the night, and not to fear it.  I began to think of myself as being not at war, but on a soulful quest.  I started writing poems in those dark hours, something I had not done for years.  I started, calmly, to think about metaphors—until I became eager to find them.  I listened for music (outside my window, and in my own poem-making head) and settled, peacefully, into the sounds.  And the funniest thing is that, once I’d decided to make use of those long nights, the nights became shorter—almost instantly.  I’d settle in to watch the moon through a downstairs window, take out a pen to work on a poem and the next thing I knew it would be dawn.  I had—miraculously—slept.  Yes, I had a line or two of a poem beside me.  But I had slept as well, for a couple hours at a time, and this was the beginning of my road back to health.

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Morning Breaks (2)

Often, not wanting to disturb any other with the restlessness of my dreams, I spend the night on the downstairs couch waiting for the darkest hours to peel. Eventually, always, they do, though some nights feel longer, darker, less willing to recede. Last night was such a night.

Yet.

Morning came. The swamp heat of yesterday rinsed off by rain and leavened by a breeze. Each day advances its own possibilities. Today I will try to write a page.

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An Insomniac's Writing Moment (or, excerpt from novel in progress)

In July the orange-pink of the gladiola crack from their husks; they split the dark. The birds fidget in the trees. The crows are disgusted. The noise of quiet places is impossible. It kept Sophie awake all that night.

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The Soul of an Insomniac

Imagine the moon like this—this bright in the sky. Imagine the blade of light that falls through the window now, slashes my glass desk, deflects at the touch of my hand, is not cool, is not warm, is not a weight, is yet alive.

There are reasonable people who claim the moon is nothing but dead, a stone in the sky.

There are those who like their words straight up, their stories quickened.

But I have the soul of an insomniac and the eyes of my mother, and I pour color down, where I can, where I am. Too old now to apologize for living my one life out loud.

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Sleep

I slept past 3 AM for the first time this year, and I credit the snow, which fell like a hush through the night and changed the shape of the coming day. The snow, which insisted on dreams.

Every once in a while I see the world through clearer eyes. The first virtue is patience. Sleep grants it.

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Wind Howls

I could not sleep, for the wind was howling through the iced trees and a conversation banged around in my head. I roamed the five downstairs rooms of the house, staring through windows, watching the darkness, the ice glints, the blank faces of neighbors' living rooms. Tired, still, awake, always, I took Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project from the pile of unread books and began, discovering this:

The ice-sheathed trees twinkle in the morning drabness; a branch broken under the weight of ice touches the pavement, rattling its frozen tips. Someone peeks from behind a curtain of the house across the street, the face ashen against the dark space behind it. It is a young woman: he smiles at her and she quickly draws the curtain. All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all the world is.

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Insomnia: A Poem

At night I keep
watch over my own
heart grinding, hands
winged out like a sylph
to muffle the sound. You
wouldn’t die either,
unaware. You would
stand by affirming blue,
you would remember
the plummeting pink
of the sun that was
caught in the blur
of yesterday’s train,
the shroud of your face, too,
in the scratched glass,
and in the rocking.
Hands over heart,
heart crossing.

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A Poem

Lower Bunk

After the wail of the night’s only sleep
I lie awake in a room of girls —
a dog, a band of thieves beyond the door,
and the Mexican sky were I to want sky,
want men perched on adjacent roofs
like broken glass on the lip of a dividing wall.
Too soon for the rooster.
Too soon for the slim white goose
to beg for yet another day
through wooded lips.
Insomnia is not the country you are in.
It is the secret of yourself, again, again.

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