Publication of new book: The Sky Within – A Memoir of Sleep

My fourth book (and first non-fiction offering), winner of the Backlash Press prize for non-fiction, has been published!

It’s not very easy to describe how it makes me feel to finally see this book in print. I’ve been working on it physically for about three years but far, far longer emotionally. This book is a very personal account charting my journey and relationship over many years with chronic insomnia and it has been through many incarnations. There have been times when I have stopped writing it, really questioning if this is a story I can tell, or even want to tell. On occasion I was paralysed by that question, who am I to write this when I cannot offer a solution? When I’m not better, so how can it give others hope?

But I realised that this is the point entirely; that life isn’t about neat, linear progressions from A to B and when we find ourselves at B we are ‘cured.’ All of the other books out there on the market about insomnia that I found couldn’t be more different from what I’ve written; they are all about solutions. Well, I’m not offering a solution. But what I am offering are, I hope, tools for when life feels heavy and difficult. Because this isn’t just about living with insomnia, it’s about when life doesn’t go the way we hope or expect it to. And how, if we stop fighting the way we believe life ‘should’ be, a richness can open up in which we understand that we don’t need to find all the answers or a ‘cure’ in order to live meaningfully.

Click here to purchase my book from Backlash Press. If you read it, I would absolutely love to know what you think of it.