I read Patricia Morrisroe's memoir of insomnia during two consecutive middle-of-the-night bouts of sleeplessness last week. I don't think I have it quite as rough as Morrisroe, who has sometimes moved house to get away from noisy neighbors who keep her up nights, and who once was almost run over by a cab in whose path she crossed, mindlessly, so dazed was she by lack of sleep.

Here, we follow Morrisroe as she ventures into sleep labs and therapists' offices, as she fills prescriptions and tests pricey mattresses, all in search of a good night's sleep. She weaves a lot of reporting into the memoir, so readers learn not only about her personal struggles; we also are offered a lot of information about the history of insomnia, and the current state-of-the-field of sleep research. Most culturally revealing fact: sleep researchers today are devoting the lion's share of their energy not to helping insomniacs get some zzzzzs, but to engineering ways for all of us to get by on less sleep.

Occasionally, I found myself bristling at the markers of Morrisroe's wealth—the mentions of shopping for a house in neighborhoods whose residents included Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren; the casual descriptions of closet space in her New York apartment that made me think her digs must be ten times the size of any hovel I inhabited during my Manhattan years—but in general I was in the hands of a narrator who appealed to me, a narrator I trusted, whose zeal to recapture the attentions of Morpheus I deeply understood. I am one who re-reads books I like; Wide Awake will stay on one of the shelves of my multi-tiered bedside table, and I am sure it will not be long before l pull it out again, on another night when I am seeking good company for the long hours before me.

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