February 7, 2022

The Cure For Sleep, by Tanya Shadrick

“How I began to spend my time that season would enlarge my life in a way I would only understand later, looking back. At the water’s edge that very first day when I stepped out from the hidden and habitual along with my clothes, I couldn’t know that even a middle-aged mother swimming laps in a small town can send ripples through the universe. But it did.”

Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure For Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life is a story of becoming, of wonder, awe and possibility. It’s a story of life after death, of creative fulfillment after motherhood, of fierce determination, and the triumph of artistic expression and human connection. Triumph that comes against the odds, for Shadrick grew up accustomed to hiding on the margins, shy and uncomfortable with her place in the world, the working class daughter of a broken marriage, rejected by her father, growing up in the shadow of her mother’s difficult second marriage. Shadrick makes it out of her hometown, however, attending university, where she falls in love with a boy who’s as comfortable retired from society as she is, and they make a life together whose foundation is books and ideas, questions and conversation. And then soon after the birth of their first child, a medical emergency after complications, Shadrick comes as close to dying as one can while still being able to tell the tale, and a vision in this moment causes her to re-imagine her place in the world, to find a way to live more boldly and grow through connection with others.

Shadrick writes about early motherhood as an expedition in a way that delightfully recalls Maria Mutch’s memoir Know the Night, challenging notions of maternal instinct as these were feelings she had to conjure by practice. After having told the story of her “First Life,” she begins to live her second one differently, venturing out to meet other mothers and finding connection there, the inverse of such a tiresome cliche, and together these women support one another and find new ways to make a village. Shadrick eventually leaves the security of her administrative job at the university she attended to begin collecting stories of people living out their last days in hospices. She also starts swimming during the hours she can find for herself, which proves most inspiring, and she eventually becomes an artist in residence at the swimming pool, writing what she calls “laps of longhand.” All these experiences leading Shadrick to become known by a woman called Lynne Roper, whose notes and diaries, after Roper’s death, are edited into a volume called Wild Woman Swimming, longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize in 2019.

How does one build a life? How does one become an artist?

(And most pressing: what does one wear for such an occasion? Shadrick would recommended a headscarf and an apron.)

If you’ve ever been a human, you’ll intuit that Shadrick’s path is not straightforward. That her success does not extinguish her pain and longing that resulted from her father’s rejection. That her long and beautiful marriage does not continue without the complication of Shadrick falling in love with somebody else. That achieving one’s goals does not always (or ever?) deliver happily ever after, and a wife, a woman, a mother, is forever becoming, which is the best possible outcome, even if it means that such a thing as satisfaction is always out of reach.

I ordered The Cure For Sleep from the UK after following Shadrick for some time on Instagram (swimming connections, I think) and coming to appreciate her artistic vision, and the memoir was everything I’d hoped it would be. Rich and literary, complex and thought-provoking, challenging and absorbing at once.