Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights is a memoir, a novel, and a lyrical internal monologue. Scattered, fitted prose reads loose, fast, and free. Most definitely, it is beatnik spontaneous prose[1] evolved, smoothed, primed, clean, raw, delicately coherently confuddled.
Spontaneous prose is a writing style that aims to capture the immediacy of thought and emotion. Often associated with the Beat Generation, particularly Jack Kerouac, it's a form of stream-of-consciousness writing. The idea is to let words flow without overthinking structure or grammar, to mirror the natural rhythms of the mind. It's raw, often fragmented, and pulsates with energy. It seeks to break free from traditional narrative constraints to create something more organic. ↩︎