Everything Has to Coexist: A Guest Post by Honor Jones
Haunting, heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, Sleep explores the nuances of parenthood and childhood through one remarkable character. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Honor Jones on writing her debut novel, Sleep.
Hardcover $28.00
Sleep: A Novel
Sleep: A Novel
By Honor Jones
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.
From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.
A few years ago I wrote a couple of personal essays about divorce for The Atlantic, where I work as an editor. The essays struck a nerve with readers. I heard from a lot of women who found them comforting or inspiring (and some angry men on 4chan who thought I should literally be in prison). Some publishers reached out to me after to ask if I would consider writing a divorce memoir. There was nothing in the world I wanted to do less than write a divorce memoir! But I started thinking about what I would write, if I could write anything I wanted.
The answer was a novel about a divorce in which the divorce was the least important part of it. The book is really about what happened long before, and the mystery of what’s going to happen after. It’s about the deep roots of the choices we make, and about how our childhoods follow us through life.
I’d been a journalist for more than 15 years when I started writing SLEEP. I found it incredibly freeing to switch into this new mode, where the needs of the story, instead of history or news, dictate what happens next. I wrote the book in the three or so mornings and one weekend day a week that my kids were with their father. I’m quite sure I never would have written a novel without this structure in place. I missed them so much, and I felt incredibly guilty. Writing was a way to make the time away from them mean something. (I also became, for the first time in my life, someone who was perennially late to work.)
The book deals with some dark subjects. The main character is a journalist in the early days of #MeToo who is helping women turn their stories into news. At the same time, she’s living with the memories of something traumatic that happened to her as a 10-year-old girl, as her older daughter approaches the same age. Maybe you have to read the book to believe this, but I think it’s a really hopeful story, and often very funny. The character loves her daughters, loves her best friend, loves— well, maybe she’s not sure if she loves her new boyfriend yet, but she definitely loves the new and more liberated sex she’s having with him. She’s figuring out how to live her life.
In a lot of the scenes, I was trying to capture the nonstop experience of being a parent to young children. She’s having sex; she’s remembering an important book she once read; she’s thinking about the groceries she needs to buy. And that’s okay. Everything has to coexist; you can’t turn part of it off. At a certain point in life, what’s most important may be exactly this sense of fluidity, that many things and versions of yourself can be possible at once, that no damage is permanent. I hope that’s what readers take from the story.