Book Review: "Insomniac City" by Bill Hayes

Full Title: Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks and Me by Bill Hayes

“I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness. After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t. The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.”

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes

Those of you who know who Bill Hayes is probably know him as the romantic partner of the writer and neurologist, Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat). In this book by Bill Hayes, he discusses his life with Oliver Sacks in an almost love letter to the city and the whirlwind of change that came about with them. Neither of them were from New York and neither of them were overtly involved in the expanding LGBTQ+ scene that was happening at the time. However, it seems that Bill Hayes found his love for the nighttime in the exact same way he found his love for Oliver Sacks. It had to be kept a little undercover for the sake of his partner but, he did it with as much heart as he could muster. So in that case, we also have a love letter to New York as well as one to the captivating relationship with the neurologist.

Sooner or later, we get to meet other people in the book. If you know Oliver Sacks, he was not (it seemed) a very social man though he also seemed perfectly nice in character. Hayes is slightly different. Through his narrative we meet a whole host of characters. One of those is a man who runs a tobacco shop who proves to be someone of difference in the city himself. This difference in, as it seems, a different way to Hayes and Sacks themselves presents us with a rather diverse painting of New York. One that about a decade or so ago, was still growing. It makes for great storytelling and lets us in on to the other people who must remain patient as they begin their journey of finding their new home wherever that might be.

They were together for no longer than five or six years before Oliver Sacks unfortunately succumbed to cancer in 2015 and yet, we get this vibrant, expanding and descriptive look at the inmost feelings of two men who though they feel a little out of place, they are trying to get on with their lives the best that they can. It is a beautiful love story and a narrative of this resillience of the soul - one where you must fight to live the way you want to. Accompanied by black and white photographs (I don't know whether they were taken like that, they just appear black and white in the book I think, for the sake of printing), it makes for a very three dimensional experience of like in early 21st century New York, a time of waves of change for America and everyone in it.

All in all, I thought that Bill Hayes' narrative was wonderful. It was fuelled by an energy that you can feel coming off the page - something magical as he describes that every single person, no matter whether they are part of the LGBTQ+ or not, every single person is an individual and lives a completely different life to what you are probably thinking. And that the only way to know what kind of life they lead is to really know them - nothing else can be assumed or predicted. Every person in the city, every person in the world has their own story that you know nothing about.