A Life Misplaced

Sleepless Nights By Elizabeth Hardwick Random House, 151 pp., $8.95 Circling around the center of life, focusing on the periphery, Elizabeth Hardwick has meticulously fashioned an impersonal memoir—more a notebook of sorts, actually—that ignites in flashes.

Shifting back and forth in time, Sleepless Nights encompasses free associations, memories, reflections, houses past and present, letters, friends seen then and now, Boston, Amsterdam, Maine, her Kentucky childhood, Billie Holiday and 52nd Street in 1943, her mother, a vaudevillians’ hotel in the Times Square area, salesmen on a train at night, a left-wing dandy, Kentucky Communists, a Boston dowager and her homosexual friend, and more. A lifetime is here, and it isn’t.

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Sleepless Nights By Elizabeth Hardwick Random House, 151 pp., $8.95 Circling around the center of life, focusing on the periphery, Elizabeth Hardwick has meticulously fashioned an impersonal memoir—more a notebook of sorts, actually—that ignites in flashes.

Shifting back and forth in time, Sleepless Nights encompasses free associations, memories, reflections, houses past and present, letters, friends seen then and now, Boston, Amsterdam, Maine, her Kentucky childhood, Billie Holiday and 52nd Street in 1943, her mother, a vaudevillians’ hotel in the Times Square area, salesmen on a train at night, a left-wing dandy, Kentucky Communists, a Boston dowager and her homosexual friend, and more. A lifetime is here, and it isn’t.