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I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order – pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature The comments on Frances Farmer Is My Sister and allied blogs that have built sometimes to this glorious other text, this communion, this conversation, this casual liquidness, the superlative nature, that is generative and affirming as opposed to dismissive, that uses our own language instead of theirs And when I think about so much of the writing happening online, I think about the notebook form, and especially what Hardwick performs in Sleepless Nights, the drifting anecodotes mixing real-life characters with literary references, this tapestry Also: Joan Didion’s The White Album, Renata Adler’s mosaic Speedboat Elizabeth Hardwick was inspired especially by Speedboat for her Sleepless Nights – both scrapbooks that are kaleidoscopic, anecdotal, self-aware, witty, and intensely nostalgic Both women who previously needed to rely on the objectivity of the critic {Adler with film, Hardwick with literature}, but in their nonfiction novels they write the self, their experiences In Sleepless Nights, Hardwick critiques what has been historically considered worthwhile material for a novel: ‘It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate motion on the dock and signed up for the journey But after all, “I” am a woman’ Sleepless Nights shows a mind, a library at work, an old woman surrounded by her books All these experiments being written online-notes for projects never written, resembling sketches from Camus’s notebooks, experiments in the epistolary, the fragmented, this casual, cultural criticism, some of it in the comments It is all ephemeral, not wanting to be formalised I am beginning to think of this note-taking as the project itself Bhanu Kapil dismantling the novel in her Notes on Ban, notes for a character and a work that stands in for the work itself, some of these she writes online, in the