The Way I Sleep Is Sporadically and Often Desperately

If you were to see my bed or even my bedroom, it might be hard to think someone sleeps there. Books, paper — so much paper just somehow everywhere — clothes, letters, those envelopes and boxes people mail books in, Gameboy Advance games — only Pokémon, really—a toothbrush, pens, used up batteries, and all kinds of random cords that belong or once belonged to something I needed. The way I sleep is sporadically and often desperately. Somehow, The Way We Sleep captures all of this and so much more.

I don’t like anthologies and have maybe read one or two before picking up Jessa Bye and C. James Bye’s The Way We Sleep. Knowing I had a deadline to read this, I was not looking forward to it. Dreading it, really. Anthologies or even just normal short story collection can take me months upon months to get through and so I was expecting to have to send some disappointing emails this week, explaining I was still only on page 20. But then just three sittings later, it was all over and I was shocked by how quickly it went, how easy it was, how beautiful and painful those pages were.

I have had a very tumultuous relationship with sleep and my bed. Dreams, though, we’ve always been on the same team. But the bed, it can be a lonely place, often a haunted place, a crippling and emotional place. Now, if I were to try to explain what my bed means to me, I’d probably just hand someone The Way We Sleep. It really covers everything, even the things that haven’t happened to me. It’s beautiful and grotesque and touching and tragic and funny and playful and philosophical and magical.

The writing in here is mostly top notch, with my favorites being by Roxane Gay, J.A. Tyler, Etgar Keret, Matthew Salesses, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Margaret Patton Chapman, and Angi Becker Stevens, whose story was my absolute favorite and the one I still cannot stop thinking about. There are a few stories that fall short, but this book is really full of amazing things, and for every story that misses, there are five that hit in ways you never imagined.

And it’s not just full of short stories, but also quick and funny and weirdly insightful interviews and comics. The comics were one of my favorite parts of the reading experience. Right in the middle of the book, it works as a sort of breather from the prose. Playful and funny and emotional, the comics really rejuvenate you and make it so you need to keep reading. For me, even more than that affect is the fact that I dream weirdly often in cartoon. I mean, to see my dreams reflected in a book is one thing, but to see them drawn out is really something else. Something deeply satisfying and beautiful.

The Way We Sleep just works. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. Jessa Bye and C James Bye have done a tremendous job here, because editing a book like this is much more than simply checking grammar. The structure and juxtapositions of this book make for an extremely gratifying reading experience and allows the pacing to never get bogged down by similarity of content or tone or style. This is a collection of stories, comics, and interviews that just speeds by.

Being released just in time for the holidays, I can’t recommend it enough as it would be perfect for friends, lovers, and family. There’s something in here for everyone, whether they’re looking for sex or love or humor or just something to pass these cold wintry nights.

So, yes, The Way We Sleep is something you want to read. But be sure to keep it next to your bed, just in case.

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.