Writer and photographer Bill Hayes first met the great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks in 2008, when Sacks contacted him to say how much he enjoyed Hayes's The Anatomist. They corresponded, found shared interests and met once for lunch. "He was brilliant, sweet, modest, handsome, and prone to sudden ebullient outbursts of boyish enthusiasm.... I was sort of smitten, I had to admit."
Hayes was grieving his partner of more than 16 years, who one night suddenly went into cardiac arrest and died. In 2009, Hayes moved from San Francisco to Manhattan for a change of scene. Although he had not moved for Sacks, he was now his neighbor, and they began spending time together. Sacks at 77 was a deeply intellectual, unworldly man who had never come out as gay, had never been in a relationship and hadn't had sex in 35 years. "He was without a doubt the most unusual person I had ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him." Sacks told him to keep a journal, and Hayes's brief impressionistic entries are woven throughout Insomniac City, which seems written in heightened states of feeling that infuse every detail with meaning and transient beauty.
One of the remarkable elements of this memoir is its portrait of emotional openness. Hayes seems to be one of those people whose appreciation of daily life and capacity for love only expand with age and the awareness of death. His compassionate curiosity extends to everyone and everything around him. He loves the city in all its noise and grime, the late-night laughter rising to his first apartment from a café below, the shifting weather, the subway trains and the public dramas. "Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent." He meets all kinds of New Yorkers in the streets and on the subway, talks with them, photographs them (his photos bookend numerous prose segments throughout), builds acquaintanceships and friendships. At the same time, he credits the trees outside the window of his first apartment with helping him understand how to manage his grief and live a full life day by day. His relationship with Sacks is filled with domestic detail and tenderness--walks and baths, cooking, conversations, books and music--through to Sacks's final illness and his death in 2015. Thankfully, Hayes has no pat answers for anything in life, but many reasons why it continues to be worth living. --Sara Catterall
Shelf Talker: Grief, love and the beauty of the world infuse Bill Hayes's memoir about Manhattan and the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks.