Review: ‘Sleepwalking’ by Meg Wolitzer

I first read Meg Wolitzer during a holiday to Greece in the summer of 2015, splayed out on a sunlounger getting suncream fingerprints on a proof of ‘Belzhar’. I fell head over heels with the novel and Wolitzer’s writing.

When Sarah and I began drawing up a working list of titles we might like to read for ‘The Dark Academicals’, I shoehorned ‘Sleepwalking’ on there in a heartbeat.

Wolitzer’s debut is an under-the-radar text that we had to import from the US and isn’t even available on Kindle, but I’d seen it on a few dark academia reading lists and it felt like the perfect fit. It wasn’t quite the perfect fit I imagined, but I loved ‘Sleepwalking’.

Sleepwalking tells the story of the three notorious “death girls,” so called on the Swarthmore campus because they dress in black and are each absorbed in the work and suicide of a different poet: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Wolitzer’s creation Lucy Asher, a gifted writer who drowned herself at twenty-four.  At night the death girls gather in a candlelit room to read their heroines’ work aloud.

But an affair with Julian, an upperclassman, pushes sensitive , struggling Claire Danziger—she of the Lucy Asher obsession-–to consider to what degree her “death girl” identity is really who she is.  As she grapples with her feelings for Julian, her own understanding of herself and her past begins to shift uncomfortably and even disturbingly. Finally, Claire takes drastic measures to confront the facts about herself that she has been avoiding for years.

Wolitzer’s writing is spellbinding. It’s both spare and lyrical, full of depth and scratches across brain. It blew us both away, just as it did in ‘Sleepwalking’.

Though the summary of the novel promises an exploration of the three ‘death girls’, the focus is mostly on Claire, Lucy and Lucy’s parents. It explores parent and child relationships, particularly mother-daughter ones between Claire and her mum, Lucy and her mum, and Claire and Lucy’s mum; grief; loss; depression and the female experience of pain and trauma. But the three ‘death girls’ exploring their poets’ work and studying are actually only a part of the novel for a brief amount of time.

This close look at these characters does give the novel room to explore the female experience and highlight the overpowering force of men in these situations, in Claire’s boyfriend Julian particularly, as he tries to curb Claire’s obsession with Lucy Ascher and takes everything very personally.

‘Sleepwalking’ is a fascinating study of the power of poetry and literature and the importance of recognising yourself in it, but also the many ways in which society still undermine the feelings and experiences of women.

But is it dark academia? You’ll have to listen to this week’s episode of the podcast to find out!

You can listen to us discuss ‘Sleepwalking’ in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and below:

Have you read ‘Sleepwalking’, or is it still on your TBR? What did you think?

Written by Sophie