Brandon Brown Reviews Diana Hamilton's The Awful Truth

Brandon Brown reviews Diana Hamilton's The Awful Truth (Golias Books, 2017) for Entropy, placing the book in a space he calls "dream lit." "The opposing pulls of writing and reading dreams, deeply personal and obliquely deferred, is mirrored by the structure of The Awful Truth. The book is formally a diptych," writes Brown. More:

...The first piece, “Write In Your Sleep,” is an expansive contribution to the oneirological tradition–mixing memoir, history, theory, study, anecdote, gossip, dream-transcription, reflections on literature, and exhortation (I partly read the title as an imperative to the reader.) The book’s second half, “Fear and Trembling,” is framed by Hamilton as a novella written by “Elsie Maria Kingdon” which she discovered outside of a movie theater in lower Manhattan.

“Write In Your Sleep” studies dreams from the murky junctures of private experience and the dreaming, objectified body. Hamilton writes,

This is about dreams and writing

them down. There’s a fake “neutrality”

though: if “who’s dreaming?” affects dream content,

it matters who gets to sleep through the night

While “Write In Your Sleep” preserves the odd deflection of subjectivity common to dream-writing, it doesn’t suggest the dreamer ceases to be, finally, a person in the waking world. One of the book’s “awful truths” is that, even while asleep, the nightmares of our dominion persists, conjugating our bodies according to its cruel grammar.

Hamilton narrates, and inscribes in the book, an exchange with the artist Rindon Johnson, whose Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People refers to a connection between the racist structure of waking life and the domain of dreaming (which depends on sleep for its existence.) Encountering this work, Hamilton writes to her friend Johnson, “presumptuously” asserting, “Now that I am learning about who goes to sleep, I am also learning that perhaps white people have the most dreams.” Johnson replies, “I don’t really dream and when I do the world is ending or something and when I wake up it still is. So my dreams are realistic I guess.” Hamilton contextualizes this apocalyptic insight with statistics...

Read the full review at Entropy.