My Morningless Mornings

Stefany Anne Golberg

In a ranch house in a Vegas suburb, Golberg’s peculiar brand of insomnia lives alongside an ailing father, a professor on permanent leave from the local university. Her mother has moved out, her older brother has gone to college, and she is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.

Startling, poignant, and harrowing, Golberg’s voice is informed by an eclectic range of interests, from Bruegel to Jung, Loren Eiseley to Marina Tsvetaeva. Equal parts coming-of-age memoir, art history, and philosophical inquiry, My Morningless Mornings is a young person’s reckoning with consciousness.

Praise for My Morningless Mornings

"My Morningless Mornings" is a brilliant book, an exploratory meditation on the significance of day and night, waking and sleeping, light and shadow. It moves fluidly from one object of contemplation to another, giving each a gentle, deft attention that makes it at once familiar and strange. This is a book that works on the reader's mind so that after you finish it, the world around you seems changed, revealed to be more mysterious, fascinating, illuminated and alive than you had realized before." —Emily Mitchell, Author of The Last Summer of the World and Viral: Stories

"Hypnotically written and impressively weird, My Morningless Mornings is an intense and harrowing meditation on Stefany Anne Golberg's youthful insomnia. More than that, though, it's a moving mini-portrait of the bond between a father and his daughter. I really loved this book." —Tom Bissell, Author of Apostle and co-author of The Disaster Artist

"This extraordinary little book is a cabinet of wonders. Golberg's quest to understand her relationship with the night and her insomnia takes her outward and inward simultaneously, from the deepest realms of her personal history to her brilliant notes on literature, art, and film. Like Patti Smith's Woolgathering, Golberg's My Morningless Mornings transforms seeming mundanities into magic by viewing life through an artful lens that makes everything feel novel. Pure alchemy." —J. M. Tyree, Co-author of Our Secret Life in the Movies

"It is disorienting to be a stranger. Stefany Anne Golberg's My Morningless Mornings takes the memoir beyond facile lyric self-regard and renders the troubling experience of the self as stranger... in childhood, of which we remain tributaries, another world perhaps definitively lost to the recuperation of grieving. This work shows us what it means that writing is re-living" —Michael Stone-Richards, Founding editor, Detroit Research

"Golberg brings her razor intellect, eclectic reading, and vast imagination to bear. Are we awake, or are we asleep? Did we dream this book, or did we dream us? Is this the most haunting thought on earth—or the most hopeful?: ‘We wake in the morning with the sense that there’s something we’re supposed to do, but this something has no name.’”—Heather King, Author of Parched, Shirt of Flame, and Ravished

"There aren't many things we can isolate as characteristic of all human beings everywhere. Walking on two feet? Wearing clothes? Sleeping by night and going about by day? We will have to scrap the last of these, as Stefany Ann Golberg's stunning work reveals to us the profound humanity of someone who stays up all night, who does not welcome the morning as the beginning of a new day full of promise, but rather experiences it as the dreaded end of that part of her life that is most real, most vital, and sharpest: the night." —Justin Erik Halldór Smith