My Morningless Mornings

Stefany Anne Golberg
My Morningless Mornings
(Unnamed Press, March 2020)

“Sleeplessness was my great discovery, darkness my perfect world.”

As a teenager from a troubled family living outside Las Vegas, Stefany Anne Golberg chooses to separate herself from the everyday world around her. She is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.

Weaving together metaphor and myth, art and psychology, Golberg explores what wakefulness really means.  Why 3 am is when most crimes are committed, when fevers either break or triumph, why it is known as “the hour of the wolf.” My Morningless Mornings is a startling and lyrical inquiry into the liminal space between night and day bringing together ideas about the psyche from Jung and Ingmar Bergman, the fantastical writing of Jules Verne and Bram Stoker and the dark paintings of Breugel.

Like Eula Biss’ fascinating inquiry into fear and vaccines, On Immunity, My Morningless Mornings examines what consciousness means and why insomnia may be a state to celebrate rather than dread.

Praise for My Morningless Mornings

“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. It moves fluidly from one object of contemplation to another, giving each a gentle, deft attention that makes it at once familiar and strange.”
—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

“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 Anne 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, author of Irrationality


“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

“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

“If you’re after something kind of cerebral and meditative for the middle of the night (which, this time of year, could be 7:00 pm), Stefany Anne Golberg’s memoir-cum-philosophy book My Morningless Mornings is here for you…It’s a short and meandering read perfect for the dark hours.”
—Sarah Neilson, Electric Literature

Stefany Anne Golberg is a multi media artist who, with several other artists, co founded Flux Factory, an arts collective in Brooklyn. Along with her husband Morgan Meis, she published Dead People, a series of eulogies about cultural icons, garnering praise from Adam Gopnik, Tom Bissell, and Keith Gessen among many others. She has written for the Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New England Review and was Critic in Residence at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She now lives in Detroit where she works at the College of Creative Studies and has created a public art museum in her house named the Huckleberry Explorer’s Club.