Insomniac City : New York, Oliver, and me / Bill Hayes.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2017 List

A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.

"A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation."--Anne Lamott

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.

And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part 1 Insomniac City
• Insomniac City (p. 2)
• Sleep: Loss (p. 7)
• Black Crow (p. 13)
• O and I (p. 21)
• On Becoming a New Yorker (p. 24)
• Subway Lifer (p. 29)
• The Summer Michael Jackson Died (p. 36)
• A Fisherman on the Subway (p. 47)
• A Poem Written on the Stars (p. 58)
• The Moving Man (p. 67)
• For the Skateboarders (p. 80)
• Part II On Being Not Dead
• The Thank-You Man (p. 89)
• The Same Taxi Twice (p. 104)
• The Weeping Man (p. 117)
• On Being Not Dead (p. 129)
• On a Typewriter (p. 132)
• At the Skateboard Park (p. 134)
• A Woman Who Knew Her Way (p. 146)
• Driving a Supermodel (p. 156)
• Lessons from the Smoke Shop (p. 164)
• A Year in Trees (p. 180)
• On Father's Day (p. 186)
• Part III How New York Breaks Your Heart
• My Afternoon with Ilona (p. 197)
• His Name Is Raheem (p. 213)
• A Monet of One's Own (p. 228)
• But (p. 239)
• Everything That I Don't Have (p. 255)
• A Pencil Sharpener (p. 266)
• Home (p. 286)
• Postscript (p. 289)
• Acknowledgments (p. 293)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Hayes's tender memoir is a love letter-to New York City and to renowned science writer Oliver Sacks. Devastated by the sudden death of a longtime partner, Hayes (The Anatomist) relocated from San Francisco to Manhattan, where he became enamored with the strange rituals and brusque charm of the locals. At roughly the same time, he entered a relationship with Sacks, whose magisterial prose and celebrity concealed the fact that he'd been celibate for 35 years and never had a serious romantic attachment. Hayes explores his fascination with his new home and growing intimacy with the unworldly, brilliant man three decades his senior who was experiencing true love for the first time. In a mélange of journal entries, photos, scenes, and meditations, Hayes reconstructs his immersion in New York and the flowering of his involvement with Sacks, a romance cut short by the fatal return of Sacks's cancer. Hayes's stylistic approach provides immediacy to his recollections, imbuing conversations with cab drivers and the clerk at the local bodega with significance that resonates past the superficial mundanity. Sacks wrote until the very end, and his public examination of his impending death and sexual orientation help to make Hayes's understated descriptions of their life together remarkably poignant. Readers will find themselves wishing the two men had more time, but as Hayes makes clear, they wasted none of the time they had. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Hayes (The Anatomist, 2007) had recently lost his longtime partner when he decided to leave San Francisco for New York in 2009, at age 48. There, he reunited with the writer Oliver Sacks, having met him once before when Sacks reached out to praise his book. The two bonded quickly, though to what end Hayes wasn't immediately sure. Soon though, they were together all the time, and Hayes' tender encapsulations of his lover are gold on the page: Sacks' wallet held a tiny periodic table in the slot where a driver's license would go. Sacks popped his first bottle of champagne in his late seventies wearing protective goggles. He warned Hayes, more than once, of the imminent danger of death, should he happen to swallow too many fireflies. They stayed together until Sacks died in 2015, and this book is Hayes' letter of love for Sacks and New York City. Alongside journal entries, many of them conversations between the author and O, are Hayes' essays about the people, poetry, and rhythms of his adopted city, as well as his photographs.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist