Reviewers of Sleepless Nights were tempted to see the woman depicted as the mother of the narrator as the author’s mother. It is likely that “her weight on a stepladder washing windows, her roast and potatoes and fat yeast rolls” and the “peculiar, helpless assertiveness” that reflected “her profound acceptance of the things of life” were true to the facts. In Sleepless Nights, the narrator is perplexed that her mother was “so indifferent to the past. . . . as if she did not know who she was.” But Mary was simply living the life mapped out for her by habit and tradition. (A “relentless finality” haunted Elizabeth’s earlier autobiographical fictional character, Marian Coleman, when she considered the possibility that her life would duplicate her mother’s.)16 By removing herself from the narrative that had been handed to her by family and community, Elizabeth was obliged to reckon with the past and figure out who she really was.

In Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth wrote that she was reminded of her father by the “handsome” workmen who came to the house she owned in Maine, with their “sunburned faces . . . their strong fingers yellowed by nicotine”—men who awakened “a flirtatiousness” on her part. What, she wondered, “would it be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.” For both her parents, sleeping in their separate beds, “night is good because it leads to the day, to shoes and stockings, to coffee, to drudgery and repetition.” These are people, she is telling us, who do not question their lives or obsess about the past or the future.

Little is known about Elizabeth’s romantic life during these years, other than her decision to break up with a boyfriend when she learned that his father was a coal mine owner. (“I felt they were murderers. He didn’t like me much either.”)56 Another boyfriend may have been the model for the devoted swain in one of Elizabeth’s early short stories, “Yes and No.” Although the narrator describes him as having a “generous, warm nature,” she constantly criticizes him, “from his soul to his clothes.” She thinks of him as her “sweetheart,” yet she never wants to see him when he shows up. Although he is a political science faculty member at the university, “his views seemed to me flat and impersonal.” What keeps her in his thrall is his unshakable affection for her, obliging her to duck his constant proposals of marriage while keeping him on a string. She confesses that his green Chevrolet convertible—in which they drive to taverns where she drinks too much and baits him mercilessly—is one of his major attractions. The kicker, at the end of this short tale, is that she acknowledges “what pleasure we have all received from someone we imagined ‘not quite good enough’ for us.”