Naked Sleeper is about a love triangle between Nona (a person who can't sleep), her husband Roy, and Lyle, a married writer Nona meets at a writers' retreat where she has gone to work on a book about her parents' lives, specifically her abandonment by her father as a child. Nona's memoir becomes part of the text of Naked Sleeper itself so the reader watches several stories unfold simultaneously: that of Nona's relationship with Roy and Lyle, with her mother Rosalind who hates the idea of her daughter's book, and with her phantom father, a man who Nona comes to understand and forgive the moment she delves into his past. Naked Sleeper is very much a love story: of women for men, but also of mothers for daughters, of parents for children.