The dying of the light | 7 August 2010

The phrasing of the subtitle is exact: a memoir in blindness, not of blind- ness. Like a portrait in oils — blindness being not just the subject, but the stuff of which this painfully stumbling, uncertainly reaching book is made. And not of, because it’s not something looked back on, like the memoir of a childhood: the blindness is still there waiting. ‘In’ acknowledges that, the way those even decades in recovery say ‘I am an alcoholic.’ And that, of course, heartbreakingly, is there too.

In 2006 the novelist Candia McWilliam started to lose her sight, and to lose it in an unusual and tormenting way. She suffers from something called blepharospasm, a disease where the muscles that hold her eyelids open malfunction. Her eyes worked fine, but she couldn’t see. For anyone, this would be horrible, but it is a particular torture for someone for whom books and reading mean near to everything.