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.

Then there’s the rest: her mother’s suicide when she was a child; her dreadful descent into alcoholism; her stalled literary career; a grand mal seizure; falls and a hideously broken leg; abscess; drug-bloat; an agonising operation; circling thoughts of suicide; a howling sense of having no place in the world. By the time her cat is run over near the end, you wonder whether the God in whom McWilliam believes is having a laugh with her.

It’s hard to express how grim, almost bludgeoning, this book can be to read: how raw and how full of sadness. It’s not a misery memoir, with the invariable redemptive uplift at the end; it is a memoir in misery, written with a 12-stepper’s punishing clarity. ‘In an age of self-help books,’ she writes deadpan, ‘here is an account, to warn any reader, of almost exemplary self-unhelp.’