THE BLIND GIRL SEES

A middle-aged woman learns to live with and learn from severe visual impairment in this debut memoir.

In 2014, Needham, a 50-year-old artist, started to lose her sight, despite having had perfect vision all her life up to that point; her swift descent into a world of “grey fog” is terrifying to her. She goes into detail regarding the cause of her initial symptoms—involving corneal scarring, bacterial infestation, and unrecalled eye-care cream—and readers will feel her fright as she experiences it; the author, however, shows admirable strength and courage throughout this memoir. She braves a stem cell transplant surgery that restores her sight, but then experiences a fungal infection that greatly affects her ability to see. This is a memoir about resilience, and most of it is devoted to sharing Needham’s kernels of wisdom. As the book straddles the line between memoir and self-help, however, it struggles to stay focused. The most compelling parts of the author’s story are summarized in the book’s first 50 pages, but the remainder doesn’t have a clear organizational structure that makes it a useful self-help road map. What stand out most are Needham’s accounts of learning to adapt to her loss of vision; she tells of an episode at an airport, for example, in which she wasn’t aware that her colleagues had left, so she continued a conversation by herself. She presents such challenges with candor and humor. Elsewhere, she talks simply about gratitude, forgiveness, and wisdom won through struggle. These latter passages can be enlightening, but they might have been more effective if woven more seamlessly into her life story.

An often inspiring but uneasy combination of personal recollection and self-help that may fail to fully satisfy fans of either genre.