Girl In The Dark: A Memoir

"Anna Lyndsey has a slight light sensitivity that grows worse until it becomes debilitating and she finds herself living in a dark box, mummified in layers of light-protectant clothing. Her disorienting, dreamy memoir tries to capture what it feels like to live in the dark, where her personhood, her presence as a body are suddenly in question. How do you deal with a sudden, violent narrowing of life — from something that’s expansive, impossibly full, to a small existence where meaning, instead of flowing in streams, must be eked out from unwilling corners? And what about identity — are you still yourself if everything you associated with your former life is impossible? In this gorgeous book, that question — is there such a thing as a stable, continuous self? — goes from being theoretical to being desperately, urgently relevant."