Irish writer tells of new life with blindness in memoir

From The Irish Times:

A succinct description of what a reader might expect from this unusual memoir is perhaps best provided by the author herself when she notes that she emptied her life to the extent that she made of it a cell. “I haven’t made a charming minimalist environment for the contemplation of the good, I have fixed up a metal cave, I think I did it with drink first and with a good disinfecting blast of high-pressure shame after that. Then I went blind.”

Candia McWilliam (pictured) was born in Edinburgh in 1955. Her father was an architectural writer and academic who worked for the National Trust for Scotland. “Painstaking effortlessness, curiosa felicitas , was my father’s apparently idling, actually supercharged, gear. There may have been something irresistible to him about my mother’s lavish appearance and her extremer way. But it was also, time showed, at some level repulsive. The quick term for this is, I suppose, a fatal attraction.”

Her mother killed herself when Candia was nine. The event, like much in this disturbing, irritating and often wonderful book is treated in the brittlest of tones. “I will now try to remake my mother’s last day during which she took me to the Nubian goat farm at Cammo to choose a pointer puppy, a dog that must have been a sop to me, or perhaps to herself, like the drugged meat burglars are said to throw for guard dogs.”

From boarding school McWilliam went on to Cambridge, and spent the years after doing some journalism and working at Vogue . In 1981 she married Quentin Wallop, 10th earl of Portsmouth. They had two children before the marriage ended. A second marriage, to an Oxford don named Fram Dinshaw, took place in 1986, and in 1988 McWilliam published her first novel, A Case of Knives. The couple had a son before splitting in 1996, a break initiated by McWilliam – then deep in the throes of alcoholism – and an act that still haunts her. Dinshaw looms distressingly large in the book.

She got sober, though by the time she began this memoir she had been suffering from writer’s block for some years. She had published a collection of stories in 1997; her last novel was published in 1994. It was the blindness – or the urge to tell of it – that allowed her to break through the block. The problems began in 2006. Her eyes and vision were fine, but she had been struck with blepharospasm, a rare neurological disorder that made it virtually impossible for her to open her eyes.

Hers was never going to be a memoir treacly with redemption: “I haven’t yet met another ‘functionally blind’ person, as I feel that attending Alcoholics Anonymous is already a great enough adventure in fellow feeling, and I can’t face more.” Yet she has written a book that is painfully, sometimes cringingly, revealing. There were moments I admired her honesty – the willingness to speak frankly of loneliness and regret – but there were as many moments when, like Dinshaw (who, according to McWilliam, is often bored or exasperated by her oft-professed self-loathing), I just felt fed up with yet another passage insisting on how fat, ugly and useless she is.

The abuse is not confined to the self-estranging period of her blindness – during which she experiences herself as “a monstrous dowager with Tourettian facial tics and the creep-and-lurch gait of a not sufficiently surreptitious drunk”. It is, rather, a net cast back over her entire life. McWilliam was a beauty, and her novels had won awards. But she saw herself during those younger years as a person of “putrid, tarty, fat, pretentious artifice”.

The repetition of such admissions makes the book an uncomfortable read. For this memoir is not a presentation of past afflictions overcome. It often reads instead like excerpts from a sharply written but private journal in which “issues” are being worked through on the page, the text we hold in our hands an enactment of the trouble its author is describing: a tendency towards public and private self-ridicule. I don’t think I’ve read another memoir at once so naked and so meticulously – and often beautifully – crafted.

McWilliam is often at her best when writing about people she doesn’t know well (the self-involvement, and thus self-abasement, is here non-existent): the shaman who treats her, the women with whom she shares hospital rooms. Her description of bodily sensations – a grand-mal seizure, a broken leg, the packing of seaweed in a putrid wound – are impressive. The Scottish island of Colonsay, her adopted home, is rendered with loving exactitude. She describes her blindness with chill precision. Not being able to read is an incalculable loss, but she notes that nothing “that insists upon concentration, as this limitation does, is all bad. Memory grows less swooning, more muscular, recall more instructable, like a messenger, and as potent and alarming”.

But Dinshaw is the subject to which she keeps returning. During the time of her blindness Dinshaw and his partner, Claudia, invite her to stay with them. Dinshaw tries to coax her into liking herself, but “when he is really bored he says that I might as well, since I have made such a mess of my own life, rejoin myself to theirs”. Her adoration of Dinshaw (and of Claudia) borders on the abject, and the reader wants to yank her free. “To this day I take very few breaths that are independent of the thought of Fram . . . I feel no experience full or ratified until I have described it to him . . . He is my home. I am homeless.”

In 2009 McWilliam underwent a procedure called Crawford brow suspension, in which tendons from behind her knee were removed and sewn in beneath the skin, stitching the eyelids to the brows.

Out of her experience of blindness, and the years of darkness before, she has produced a book that is both fascinating and exasperating, admirably candid and perhaps, in parts, inadvisable. An antidote to memoir schmaltz (a “self un-help” book), it is ultimately life-affirming. Suicide – given the death of her own mother and, in her own worst times, the hovering thought of it – is an idea returned to, and turned from, repeatedly. “That is what truth to life is. The way to be true to life is to remain alive.”