Candia McWilliam

A starkly truthful account of this Scottish novelist's life, including her struggles with alcohal, her feelings of insecurity, her relationships with her ex-husbands and children, and the condition called blepharospasm that caused her blindness. With each chapter I experienced a different emotional response ranging from sympathy to frustration, disbelief and admiration.

Ugh, this book took forever to get through. It sounds like it should be fascinating. McWilliam suffers from a rare condition that produces functional blindness-- her eyes can see but her eyelids are unable to open. This condition arrived in middle age, a particularly cruel affliction for a person who lived her life in the world of books. Sudden blindness is a painful blow for a writer and reader.

I expected this to be a memoir about dealing with blindness, but it really is not. This is a show more memoir that seems to be simultaneously about everything and nothing at all. McWilliam covers the entirety of her life, and jumps around throughout. The memoir is written in stream-of-consciousness format, and the tone is depressing. Certainly McWilliam has experienced difficult and tragedy. Her mother committed suicide, and McWilliam is a recovering alcoholic. Still, the tone is terribly woeful. I've read plenty of memoirs about horrible things, and this one is particularly depressing. Much of the author's time is spent analyzing her relationships with her ex-husbands.

All of this said, McWilliam is quite a writer. She has some beautiful turns of phrase. Her technical writing ability is quite amazing. But this memoir is completely inaccessible. The writer seems to have little awareness of the benefits she reaped from growing up among the intelligentsia. I love the literary world in which McWilliam lives, but I found this memoir to be dull, slow going. show less

I also often find McWilliams prose too dense. But not with this book. It suits the character and story perfectly. A really great rendering of a voice. Not a story at all improbable - hardly newsworthy. But the more terrifying because of that.

Rather like Iris Murdoch in the kind of people she writes about, though they are more obviously part of a real world in which we ourselves participate - they are similarly dirty to Murdoch's characters, but less abstractly so - Candia McWilliam is here also every bit as clever as Iris M, and this extremely elevated trash fiction will easily and happily while away a few hours.