Blindness: possibly the worst-case scenario for a woman who makes her living reading and writing. In What to Look for in Winter, Scottish novelist Candia McWilliams (Wait Till I Tell You) slowly unveils her 2006 descent into the physical condition of blepharospasm--the involuntary twitching of one's eyelid--in her case, a rarer form of the illness clamped her eyelids shut. With no outward vision, McWilliams zigzags inward, as she attempts to understand the illness that has made her functionally blind. "My eyes work quite well," she explains, "but my brain has decided that they must be shut and that its self-allotted job is by no means to permit them to open."
In this bluntly honest memoir, McWilliams puts her entire past (including her mother's suicide and her own alcoholism) under the microscope as she bumps and fumbles her way through her physical surroundings. After years of muffling, winter-like sightlessness, she comes to a possible psychological basis for her non-seeing "shameful pain." However, despite remorse, she writes, "I must put myself out into the warm and light, that I am convinced I do not deserve." With the undertaking of a painful, two-part operation called the "Crawford Brow Suspension," McWilliams regains sight, although the condition is just "held off" rather than cured. What to Look for in Winter is an intense and meandering journey through the bittersweet landscape of a talented writer's life. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer