What to Look For in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness

I'm reading Candia McWilliam's memoir What to Look For in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness. She dictates most of the book because she can't see, hence the subtitle. I don't read too many books about individual experience of mental illness - mostly because they tend to conform to a simplistic narrative of "I was once ok and then this thing happened and I wasn't ok and then thanks to this amazing doctor/medication/the love of my family I am now cured". Tend, I said. Not all do. This one doesn't - at least not so far. I'm on p.276 out of 480. I know she isn't blind anymore so she does get cured of that but I doubt she will finish with "and now I am totally fine"

I feel quite sympathetic to Candia McWilliam but also a bit jealous/envious. Class is why. And a sort of idiot's luck. Not that she is an idiot, not by any means. But she comes across as a bit vacant at times, drifting through things - or she writes about them as if she has been drifting through them. How did she get jobs, for instance? And everyone she mentions is the sister to someone famous and brilliant in her own right at something or other.

An example from my own life might read like this:

When I was asked to cover a shift at Belsize library one Tuesday morning, I found I was to be working with Jean and Debbie. Jean was known as being handy with a witty reply to the more elderly male readers and was sister to one of the best plumbers in Kentish Town. Her marriage to Den had broken up but they were devoted parents to Paul who was doing Business Management at the Polytechnic of East London. She and Debbie took great care of me, Debbie giving me a cheese and tomato sandwich she couldn't eat herself because as we found out later, she was pregnant with Katie, who went on to work for English Heritage. Jean was especially talented at making tea. 

I think Candia's experience of people isn't that disimilar to the above - they were people she knew and who were connected in various ways. But she mentions them knowing that many of her readers will recognise the names.

People also seem incredibly kind to her on the whole - she has been adopted at various stages of her life by kindly people. She came up against some difficult people - her second mother-in-law and her step-mother - but not many.

I think I am envious myself - not being one to endear herself to people wanting to take care of her. If such people exist. I wouldn't know as I doubt I would have recognised them as such. Either not noticed them at all, or have misinterpreted their intentions.

Anyway, it's a good book. A bit hard to keep track of things because she does wander about a bit but bear with it and it all makes sense and hangs together.

(Disclaimer: I did cover a shift at Belsize at least once, but can't remember who I worked with. I don't think there was a Jean and a Debbie, but there would only have been two of them, maybe one. And I might be mixing Belsize up with Hampstead library... I think I am. It was a long time ago.)