Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
    Unavailable
    What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
    Unavailable
    What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
    Ebook532 pages8 hours

    What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness

    By Candia McWilliam

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The British literary sensation—“the most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious and heart-rending of memoirs ” (The Telegraph)—the story of a celebrated writer’s sudden descent into blindness, and of the redemptive journey into the past that her loss of sight sets in motion. Candia McWilliam, whose novels A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger, and Debatable Land made her a reader favorite throughout the United Kingdom and around the world, here breaks her decade-long silence with a searing, intimate memoir that fans of Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Mary Karr’s Lit, and Diana Athill’s Somewhere Toward the End will agree “cements her status as one of our most important literary writers beyond question” (Financial Times).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 20, 2012
    ISBN9780062094520
    Unavailable
    What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
    Author

    Candia McWilliam

    Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation which harvested tendons from her leg in order to enable her to open her eyelids.Her most recent book is her critically acclaimed memoir, What to Look for in Winter.

    Related to What to Look for in Winter

    Related ebooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Crossing Over

      Mar 20, 2018

      Crossing Over
      12 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Jun 16, 2021

      The beginnings of M. Leona Godin’s new book, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, June 2021), trace back to a class on Milton that she took as an undergraduate. Since then, Godin’s experiences as a scholar, writer

      3 min read

    • Article

      Flowers in Vases

      Mar 15, 2022

      Flowers in Vases
      1 min read

    • Article

      George Bradley

      Jun 8, 2021

      Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dishin 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drugand by the fifties had become both widely availableand cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrivedin time for me, who without it would have dieda ch

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Language the Poet Knows

      Dec 11, 2018

      The Language the Poet Knows
      4 min read

    • Article

      Entering Through the Side Door

      Aug 18, 2021

      THIRTEEN years ago I attended my very first writers colony and began living a lie. The lie wasn’t to do with the worry writers often feel—that rude, wicked thing we call impostor’s syndrome, a fear that we aren’t qualified to put our thoughts onto th

      10 min read

    • Article

      SCOOP Club

      Oct 6, 2021

      I was all caught up in my conceitI was living on deceitI had been blinded in my ego, nothing, I could seeThen, I started searching for me, I gave up on everythingI couldn't dance or singI lost all the faith that bound meI gave up on searching for me,

      1 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Apr 12, 2023

      U.S. Supreme Court decisions on policing, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, death certificates, physics textbooks, property labels on books. In their debut poetry collection, I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, published in May by Alice James Books, Cand

      3 min read

    • Article

      Applied Artistry

      Oct 26, 2021

      Applied Artistry
      4 min read

    • Article

      Sam Delaney Is At Home

      Oct 24, 2022

      I received an unsolicited package in the mail. It was a padded envelope, pretty crumpled, my name and address scrawled in Sharpie. Maybe I’ve watched too many police procedurals, but I immediately analysed the handwriting as being that of a psychopat

      2 min read

    • Article

      I Ran Away From Home At 60!

      Feb 20, 2024

      Three decades ago, I celebrated my 30th birthday in the time-honoured tradition of all young people who think they are an adult but have no real idea about life, duty or personal responsibility – I got smashed. In fairness, I had quite a lot to get s

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sigrid Nunez

      Sep 15, 2017

      During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khme

      23 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time

      Nov 24, 2020

      Now Is the Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Announcing The winners Of Our FLASH CONTEST

      Feb 29, 2020

      I sever the first two fingers of my left hand on a Tuesday. They fall to the ground at my feet, causing a momentary confusion as I wonder what tree has dropped this odd fruit. Then I see the crescent scar left behind by a fish hook and know that thes

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Mamta Chaudhry

      Dec 23, 2020

      At a time when I’m housebound and only my imagination is free to roam, it is head-spinning to read the phrase, “if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary” and wonder if in our ceaseless rush forward, these are days, too, that will be indelibly

      4 min read

    Reviews for What to Look for in Winter

    3.5/5

    26 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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.