Blind Man's Bluff
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice
A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021
A writer’s humorous and often-heartbreaking tale of losing his sight—and how he hid it from the world.
At age sixteen, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. When high-school friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised him to aim for C’s in his classes, he tried to escape the stigma by pretending he could still see.
In this unfailingly candid yet humorous memoir, Hill discloses the tricks he employed to pass for sighted, from displaying shelves of paperbacks he read on tape to arriving early on first dates so women would have to find him. He risked his life every time he crossed a street, doing his best to listen for approaching cars. A good memory and pop culture obsessions like Tom Cruise, Prince, and all things 1980s allowed him to steer conversations toward common experiences.
For fifteen years, Hill hid his blindness from friends, colleagues, and lovers, even convincing himself that if he stared long enough, his blurry peripheral vision would bring the world into focus. At thirty, faced with a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Hill (Academy Gothic) shares a stirring if meandering story about losing his sight. At age 16, he was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and deemed legally blind. When asked about what he can and can't see, Hill writes, "The short answer is this: I don't see what I directly look at." While his narrative sometimes digresses into tangents about unrelated childhood crushes and his mom's Weight Watchers meetings, humor buoys his account as he lays bare his attempts hide his legal blindness in a sighted world. He'd arrive early for dates so he could be found first; memorized buttons on the microwave and the route to the convenience store; and even entered a creative writing program where classmates, unaware of his blindness, attributed his unapproachability to him being "an asshole." Eventually he met and married a fellow MFA student, but their relationship buckled under his denial about his disability ("I will not help you hide your blindness from the world," his wife wrote to him before their divorce). In the wake of their split, Hill struggled to write about his condition—"the thought of readers... knowing I was blind, disabled, felt like the opposite of why I chose to be a writer"—but after finding love again, his reluctance gave way to self-acceptance. This moving account doesn't disappoint.
