What to Look for in Winter

What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness, by Candia McWilliam, Jonathan Cape, RRP£16.99, 482 pages

The literary novelist Candia McWilliam is a reluctant memoirist. A few years ago, after it became known in publishing circles that she was an alcoholic, someone approached her with the suggestion that she write a guts-and-all misery memoir. She was so appalled by the idea that she drank for a fortnight. McWilliam is very much an intellectual; she’s also a Scot of the unsentimental variety, who by her own admission prefers to live “by suppression than by spillage”.

But in 2006, when she was sitting as a judge on the Man Booker prize, McWilliam began to suffer from a rare disorder called blepharospasm that caused her eyelids to clamp shut, rendering her functionally blind.

Her doctor reacted angrily to the idea that the condition had a psychological cause; but when a friend suggested that perhaps her eyes had shut because they had seen quite enough already, she decided it was time to write (or rather, dictate) “all this stuff I swore I would not write, ever”, just in case “the precise naming of things” would work the sadness out and bring her vision back.

What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness is a story of loss and self-destructiveness, beginning with a mother who commits suicide and ending with the loss through blindness of her greatest solitary pleasure: reading.

The journey in between is not unenchanted – there are summer houses in Holland, and on the Hebridean island of Colonsay, like minds (but also alcohol) at Cambridge, and, eventually, three children by two men she loves. And this is not to mention the literary successes which, tainted as they are by her unappreciative relatives, barely get a mention. Even when she’s a single mother she manages to have John Gielgud as a next-door neighbour.

But this of course makes McWilliam’s self-hatred all the more poignant. She is someone who “rushed to hurt myself before anyone else did”, and it is devastating to see how she herself “conducted the lightning strike” that cleaved her from a near-perfect relationship with her second husband, Fram – a mistake that fills her with a burning regret 13 years on.

McWilliam has a big heart, and is unceasingly generous – and joyous – in her description of others, even the new partner of her still-loved Fram. She’s also a master of characterisation. From the junkies she meets in rehab to the delightful Howards of Colonsay who need “to hack and dig to make a day feel lived through”, the people in this book are so precisely and deftly drawn you might peel them off the page. Sometimes just one sentence is all she requires: “The thing about Anthony was that he had some paisley flares and a blue rollneck and he could play the piano.” Yet when she turns her sharp, beautiful pen on herself, it makes for almost unbearable reading. We yearn to come between this woman and her description of herself as “a head mounted on a bit of taxidermy of, say, a large beast like a sea lion, that is falling in, sawdust and kapok spilling at unseemly seams”.

Candia McWilliam was famously accused, in a review, of having “swallowed the dictionary”. She is certainly no Hemingway, but her love and understanding of words is so gorgeously apparent in this memoir (“fragile”, she contends, is “too strong and consonantly pegged down” a word to describe blue flowers; “frail” does the job much better), that it cements her status as one of our most important literary writers beyond question. She has also achieved a rare thing: a misery memoir that, while touching on the far reaches of pain, leaves one feeling enriched, not dirty. Her hope was that it would bring back her sight; mine is that it will lead readers back to her fiction.

Susan Elderkin is the author of ‘The Voices’ (Harper Perennial)