Girl in the Dark

In this deeply affecting work about her increasingly debilitating dermal sensitivity to light, former British civil servant turned piano teacher Lyndsey moves the reader with her wry, intimately detailed narrative. When exposure to her computer screen became unbearable pain on her face, she quit her high-level writing job at the Department of Work and Pensions in 2005 and began a gradual process of vanishing from sight. She moved to Hampshire to live with her understanding and loving boyfriend Pete, where she spent most of her time in a blacked-out room listening to books on tape, exercising, receiving fewer and fewer visitors (like her intrepid pianist mother), and doing mind-bending word games %E2%80%9Cto play in the dark.%E2%80%9D Minimizing her agonizing exposure to light (now over her entire body) required her to venture out only after sundown, except during periods of remission, forcing her to postpone wedding plans. Trips during the day%E2%80%94such as to the mostly mystified doctors%E2%80%94required hats and mummy-like swaths covering her face and body. Working gingerly with the array of metaphors that emerge from darkness and offering small, telling details, Lyndsey achieves a powerful assertion of self against the eclipse of all that she used to hold dear in the realm of light. Her work is especially gripping because there is no cure for or reversal to her condition. (Mar.)