Girl in the Dark

January 19, 2015
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 âto play in the dark.â 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 dayâsuch as to the mostly mystified doctorsârequired 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.

December 15, 2014
A former British civil servant's debut memoir about learning to live with a rare light-sensitivity disorder that forces her to spend months living in complete darkness.Though Lyndsey sometimes questioned her job at the Department of Work and Pensions in London, she loved what she did and the security her position offered. But in April 2005, she made a disturbing discovery. Whenever she sat in front of her computer screen, the skin on her face burned "like the worst kind of sunburn." At first, she suspected sensitivity to artificial and especially fluorescent lights. By June, however, Lyndsey's condition had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer tolerate light of any kind, including sunlight. Forced to abandon her job, she moved into her boyfriend (and later husband) Pete's house. There, she spent her days dressed head to toe in light-impermeable clothes in a room that blacked out all traces of sunshine. Her only companions were audiobooks and complex word games, both of which she used to keep herself from sliding further into despair. Realizing that her condition was medically untreatable and likely permanent, she began reaching out telephonically to others who she discovered had similar conditions. These friends became conduits through which she received "massive transfusions of life." Over time, she found that she would experience brief periods when "the muttering in [her] skin" ceased and she could go outside at dawn and dusk with a photographic light meter to help her measure how much light she could withstand. As much as the book is about coping with a life-altering condition, it is also a quiet love story that celebrates a relationship that not only withstood the ups and downs of Lyndsey's medical struggles, but also deepened in the process. A unique and haunting story.

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October 15, 2014

A hit at the London Book Fair, the pseudonymous Lyndsey's reportedly beautifully written memoir explains what it has been like to develop such a sensitivity to light that she has had to spend months in a blacked-out room with audiobooks her only companions.

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